Condemn

The Theft of Beauty

 In the last line of my essay on Beauty I conclude, Beauty nourishes our better selves, and because we love what is beautiful, beauty stimulates our ability to love.

http://seeingmeaning.blogspot.com/2009/02/sense-of-beauty.html

 So I feel duty-bound to combat the perversion of the individual sense of beauty happening in the horrorshow of advertising’s efforts to colonize territory that’s rightly controlled by individual responsiveness. The psychological capacity to respond to beauty is a necessary compass to lead to what is good for us. Today, it’s being reduced to a single kind of physical attractivness as the only meaning of the word. The day-to-day satisfactions of finding beauty by accident and anywhere is obliterated by the onslaught of a single look.

https://thoughtmaybe.com/the-illusionists/

This documentary exposes the depths to which advertisers sink in pursuit of profits. It is an industry that creates insecurity by the constantly reinforced message that one’s lovability depends on matching the impossible image they say is beautiful. Media sells a look that’s pathologically conformist in a world rich with variety. Once conditioned to the type that saturates the media, the rest feel devalued, invisible, which undermines the natural beauty available through their individual look. Real beauty is the result of harmony and happiness. The beautiful people I know are the ones who are comfortable with who they are, relaxed about being the person they were born to be. Smiling pulls the features into symmetry, often considered a primary attribute of beauty.

Young people are smothered in images pushing the same mold, pushing them farther away from the beauty inherent in each individual. Insecurity twists the features. Many of the more sarcastic and snide of media’s talking heads are starting to wear permanently crooked mouths because of the repeated sneer, and no amount of purchases will change that. The plastic surgery will still get pulled sideways by the facial expression. I prefer the radio for news, to protect my mirror neurons from the chemicals stimulated by nasty facial expressions. Obviously, I can’t look at the president.

The fact that a worldwide model of beauty is pushing a western look does violence to the natural beauty of every other cultural group. When I see a video of a beautiful young Japanese girl getting ready to have plastic surgery, the announcer is saying this is what they think they need to look like in order to succeed. Self-loathing is actualized when a person denies their natural beauty with an act of mutilation that will alter the harmony of their personal alignment.

The anxiety created by fear of not looking like the media standard stokes fear of rejection. Many avoid others but yearn for connection. They have products on all sides, ready to come to the rescue and the solutions cost too much. The theft of an individual’s sense of beauty and techniques of advertisers should be held accountable for the psychological damage.