In April 1992 the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced it was restricting the availability of silicone gel-filled breast implants to women enrolled in clinical trials. All candidates for breast reconstruction, but only a "very limited" number of augmentation candidates, would have access to the implants. This policy has been criticized as paternalistic, sexist, and unjustified by scientific data. I examine these charges and conclude that controversy surrounding the scientific data weakens the FDA's paternalistic mandate and that its policy of (...) treating reconstruction and augmentation candidates differently results in increased social injustice and perpetuates cultural biases concerning female beauty and women's rights to control their bodies. I also argue that these cultural biases shape women's subjective experience of their physical selves and should not, contrary to some feminist arguments, be viewed as precluding their giving informed consent to breast surgery. (shrink)

Prior research on facial beauty has suggested that the average female face in a population is perceived to be the most attractive face. This finding, however, is based on an image processing methodology that appears to be flawed. An alternative method for generating attractive faces is described and the findings using this procedure are compared with the reports of other experimenters. The results suggest that (1) beautiful female faces are not average, but vary from the average in (...) a systematic manner, and (2) female beauty can best be explained by a sexual selection viewpoint, whereby selection favors cues that are reliable indicators of fertility. (shrink)

Prior research on facial beauty has suggested that the average female face in a population is perceived to be the most attractive face. This finding, however, is based on an image processing methodology that appears to be flawed. An alternative method for generating attractive faces is described and the findings using this procedure are compared with the reports of other experimenters. The results suggest that beautiful female faces are not average, but vary from the average in a (...) systematic manner, and female beauty can best be explained by a sexual selection viewpoint, whereby selection favors cues that are reliable indicators of fertility. (shrink)

Prior research on facial beauty has suggested that the average female face in a population is perceived to be the most attractive face. This finding, however, is based on an image processing methodology that appears to be flawed. An alternative method for generating attractive faces is described and the findings using this procedure are compared with the reports of other experimenters. The results suggest that beautiful female faces are not average, but vary from the average in a (...) systematic manner, and female beauty can best be explained by a sexual selection viewpoint, whereby selection favors cues that are reliable indicators of fertility. (shrink)

Putting classical art to the side for the moment, the naked and near-naked female body became an object of mainstream consumption first in Playboy and its imitators, then in movies, and only then in fashion photographs. With the male body, the trajectory has been different. Fashion has taken the lead, the movies have followed. Hollywood may have been a chest-fest in the fifties, but it was male clothing designers [e.g., Calvin Klein] who went south and violated the really powerful (...) taboos--not just against the explicit depiction of penises and male bottoms but against the admission of all sorts of forbidden "feminine" qualities into mainstream conceptions of manliness. . . . Images of masculinity that will do double (or triple or quadruple) duty with a variety of consumers, straight and gay, male and female, are not difficult to create in a culture like ours, in which the muscular, male body has a long and glorious aesthetic history. (shrink)

Classical Greece is famous for its athletic art, particularly the image of the nude male athlete. But how did the Greeks understand athletic beauty? Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon, and others discuss athletes’ beauty, while the educational ideal of kalokagathia conceptually connects athletic beauty with the good. More questions need to be answered, however, if we are to understand ancient athletic beauty. We need to ask ourselves what the Greeks appreciated when they looked at athletic bodies. What did (...) those qualities mean to them? In what way was it erotic? How did it differ for females and males? In this paper I argue that the beautiful athletic body is framed in ancient Greek thought, not just as an aesthetically pleasing image, but as an ideal expression of a certain kind of soul. (shrink)

Medieval literature often used stock descriptions of beautiful women following a well-established rhetorical canon which included expressions such as "golden hair," "sparkling eyes," or "skin whiter than snow." But were these terms mere rhetorical conventions derived from Latin poetry, as generally accepted by medieval scholars? And what happens if we examine these descriptions at the "literal" level of interpretation? This survey of works in the languages of medieval Iberia shows that the medieval rhetorical portrait synthesized a widely shared ideal of (...) female beauty which coincides with today's male perceptions of female attractiveness, and is consistent with evolved psychological preferences. (shrink)

In this chapterI discuss beauty and youth in Balinese dance, with special reference to Legong. Legong is the "classic" Balinese dance genre for females and is represented by Balinese to the world as the quintessence of grace, charm, and beauty in their performing arts. . . . Apparently, the notion of beauty that is invoked here is not straightforwardly equivalent to the heterosexual male norms for female sexual attractiveness, which may favor younger women but don't require (...) them to be under twenty. What then is the connection between beauty and youth in Balinese legong? (shrink)

