Amanda Walker
Paper One
I interviewed five people representing different ages and genders in order to determine their idea of beauty. One interviewee was a man in his fifties, another was a woman in her forties, I also interviewed a man and a woman both in their twenties, and lastly a man who was eighteen years old. To try and determine their idea of beauty I asked them questions about what they thought beauty was, who they considered beautiful and why, and what specific characteristics are beautiful. The only thing I specified was that I was implying beauty as it pertained to people. I did not specify what gender I wanted them to focus on, or if I wanted them to focus on inner or external beauty. The responses where very different in each case, yet they were all insightful and interesting.
The first interviewee, the eighteen year old man, had a hard time distinguishing beauty from lust. First he said that “average girls, like gap commercial girls” are beautiful. He said that beauty is not just looks but also the way a woman carries herself and communicates with people, and her attitude plays a key role in her beauty. I was pretty impressed by this answer coming from an eighteen year old guy. Then when I asked who he thought was beautiful he struggled. He thought for a minute or two then retorted “Megan Fox, but I do not know if she is beautiful or just sexually attractive, that is just the only woman I can really think about.” He said that he thought she was beautiful because she is short, has dark hair, and is in transformers. I asked who else resembled his idea of beauty and he said “Angelina Jolie, because she is tall and has pretty features like big lips.” He also said he liked shiny, dark hair, and dark skin. These examples seemed to contradict his first statement of what he regarded as beautiful. The only way I can analyze this is that when I asked him what is beautiful he told me qualities in a person along with looks, but when I asked him to give me a name he told me names of sexually attractive, “lusty” women. I think this is because when he tried to put a face and name with his example of beauty, the only thing he could picture was the media’s idea of beauty. Pictures of these women are all over TV and magazines and they talk about how beautiful they are, and this is just based on looks. Even though his definition of beauty included more than looks, he still said a name associated with only physical attraction, most likely because that is just who he has been told to associate with beauty.
Next was a man in his mid twenties. He described beauty as a woman who is tall, brunette, intelligent, funny, determined, and aware of what she wants out of life. He was not as detailed as the younger man but he was more consistent with his description and who he chose. He said that his girlfriend was the only person he saw as beautiful, this is probably not the only person, but it is sweet. He said that his girlfriend embodied all or most of the characteristics he finds beautiful. He actually stayed consistent and also did not mention a famous person as beautiful; he did not just mention a name of someone the media labeled as beautiful. I think the most interesting thing he said was that “beauty is more like a moment in time or an experience. It has to do with what you see as well as what you hear, feel, and think about. Beauty is so complex that it is hard to say what exactly is beautiful because someone can be beautiful one minute, then not so beautiful the next.” I had never thought about beauty this way but it seemed to really make since when he said this.
The third interviewee was a man in his fifties. He said that his daughter and wife are the people he sees as beautiful. He focused mostly on the wife, saying that the reason he thinks she is beautiful is that she is a good person. He also said it is because she is caring, pretty, has skills like being a great cook, and that she is a little “ornery.” He would not give me another name, this is sweet once again, but I have to question whether or not that is the only woman he finds beautiful. Maybe the reason the two last men only mentioned their significant other is because they are older and more mature so they realize what beauty really is, maybe it is because the youngest man was not in a relationship, maybe it is that the first man is younger so he is more influenced by the media. Possibly it is because they do not want to sound bad, or hurt their significant others’ feelings.
Then I interviewed a woman in her forties, she gave me some very interesting answers. She said that the human spirit is her idea of beauty. That it is not at all what is on the outside, but what your spirit is like. She said that some people can go through such horrible things and still be a good person, and not let the things they have endured affect them in a negative way. Their spirit can overcome some amazing obstacles and not be broken. She gave an example of a girl who lived in Africa and wanted to go to school but was not allowed to go so she would do her brother’s homework. She was finally allowed to go and attended school for two years, and then she was married off at the age of eleven to a man that beat her for wanting to go to school. Her dream was always to come to America and get a P.H.D. and she finally accomplished both goals even after all of that, and having two children by the time she was eighteen. The interviewee said this illustrates what she views as beautiful.
The other woman I interviewed was in her twenties. She said that her idea of beauty is being healthy, it does not matter what your body type is as long as you are healthy looking for your body type. She also stated that part of being beautiful is what you pride yourself in, and also has to do with your actions. She considers her husband, friends, her mother, her sister, Kelly Rippa, and Kate Winslet to be beautiful people. Also, that people who do charity work, conservation work, who are good parents, and who are just good people, are truly beautiful. She also said that someone can be pretty on the outside but if they have a bad personality it shows through in their expressions and actions and this keeps them from being beautiful. Her example of this was Audrina from the Hills, a TV show on MTV, because she is very pretty but is not a nice person so it takes away from her looks.
