Crime Against True Beauty

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Eight girls are standing in line at a movie theater. All smiling in a carefree manner that could be expected of any all American teenage girl. However, statistics say that two of these girls bare scars on their bodies that our society would deem, “self-inflicted”. The truth of the matter is, these two girls are wounded by the immense weight of our cultures requirements for beauty. Requirements that can potentially be explained by science, but neither the way in which our society allows itself to be controlled by such mundane fancies nor the effect on the people it oppresses is by any means justified.

Though there are countless explanations by which we might decipher the origin of our cultures general idea of outward beauty, science currently stands foremost as a highly relevant source to expound upon this topic. In Blinded By Science The Math behind beauty (June 2007), Bruno Maddox argues that, "In short, the Science of Beauty was inaugurated by the two classical thinkers upon whose shoulders the science of pretty much everything else would eventually come to rest"(page 1). Mr. Maddox supports this claim with the, "golden ratio"(paragraph 2) or the “proportional relationship between two lines”(paragraph 3) as well as showing that the Greeks also saw beauty in symmetry thousands of years ago. The purpose of this is to show how straight forward and logical our methodology of discerning outward beauty truly is. This idea, that humanities perception of beauty is so simple that it is made up for the most part by lines of symmetry which appeal to us, may seem insulting or impossible but science has compiled very good evidence in support (more of which is available in Blinded By Science.

On a much less intellectually daunti...

... middle of paper ...

...y but the one it has created can exist or that beauty is not limited to appearance but is infinite in definition; reaching to the content of a man's character all the way to ones soul. Leo Tolstoy once said, “ It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness(The Kreutzer Sonata). Perhaps if the current culture can ever fully grasp the wisdom in Tolstoy's words a revolution of our ideology on beauty would take place and two less girls buying popcorn would have scars to hide.

Works Cited

Dove Self-Esteem Fund. "Real Girls, Real Pressure: A National Report on the State of Self-Esteem". June 2008:

Maddox, Bruno. "Blinded By Science The Math Behind Beauty". Discover Magazine June 2007 :

Eden Dan. “What Makes Us Beautiful?”. ViewZone Magazine Thursday, August 13, 2009:

Tolstoy Leo. The Kreutzer Sonata. Published 1889

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