A Women's Beauty By Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag’s essay entitled, “A Women’s Beauty: Put-Down or Power Source” was published in Vogue magazine in 1975. Sontag’s essay is written in a third-person point of view. Susan Sontag was an influential critic, political activist, and novelist who wrote on the modern definition of beauty. She discusses society’s pressure on women to achieve that certain beauty that they defined. Examining Sontag as an author and exploring the purpose of her essay can often emphasize the message she delivers to her audience on society’s intangible standards of beauty that it set for women which can affect how they feel about themselves.

The author was qualified to write this essay because she was a woman. Seeing that society has a deeply sexist view that

Women are being told to keep up appearances just so they could fit into an idea of beauty that society put forth. She differentiates between how men’s beauty is defined through being masculine and that femininity is all about how one must look. For men, society only cares about “what one is and does and only secondarily, if at all about how one looks” (Sontag 388). For women though it is all about viewing themselves in parts and evaluating it separately. These ideas are being brought through media coverage on the celebrities who are portraying their surgically altered bodies as normal. Also, it influences the young generation of girls that, in order to be considered beautiful, they must look like the women on magazines who are photo shopped to

She writes to inspire others who view themselves based on society’s criteria that no one can define their own self-worth but themselves. “But to get out of the trap requires that women get some critical distance from that excellence and privilege which is beauty, enough distance to see how much beauty itself has been abridged in order to prop up the mythology of the feminine” (Sontag 388-389). Sontag deeply expresses how women must separate themselves from those standards that are so intangible before they lose themselves completely. Their beauty comes from the inside, and how they feel within themselves. Once that feeling of love comes from the inside than that love that they have for themselves will shine through their appearances. Although Sontag’s purpose conveyed society’s purpose with woman’s beauty, she had expressed a focused