"You are beautiful just as you are... unless you aren't"

I was recently watching one of those kid channels on TV with my ten year old daughter. There was a Revlon commercial that came on with these tween girls singing and chatting. They were all made up like twenty year old fashion models, and they were singing a song by Pink that indicated that they were "perfect as they are." What 10 year old is going to identify the logical fallacy?

Now of course what the purveyors of Revlon must mean by this is that they are perfect provided they convince mom and dad that they need Revlon cosmetics to make them look acceptably beautiful.

There is a peculiar form of insanity at the heart of all of this in our culture, especially the cult of youth and beauty. We are told incessantly that we are "fine the way we are" and that those who truly love us will accept us on condition that we need never change, and that would include never becoming more fit or more beautiful.

And yet there is this constant badgering by the popular culture and advertisers that young women require only this or that beauty product to be accepted as beautiful. This carries with it a necessary assumption--that they are not beautiful or acceptable, at least not yet. But they can be. And it will only cost a few dollars, unless the project is more intensive, such as deformities requiring surgical modifications.

Now all of this insane noise never produces one important philosophical discussion: What is feminine beauty? Is it diverse? How diverse is it? Is it one of those questions about which the negation is clearer than the affirmation--in other words, it is easier to say what it is not than to say what it is? And note that I am here discussing only physical beauty, because everyone is beautiful on the inside (sarcasm font).

Nobody seems to want to touch this question, and so we end up with wild inconsistencies like the Revlon commercial. Girls are from every angle "encouraged" to improve upon their beauty, and yet told by girl anthems and teachers and parents that they are already beautiful exactly as they are.

One of the things that is also fascinating in all of this is that we all know women who are merely beautiful, and we don't know exactly why, and they don't require make-up or a great deal of other "modifications" in order to be this way. We are assured by the beauty counter-culture that the reason these women are so "beautiful" is because they have been airbrushed to perfection, or the standards are generalized by unimaginative and one-dimensional men. But we have to ask the question: Is it possible that the reason these women are hated is not because they represent some manufactured and arbitrary standard of beauty, but because they are truly beautiful and others are less so, and that produces envy? Perhaps what women fear most is that there really is a standard of feminine beauty, and they know they don't, or even can't, meet that standard.

What is one to think of all of this?

The truth can be found under the surface of the cultural inconsistencies. If people are constantly, to the point of harassment, encouraged to be more beautiful, then it seems clear that there is some kind of standard of beauty to which we are aiming. In effect, we are not given a definition of this, but various images. We are given ostensive definitions. Beauty for women is Scarlett Johansson or maybe someone a tiny bit heavier, but not too much. Beauty for men is Brad Pitt. There is some variability, but the same kind of physique and general symmetry and skin health are the accepted "norms." To be overweight or to have serious flaws in skin or facial symmetry is not the image we are to hold before us as a model. When was the last time you heard a commercial for crisco that suggested that one's beauty can be enhanced by smearing it on one's face to create acne?

Of course people always bring up the differences in various cultures on the question of beauty. I am not an expert on the history of this question, but let us think about it. Is it true that a morbidly obese woman whose face was riddled with acne and featured a massive jagged nose could in theory be considered beautiful in some distant country a long time ago? Read the Song of Solomon and one will be surprised not by radical differences in the understanding of beauty found there, but by the many similarities with our current beliefs.

No one can deny some variability in our understanding of beauty, but then this variability never seems to me to rise to anything like a postmodern free-for-all, where feminine beauty can be anything. I see this as yet another example of Aristotle's mean. We all have an instinctive awareness of beauty, but this awareness does not provide an exact definition, only a range of truth, so to speak. In other words, we know what doesn't meet the standard, but we struggle to define the standard. As an example of what I'm talking about, I recently saw an article posted by a former student, who boasted that "these were real women." The article then proceeded to display several women who were "plus size" and boldly touted each as "unconventional beauties." The odd thing is that they all looked to me exactly like the rest of the people we deem to be beautiful in our culture. In short, they were proportionate, healthy, possessed flawless skin and stunning faces, even when seen through unfiltered, unretouched hd imagery. Not a one of them had a massive bulge for a stomach or a giant wart on her cheek.

It seems to me that our struggles on the question of beauty only confirm Aristotle, and the Bible, yet again. There is a standard of beauty. We all know it. We now need to be savvy to the fact that there are people on both ends of the beauty question exploiting this fact to pry money from impressionable young girls. Pinks sells downloads reminding girls that they are already perfect, already beautiful. And others join her, selling jolts of self-esteem. In the meantime, Revlon "empowers" the girls in their endless search for elusive beauty. So does the local gym, the makers of diet this and diet that, and self-esteem pushers reminding girls that achieving a smaller size will give them a jolt of personal self-confidence. Why does no one ask the simple questions: Does Pink need the standard of beauty and the depression it produces in order to sell "encouraging" songs as a countermeasure? Does Revlon need the standard of beauty in order to create discontentment that Revlon can help solve?

These people don't care about my daughter's self-esteem or beauty. They have their own interests!