What does the word beauty mean? Before reading Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth, I considered beauty to be made up of both the inner and outer characteristics. The way someone looks or how someone presents themselves doesn’t make them beautiful, but it’s also who they are under their clothes and makeup. For me, I tend to judge people’s beauty more on their personality than their physical appearance. Anyone can try hard and make themselves pretty on the outside but it’s not always an easy task to make someone nice and loveable.
Reading The Beauty Myth about the truth that goes on behind the advertisement industry and seeing the images of women on Killing Us Softly 4, concerned me about how these industries are dehumanizing women. When Naomi Wolf talked about the sex discrimination case, I was struck when ‘the district court ruled that her appearance counted against her: Testimony about her ‘provocative’ dress could be heard to decide whether her harassment was ‘welcome’.’ (38). And I was also surprised when Naomi Wolf pointed out that ‘you can lose your job if you don’t wear makeup’ (39). So this leaves me with the question; how much is ‘too much makeup’ and ‘too’ revealing clothing?
I have a friend in Japan who joined the modelling industry when she was just 14 years old. She was scouted on the streets of Tokyo one summer and was overwhelmed because it had been her dream to one day become a model. Her photographers commented on how pretty she always looked and were always pleased with the outcome of the photo shoot. But when she went to Hawaii for a bathing suit photo shoot, her photographer kept making offensive comments on how she had gained weight since the previous time they met and how he was planning on making her skin flawless on Photoshop because she had bad acne on her forehead. He kept on throwing pictures at her and yelled why she had to become ugly. She was so hurt by his repulsive comments that she became bulimic to the extent that her weight dropped from 88 pounds to an unhealthy 66 pounds. She even became depressed that she had to take some time off of school. But after two long difficult years of battling depression and bulimia, she headed towards a better future after she began seeing a psychiatrist. She began her new career as a strong activist to change the standards of the modelling world and to help young girls understand what true beauty really is. She hopes that one day, more and more people will understand the hell she had gone through so that no one else repeats what she did. She wants girls to know that the images of women in magazines are ‘unwomanly’ because they only exist in the cyber world.
Hearing my friend’s story about her modelling career and watching Jean Kilbourne’s documentary made me really want to do something about the fashion industry and the effects media has on girls of all ages. People need to become aware of the truth or else they would fall into the same trap that many of us have fallen in. I agree that those women in those magazines are drop dead gorgeous. But we need to realize, no one has flawless skin like that. No one has perfect luscious hair or those killer legs. They’re all tweaked on Photoshop to mess with your mind that that is what beauty is supposed to be and that’s how all women should look like. I want everyone to know that no one is ugly. So what if you have acne problems, or you don’t have hair like those women on hair product commercials. We all have characteristics that make us all beautiful individually. And personally, I think beauty comes from within the heart, not just your physical appearance.
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