Beauty Summary

In the essay “The Empire of Images in Our World of Bodies” Susan Bordo brings our media influenced ideals about the “perfect” body to the attention of the reader. In Bordo’s view, media has strayed away from saying that any one can be beautiful at any age, instead we are now faced with the fact that the word “perfect” can now be applied to a human body when it never could have before (151). Specifically she looks to the teens of America, and how we should reach out to them and influence them in positive ways. So that we as a whole can finally grab a hold of our nation’s ever growing disorder dilemma.
As Susan Bordo puts it, “Inner beauty has become a joke in this culture.” (154) Some believe that our current beauty ambitions are nothing more than simple acts of bettering one’s self esteem and self-confidence. And sure the occasional face-lift, tummy tuck, breast augmentation, or strict diets seem innocent enough in our society today. But Bordo insists that it is much more than that, the possibility of leading yourself down a potential path of eating disorders and addiction to plastic surgery is not worth looking five years younger. In sum, Susan Bordo wants our society to revert itself to where aging beautifully was simply “Wearing one’s years with style, confidence, and vitality.” (150) Certainly something that can be ascertained by our culture, but with the steps we are currently taking, we must come to realize we are ruining the “perfect” image. Which should simply be what each individual wants to see in themselves and not what society demands them to be.
I myself have mixed views on the topic. In my opinion, beauty should involve more than your looks, looking 35 when you are 55 shouldn’t immediately translate to overwhelming beauty. Where did personality, intelligence, and common interests go? Those are the real things that matter to me, not how many times you’ve had botox injected into your forehead. Bordo even mentions, “We confront how bizarre, how impossible, how contradictory they are,” when looking at how much the beauty industry has tweaked images to make them even more “perfect” than the original (161). For instance, I’ve never really had an interest in finding a woman that is simply drop dead gorgeous, because odds are she doesn’t meet the other standards that I put ahead of pure beauty. Pure beauty being basic physical characteristics, or “judging a book by its cover” you could say. Not to say that there aren’t beautiful women out there that can also have amazing personalities, be smart, and enjoy the same things I do. But I’d rather get to know someone, decide that we have more together than physical attraction, and then look for the inner beauty in each and every woman.
Others would argue that the use of plastic surgery is not to merely make a person “perfect” but to enhance or improve certain features that they are unsatisfied with. I can understand that, and for that reason I have mixed feelings about the whole topic. I do feel that if there is something about your body that you really don’t want, and think you’d have higher self-confidence if something were done about it, then in any situation you should always be looking to achieve that change.
Overall I believe that beauty in our culture has drastically changed over the years and that we have no one to blame but ourselves. We could blame the media, we could blame Hollywood, but we have always had the option of turning off the TV or ignoring what we’ve seen and heard from Tinsel Town. Our ideal of beauty can always be changed, but it will require a lot of work at this point due to everything that influences our choices. We need to take a moment and attempt to determine what is best for each individual, and stop looking at beauty with such a collectivist attitude. But, with our society being a media driven culture, what we see is what we trust and what we yearn for.