Walking through the grocery store, one is visually overwhelmed by images of the female body. Slender, sonsie female bodies, no less, bodies differentiated only by the colors of their gleaming coifs. Month after month, the parade goes on, and even if the identity of the bodies change (which you can only tell by looking at the captions), the bodies themselves seem consistent. A slightly different nose, a quirky smile, perhaps, but that is all the difference. Even women who are markedly different from the overwhelming trend are strapped, taped, dressed, shot, then airbrushed to match the ideal.
And for the magazines it is an ideal.It is their stock in trade, because magazines sell with promises of how to be as beautiful, as sexy, as slim and curvy, as the women on the cover.And the tactic works, because so many women’s bodies are so far from that ideal.Whether a woman finds her hips are too big or her breasts are too small, she is likely to feel less attractive by comparison.It is partly as a result of the magazines that so many women have body-image problems.
But is this really beauty? Is the magazine ideal a barometer of what really makes a woman beautiful? It is one way for a woman to be beautiful, yes, but it isn’t the only way. With the saturation and repetition of the magazine ideal, it’s easy to forget that there are other ways for women to look that are also good. By looking at an array of artists who present different ideals, it is possible to see that we don’t have to feel bad about our bodies because they don’t match the magazine ideal of beauty.
From Gustav Klimt, who clothes his waif-like figures in concretized emotion, to Peter Paul Rubens, who disrobes the pure bodily pleasures of ample flesh, each of these artists takes a different tack on what is the essence of beauty, idealizing a different form of woman. Are these figures more realistic than the magazines? No, in fact, possibly less so, as, for example, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingre’s Grand Odalisque has an extra vertebra in the elegance of her overlong back. But by looking at different ideals, we can hopefully break the stranglehold the modern mass-media has on beauty.
Even more important, looking at these artists, the one commonality that shines through is that beauty is not so much a result of bodily features such as breasts or buttocks, but of a more sublime combination of posture, poise, grace, and confidence.
Jack Vettriano: The Sliver of Nostalgia
Eternal Youth and Virginal Desire
The Dangerous Sexuality of John Williams Waterhouse
Your writing is absolutely beautiful and true.