Beauty is depthless. Looks are, quite literally, entirely superficial. How you dress, how you prepare your hair and the structure of your face and body are completely immaterial to any meaningful aspect of you and your personality. Your important values, such as compassion or charity are quite distant from the colour of mascara you wear, or the lack of mascara you wear. Who you are is not how you appear. Your aesthetic and sexual appearance is unimportant.
Blatant truth, yet heeded inadequately.
Take for example this new pseudo-activist – but supposedly well intentioned – trend of attempted universalization of . No matter who you are, no matter what you look like: you are beautiful – this is the message. Or in some cases, and this tends to show up: every girl is beautiful.
From my personal analysis, from sources such as this: a lot of these messages are geared by women for women. Why this is I will not detail now, as that’s a big enough topic individually warranting its own post. Just keep in mind that sometimes it can be merely female oriented.
Other more direct and poignant examples, beyond mere statements and signs professing the universal beauty of every individual (or individual female), would have to be a picture of a bald woman (presumably a cancer patient) or a young girl with down-syndrome in a dress with the caption: she should win The Beauty Contest/Pageant.
It’s of course to get you to react, to deal with orthodoxly ignored or culturally “unappealing” female figures. Here’s the problem with this, and the whole attempted application of universal beauty:
It completely misses and ignores the underlying and fundamental problem with the very campaign itself. Beauty is unimportant, it shouldn’t matter; it’s regressive to emphasize it and utilize it – even if it’s intended to be noble. By hyping up beauty, or saying that people will find you beautiful, does nothing to mitigate the fundamental and underlying issue with looks in our society and how we deal with them.
Beauty contests are disgusting. Since beauty is subjective, and simultaneously, since what’s “beautiful” is influenced by culture, it is regressive to try and use beauty contests as some method of activism. Beauty contests want traditional and established, they want what their culture wants, generally. And even if they don’t, they can’t represent all the different looking people equally. It’s not practical, and it’s just silly.
The right way of dealing with insecurity over your appearance is to devalue physical and sexual appearance. If someone doesn’t look like a lot of the females in the movies that a significant amount of people like, so what? If beauty was effectively trivialized, it shouldn’t and wouldn’t matter what others think, or even what the majority of people in that culture think is ‘lovely’. If people got past the shallow understanding of themselves and others, there would not be physical insecurities merely based on appearance. It just wouldn’t matter.
If presentation and display – that includes hair length, format, colour; that includes facial structure, symmetry; clothing; body size and figure; skin colour; body parts being the idealized length or size; and every other superficial aspect – was capably deprecated in appraisal in the eyes of our society, then all those traits listed above would become no more than passing thoughts, not something to dwell on. Motivation to ignore, dismiss or mistreat those who appear less than what our culture deems “attractive” would slowly vanish. As the majority of people would not be ruled by such shallow mentality. If physical beauty was not culturally significant, then the inherent issues that come with that would gradually fade.
So long as people continue to support and hype up beauty and its idolization, the very issue these people are seemingly trying to campaign will be for nought. However novel their motif may be, they’re doing a disservice to everyone, especially the people who need it most.
***
A more speculative analysis of this trend will reveal very noxious and yet vital information and even arguably rationalization for the venture to all-inclusivefy beauty. If you take a few minutes to peruse through here, for example, you’ll notice some disturbing trends.
Contained in the tag, “everyone is beauty” on tumblr (linked above) reveal pernicious trends and activity. The primary group that posts is girls, as mentioned before. Moreover, the disturbing truth that the majority of girls posting things about beauty being universal tend to be the conventionally beautiful themselves. It’s the very ones who aren’t in need of comfort or a lecture that are spreading the very same trope that only goes to support themselves.
It almost becomes a socially expected phrase and trope to endorse. Among the internet circles, such as tumblr, it’s an expectation that you spread it. “Everyone is beautiful!” it’s easy to say, and with minimal thought one could think it’s such a gracious sentiment. If you want to remain chic, and jive with all the other tumblr girls, it wouldn’t hurt to spread that around a bit. It’s a social obligation in some circles.
What you will find is almost a social mantra among these girls, who have little qualm with posting photos of themselves, that everyone must be beautiful. They can post pictures of themselves, and people call them beautiful, so it of course must be true and a good thing at that!
These girls who are posting are also posting their near-idealized selves that our society has a thirst and obsession for. They’re gaining views, they’re gaining “re-blogs” and they’re gaining praise for their looks. It’s possible their pseudo-activism is just a way for them to justify their dominance and attention over yet another sphere of reality. Are they any less shallow than those girls who post pictures of themselves and refrain from saying ‘we’re all beautiful’? Not by a long shot.
Like many things, tumblr popularity is ruled by lust and societal aesthetic preferences. If you’re a “super sexy girl”, meaning skinny, long hair, maybe a navel ring and other trends like that, then your popularity will rapidly increase due to the shallowness and desire to look at something “pretty” and “hot” by many people. Someone considered culturally ugly posting a picture of themselves will be ignored by the majority; it will be unappealing to them, they’ll quickly switch to the ladies that rouse them instead. Everyone is beautiful, yet the quantity that is quite evident sadly indicates an unequal distribution of affection and taste. Everyone is beautiful, but continue to look at me. Please, continue to look at me.
“Attractive” women, as deemed by our culture, dominate the music industry, film industry, fashion industry and many other public occupations. The same is for tumblr, the conventional prevail.
It’s likely that the “unfashionable” persons or ladies’ under-confidence, for example, comes from the very same social system that rewards the typically attractive lady, such as on tumblr. The very same social system that gives them less attention, and less compliments. They’re not equally praised or represented, so why would they be confident and proud?
From someone who may consider themselves “ugly” because society does not favour them, they may see the hypocrisy involved in the social system that garners the predominately attractive people the support and attention from their ignorantly comprehended “noble” message, and also see the attention and support these girls receive because they look conventionally hot. I wonder if that would help those already maligned and under-represented.
How does this help those ignored and disfavoured deal with their confidence? It does not.
If you’re the one who’s already marginalized by the negative attention, or absence of positive attention, then how is someone who has exactly what you are lacking, telling you “you’re fine!” going to cheer you up? The person who can not relate, because they have features that put them in the top societal tier, rather than the bottom, telling you everyone is beautiful. While getting thumbs up and attention.
Whereas if an “ugly” person did it, the attention would falter quickly, or not pick up at all.
Beauty is disgusting, and to purport it as significant makes you disgusting too. If you milk the very system that keeps the “ugly” out, then you’re part of the problem. Everyone is beautiful, but please, look at me.
We need to progress past the superficial. When it no longer matters, is when we’ll be equal and content.