Overall I can tell that the women in general think about personality more than looks when it comes to beauty. Also, women described both men and women when asked for a specific person. Men, on the other hand, only described women and not any men. I think this is because women are portrayed as the sex symbols, and women are the ones who are constantly judged on their looks so women and men alike are used to critiquing the beauty of women. Also, women are usually attracted to men since they are the opposite sex so that is probably why they described some men, but they still described more women as beautiful than they did men. One the other hand, men only described women as beautiful when I interviewed them. This could be because they are usually, and naturally attracted to women, or because women are the ones portrayed in the media everyday as sex symbols and portraits of perfection. This might actually have something to do with the “tough guise.” Men have to put up this “front” so that they look more macho or masculine, and if a man describes another man as attractive, let alone beautiful, he will be scrutinized, beat up, or maybe called a homosexual.
Now I will try to define beauty according to what we have read and experienced so far in this course. According to Naomi Wolf in The Beauty Myth, “beauty is a currency system like the gold standard. Like any economy, it is determined by politics, and in the modern age in the West it is the last, best belief system that keeps male dominance intact.”(p.12) I completely agree with this statement. It does seem to be the last belief system that keeps male dominance intact because every day women spend countless hours trying to make themselves “beautiful” instead of using this time to gain economic power. On top of that, the only reason we strive to be beautiful is to please men and make their lives more fulfilled. We spend so much time on catering to men, because they have the majority of the resources. If women would have started off in this society with all the economic power, then men would be the ones trying to please us and spending countless hours catering to us in order to receive the resources they needed. The idea of human beauty is definitely a product of the culture and who holds the economic power in a society. Naomi Wolf also states “in assigning value to women in a vertical hierarchy according to a culturally imposed physical standard, it is an expression of power relations in which women must unnaturally compete for resources that men have appropriated for themselves.”(p.12)
In our society women fixate on trying to be beautiful and reverse aging. We know this is not just some inherent quality in the DNA of women, or a factor of evolution that affects women worldwide. When you look at the way other cultures view “beauty” and who inside of that culture is spending time on embodying that ideal beauty, you will see that it is not the same for all cultures or societies. This proves that it is not some evolutionary quality that every woman develops.
Every culture’s ideal of beauty is different. Wolf says “beauty is not universal or changeless, though the West pretends that all ideals of female beauty stem from one Platonic Ideal Woman.”(p.12) She talks about how the “Maori admire a fat vulva, and the Padung, droopy breasts.”(p.12) In America droopy breasts are the last thing a woman would want. These are just a few examples of how beauty is not universal, and not everyone in the world thinks beauty means blonde hair, blue eyes, no body fat, or perky breasts. I think that men just thought up this image of a woman that has such perfect features that it is virtually unattainable to look like her, and then called it the ideal of beauty that we all have to live up to.
Another example of how ideals of beauty vary among different cultures is how the Nigerian Wodaabes obsess over male beauty. In the Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf discusses how in their culture the women hold the economic power, and men are the ones that spend hours painting themselves and they compete in contests that the women judge.(p.13) This just goes to show that beauty has everything to do with trying to obtain economic power and resources. In their culture the women hold all the economic power so the men have to impress them and please them in order to gain some of those resources. On the other hand, here in America the men hold most of the economic power and women are the ones competing with each other over beauty, in hopes of attaining resources and power. The media makes the women of our culture think that the only way they will be able to achieve greatness is by improving the way they look, but when that is finally achieved some women are scrutinized for being too high maintenance or too superficial, it is like women can never win.
Wolf states that “the beauty myth is always prescribing behavior and not appearance.”(p.14) If you think about this it makes sense, every culture has a different ideal of beauty so this shows that the main goal of the beauty myth is not to make every woman look alike, this would not benefit men. The main goal is to manipulate women into doing certain things. Men want women to spend their time and money on gaining beauty so they are not spending their time getting an education or a good career. This is so women will remain less powerful that men. Wolfe makes a good point when she talks about how we think our identity has to correlate with our looks so we are always seeking outside approval and this makes us vulnerable. I think that women need to stop trying so hard to gain this sometimes unattainable beauty and just strive for power. This would really empower women and shift the reins in our society.

Works Cited
Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth: How images of beauty are used against women. 1991. New York city, NY: HarperCollins, 2002. 12-14. Print.