What is beauty? Beauty is a social construct based on racist and sexist norms from the past. When searching up “beauty” you will mostly see pictures of thin white women. Beauty is normally associated with feminist, even though handsome, attractive, etc mean the same. What’s interesting about beauty is how some traits may seem good on one race but not another. For example, a white man who seems strong is very attractive. While a man of color would be seen a criminal/hooligan. That racist ideology gave birth to skin lightening produces; normally market towards women. Another characteristic of beauty is a person’s body shape. The beauty norm is normally a white Woman who is very thin. That is considered beautiful because of the time we currently live in. Right now you have multiple media outlets advertising those beauty standards. Originally dove would shown white, thin women on their advertisements. More recently however, dove has started a campaign where they show more realistic standards of beauty. They started that kind of advertisements to simply make money off of a movement. What they are doing is feeding into the movement, saying how their products will help people achieve their standard beauty. Dove won’t try to make you into a model, but maybe that’s a good thing. I’m today’s modeling world people of color are still discriminated against. Just like beauty, the modeling world sees people who are white and extremely thin as “true beauty”. What happens is people of color are seen as uncivilized or improper. The results in the modeling industry being composed of mostly white women. In 2014, 80 percent of models were white, only 20 percent were nonwhite. This type of discrimination is what pushes movements like the standard beauty movement. I haven’t experienced any type of discrimination for beauty, but I am a man with a light brown skin tone. Like said before, discrimination normally happens towards women of color.
4/17/2019
Sociology Blog 