How Realistic is Our Beauty Ideal?

We have talked quite a bit about the "ideal man" and "ideal woman" this semester. At the end of class today we started to touch on how our images of the ideal contain expectations for what men and women are supposed to look like. How realistic are our ideals? Should all women be rail thin, with big breasts? Should all men be muscular? Where do those ideals come from, and how do they relate to the other social constructions we have for race, class, gender, sexuality, size, ability, and so forth? What do we mean by "fat"? How has that definition changed over time? As I would like to explore in this post, are those ideals even realistic? If we are all being held to a standard, how possible is it for any of us to reach that standard?

Check out this gallery of celebrity images that have been touched up using Photoshop.



It is such a well known practice to use Photoshop to alter images, the United Kingdom has controls in place, calling the use of such techniques "misleading."

Here is a spoof ad about the practice:

Fotoshop by Adobé from Jesse Rosten on Vimeo.

While being overweight has different social consequences for men than women, there is still a lot of pressure on men to display masculinity a certain way, through their appearance. As your classmate pointed out, men get grief for being too skinny. They also get grief for being too fat, as we saw in the ads from the first day of class. Just like you see before/after pictures to "motivate" women to buy products, you see before/after pictures promising impossible results at a cost for men. How realistic are those?



The formula is pretty clear. Create an insecurity, offer a solution, rake in the money. Think about the trend of making men worry about their height and the products offered to "solve" that socially constructed problem. What are the consequences of height being seen as a "problem" for men? Short men are perceived differently from tall men:



As some of your clever classmates pointed out today, there is a LOT of money to be made selling people the solutions to their insecurities, so there is an investment in keeping people insecure, as well as fabricating new reasons to be insecure. These messages--that we should feel shame if we are fat, or fear that we will die lonely if we are short--are part of the slow drip we receive our whole lives, reminding us we need to be normal at all costs, and fear that which is deviant.