Beauty is a beast

by Danilo Landim

The patterns of beauty shown by the media have a great social power. Such power influences in some way our preferences concerning what we think is more attractive in men and women. For instance, many people try to follow or dream about the ideals of beauty. Many girls around the world try to imitate the “celebrities”, even though these patterns of beauty do not correspond to their natural traits. Boys are each time more tempted to reach the male models. It is possible to say that this phenomenon is spreading in such dimensions that the models of beauty are not only the ones which the media shows. Some common people who are not in media turned out to be new “celebrities” in smaller circuits, but they are products of media influences.
Although media power contributes to the lack of authonomy upon what we truly like in people’s appearance, we could not say we are in a catastrophical situation. Patterns of every type are part of life, and they somehow help us recognize the human limitation in determining which of our tastes have not been created by external forces. In other words, doubts related to the authenticity of the tastes we have would remain. Specially focusing in beauty, it would be useless to measure this sort of authencity, due to other influences such as the biological and cultural factors that influence our judgement about which kind of people are attractive or not.
However, these philosophical remarks could not excuse the nocive consequences of pattens of beauty upon public health. By promoting standards of beauty which are too far away from the common reality, the media has produced many “social disorders”: trying crazily to reach a perfect appearance, girls die by anorexia everyday, and they suffer from troubles like bulimia and low self-esteem; all of these problems are generally symptoms that occur when the girls fail to achieve their objectives. Moreover, an increasing number of boys are also becoming sick by the use of anabolic steroids.
The force of the big brands and big corporations could explain this nightmare. In order to increase their profits, they do business with the media and adopt many other strategies to sell their products. They have chosen vulnerable people to be their consumers, and noticing that these people do not have solid own values, they try to impose them the ones related to beauty (the values could be related to every other thing, but beauty is what these economical agents sell). Even who does not have money to invest in their beauty incorporates values related to the world of fashion and fame that are associated to the patterns of beauty.
Looking attentively to these aspects, we can say without compass that media and the patterns of beauty are killing people and our civilization. But the origin of this phenomenon is nothing more and nothing less than the capitalism necessities. Who would imagine that beauty would be transformed into such a perverse force?