Human Beauty can be defined in many ways and can be described with different parts and categories. Human beauty is the nature of a human, the physical shape of a human and, the mysterious mind and thoughts or inner body of a human. In modern society, beauty has been disfigured and morphed into very narrow and unapproachable standards.
The media in today's modern society has much to blame in the battle of achieving beauty. The T.V yelling "to be more beautiful, be on this diet or get a face lift" or some other plastic surgery procedure, which is expensive. It gives the illusion that you have to be rich in order to be beautiful. Celebrities and models are the faces of beauty, which advertises emaciated, unhealthy almost impossible lifestyles.
Beauty has been valued as a virtue ever since the Greeks; but beauty as a whole person not just the inside or outside beauty. As Susan Sontag mentions in her essay "they still expected that inner beauty would be matched by the beauty of the other kind." But the greeks found it very hard to believe that their hero, Socrates, was "so intelligent, so brave, so honorable, so seductive— and so ugly."(Sontag 332) In today's modern society, several thousands of years later, we find it very surprising to find someone who beautiful and intelligent and talented. ( a rare find indeed) With the advertisements today, we see beautiful long legs, a flat stomach with full breast, or a light spearmint colored eyed woman with flawless skin and we women think "where's ours?", "why don't I look like that?" Women, now, chop each other into pieces. We say "I want longer legs, my stomach's flabby, my skin sucks…uggghhh my THIGHS ARE HUGE!!!!" Beauty is proportionate, everything is balanced out by itself.
Now beauty has bound and gagged women into following a certain path or pattern. Is the meaning of femininity become the housewife in the billboards wearing the stifling apron cleaning the kitchen happily? We as a society have been brainwashing our young girls with Barbie dolls and miniature tea sets. Susan Brownmiller writes in her essay that "femininity was a challenge thrown down to the female sex, a challenge no proud, self-respecting young woman could afford to ignore, particularly one with enormous ambition that she nursed in secret…" Femininity is always wanting more ,as brownmiller also mentions in her essay, "biological femaleness is never enough."
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