Beauty: the Evolution of Perception

Vennette Gonzalez Mr. Warner English 111 (032W) 19 November 2012 kayo The evolution of perception When looking in the past to suck up how people lived and catched the world, there is one commonality that stands out. A char charrs debaucher says a lot on how the culture and the people of that gild comprehend themselves and others. These past perceptions affect how current golf club and culture is get the pictured non plainly by the individuals of our generation but by our proximo generations as well.This paper will address how we as society view peach as it has changed over a period of age, how these changes came about, and how the media played a role in this beauty evolution. How this beauty evolution begins starts in childhood. angiotensin converting enzyme of the first memories that children have is the reading of fairy tales. These stories set a tail end as to what we perceive as beauty. Childrens media has been found to be potently responsive to social change and not simply in a way that mirrors society (Baker-Sperry and Grauerholz 714). With this early exposure to what is awarded as beauty, it is ceremonious early in the developmental years of childhood of how a fair sex should look as well as act. Childrens fairy tales muckle provide insight into the dynamic blood between gender, plyfulness, and culture as well as the cultural and social significance of beauty to womens lives (Baker-Sperry and Grauerholz 712). The cultural and social significance can be seen as missys and boys argon taught specific messages concerning the importance of womens bodies and womens attractive office (Baker-Sperry and Grauerholz 724). These fairy tales were created to gentle the cultural values and conflicts of the era, and establish the values of what our society deems as appropriate and what is acceptable for our young children to grow into as well as establishing a baseline for beauty.As our children grow, they carry these values and examples w ith them. These fairy tales portray women as humble and powerless, who are damsels in distress in need of a nickname in shining armor. With maturity some of these values and perfects change however, Baker-Sperry and Grauerholz state that The feminine beauty ideal is the socially constructed notion that physical attractiveness is one of womans most important assets, and something all women should filter to achieve and maintain (711). This whimsey is still prevalent in todays society. This does not mean that there is a direct relationship between cultural values concerning feminine beauty and womens port and identities, but the feminine beauty ideal may operate indirectly as a means of social control insofar as womens concern with physical appearance (beauty), absorbs resources (money, energy, time) that could otherwise be spend enhancing their social status (Baker-Sperry and Grauerholz 723). The impacts of this ideal feminine beauty not only affect our children, but it lik ewise affects how they perceive themselves and how the future generations will perceive us. The feminine beauty ideal can be seen as a normative means of social control, where by social control is complaisant finished the internalization of values and norms that serve to restrict womens lives (Baker-Sperry and Grauerholz 712). This in the end means that girls who are exposed to these fairy tales develop a belief that there are certain expectations that need to be upheld and if these expectations are not met then they will lack the power to succeed. Workers of above average beauty earn about 10 to 15 percent more(prenominal) than workers of on a lower floor average beauty. The size of this beauty premium is economically significant and comparable with(predicate) to the race and gender gaps in the U. S. labor market (Mobius and Rosenblat 222). According to Naomi animate being More women have more power and scope and legal perception that we have ever had before but in terms of how we go through about ourselves physically, we may actually be worse off (Wolf 16) She also goes on to state There is no legitimate historical or biological justification for the beauty myth what it is doing to women today is a solution of nothing more exalted than the need of todays power structure, economy and culture to mount a counteroffensive against women (Wolf 19). Due to this, beauty is today linked with power in the sense that the more beautiful you are the more powerful you are.This idea that beauty is power became more evident during the womans movement according to Wolf (19). She states that By the time the womens movement had made inroads into the labor market, both women and men were attached to having beauty evaluated as wealth (Wolf 26). This influx of women in the work force changed how young girls think to the fairy tales they once read. They no longer had to portray the roles of the damsel in distress, but had to use their beauty to gain power and attent ion.This evolution from the damsel has led to a more independent woman who uses her beauty to get what she needs. Before women entered the work force in boastful numbers, there was a clearly defined class of those explicitly paying for their beauty workers in the display professions-fashion mannequins, actress, dancers, and higher paid sex workers much(prenominal) as escorts. Until womens emancipation, professional beauties were usually anonymous, low in status, un-respectable (Wolf 33). outright our young girls want to look like all the actresses, musicians, models etc that they see on TV, movies and in magazines.I think these changes occurred once the fairy tales were no longer in written media, where we used what was written down and our imagination to create our ideal of beauty. Once these fairytales became a visual (movies, TV. and magazines) our young girls wanted to copy what they saw. In 1969 Vogue offered a bran-new look for womens magazines (Wolf 73). Vogue began to instruction on the body as much as the clothes, in vocalization because there was little they could dictate with the anarchic styles (Wolf 73). The number of diet related articles rose 70 percent from 1968 to 1972.Articles on diet in the best-selling(predicate) press soared from 60 in the year 1979 to 66 in the month of January 1980 alone. By 1984, 300 diet books were on the shelves (Wolf 73-74). The timing of this influx of dieting articles is due to the popularity of a model named Lesley Lawson otherwise known as Twiggy. She piss the height of her career in 1966 where she was on the cover of Vogue magazine. She was the ideal beauty of that era where being boyishly thin was in. Whereas a cristal before having womanly curves was the idea of what beauty was for example the pin-up girl Betty Grable.She was what was considered the ideal of that era. The images of both of these women show the significance of how models, actress and movie stars affect the women and early days of our society. Both of these women were portrayed in womens magazines or movies. A woman reading Glamor is holding women-oriented mass culture between her twain hands (Wolf 76). With the mass media evolving and able to mass produce the media quicker than ever, the new ideals of what our young women view as beauty changes at an even more rapid pace. With the introduction of the internet mass media is now instant, and on demand. Glamour, beauty and the perfect body these are the values upheld within our culture as necessary to the fulfillment of desirable femininity (Wark 41). With this beauty evolution systematically changing it also reflects the changes in the values that we as a society hold. The mass media will always be an integral part of our looker evolution as it reflects societys values. Works Cited Baker-Sperry, Lori, and Liz Grauerholz. The Pervasiveness and Persistance of the Feminine watcher Ideal in Childrens Fairy Tales. Gender and Society 17. 5 (Oct 2003) 711-726. http//www. jstor. org/ abiding/3594706. Web. 19 November 2012. Fox, Greer Litton. Nice Girl Social control of women through a value construct. Signs Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2 (1977) 805-817. Print. Mobius, Markus M. , and Tanya S. Rosenblat. Why Beauty Matters. American Economic Review 96. 1 (2006) 222-235. http//www. jstor. org/stable/30034362. Web. 19 November 2012. Wark, Jayne. Wendy Gellers 48 hour Beauty Blitz Gender, kinsperson and the Pleasures of popular Culture. Art Journal 56. 4 (1997) 41-47. http//www. jstor. org/stable/777719. Web. 19 November 2012. Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth How images of Beauty are used against Women. New York HarperCollins, 2002. PDF File.