Paired masks described as beautiful and grotesque express complementary values in several southern Nigerian art traditions. Beautiful masks represent humans, often women, and serve as metaphors for things associated with civilization and culture. Grotesque masks represent animals or men, and tend to be linked with notions of masculinity and nature. Analysis of masks falling into these categories provides us with a set of formal criteria for this imagery. Mask types that fall into this continuum are used by the Okpella, a (...) northern Edo people living north of Benin City in southern Nigeria: a female character commemorating specific women of status and described as beautiful, a more ambiguous character that serves as the festival herald and messenger of the Dead Fathers described as grotesque, and a third masquerade that combines elements of both the beautiful and grotesque is described as fascinating. Why and how these forms communicate to their Okpella audience is the focus of this paper. It is based on qualitative research on the history and meaning of these masks carried out among the Okpella, survey research on aesthetic preference in which 400 individuals were interviewed, and with a panel study in which 100 participants from the original sample were re-interviewed. Key words: beautiful, grotesque, Africa, okpella, masquerade, aesthetics. Resumen Las máscaras emparejadas descritas como ‘bellas’ y ‘grotescas’ expresan valores complementarios en varias tradiciones artísticas del sur de Nigeria. Las máscaras bellas representan a los humanos, frecuentemente mujeres, y se emplean como metáforas de aspectos asociados con la civilización y la cultura. Las máscaras grotescas representan animales u hombres, y suelen vincularse con nociones de masculinidad y de naturaleza. El análisis de las máscaras que entran en estas dos categorías proporciona un conjunto de criterios formales para comprender este imaginario. El grupo étnico Edo del norte que vive al norte de Ciudad de Benín en el sur de Nigeria, los okpella, usan máscaras de este tipo. Existe un personaje femenino descrito como bello, un personaje más ambiguo descrito como grotesco y un tercero que combina elementos del bello y del grotesco y que se describe como fascinante. En este artículo nos interesamos en qué y cómo comunican estas formas con los okpella. Nuestro trabajo se apoya sobre una investigación cualitativa realizada entre los okpella, una encuesta sobre preferencia estética en la cual se entrevistó a 400 personas y un estudio en el cual se volvió a entrevistar a 100 personas de la muestra anterior. Palabras clave: belleza, grotesco, África, okpella, mascarada, estética. (shrink)

The phenomenon of apparently greater emphasis on human female physical attractiveness has spawned an array of explanatory responses, but the great majority can be broadly categorized as either evolutionary or social constructivist in nature. Both perspectives generate distinct and testable predictions. If, as Naomi Wolf (The beauty myth: How images of female beauty are used against women. New York: William Morrow, [originally published in 1991], 2002) and others have argued, greater emphasis on female attractiveness is (...) part of a predominantly Western “beauty myth,” then an analysis of a culturally diverse sample should reveal marked fluctuation in gendered attractiveness emphasis: there should be significant numbers of cultures in which male and female attractiveness are equally emphasized, and cultures in which male attractiveness receives more emphasis. On the other hand, an evolutionary perspective suggests that disproportionate emphasis on female attractiveness will be a universal or near-universal phenomenon. To test these hypotheses, we tallied references to male versus female attractiveness in 90 collections of traditional folktales from 13 diverse cultural areas. The results are consistent with the evolutionary predictions and inconsistent with the constructivist predictions. Across culture areas information on physical attractiveness was much more likely to be conveyed for female characters. Together with other recent studies, these results suggest that the main elements of the beauty myth are not myths: there are large areas of overlap in the attractiveness judgments of diverse populations, and cross-cultural emphasis on physical attractiveness appears to fall principally upon women. (shrink)

Why do physicians who've taken the Hippocratic Oath willingly cut into seemingly healthy patients? How do you measure the success of surgery aimed at making someone happier by altering his or her body? Sander L. Gilman explores such questions in Creating Beauty to Cure the Soul, a cultural history of the connections between beauty of body and happiness of mind. Following these themes through an impressive range of historical moments and players, Gilman traces how aesthetic alterations of the (...) body have been used to "cure" dissatisfied states of mind. In his exploration of the striking parallels between the development of cosmetic surgery and the field of psychiatry, Gilman entertains an array of philosophical and psychological questions that underlie the more practical decisions rountinely made by doctors and potential patients considering these types of surgery. While surveying and incorporating the relevant theories of Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, Karl Menninger, Paul Schilder, contemporary feminist critics, and others, Gilman considers the highly unstable nature of cultural notions of health, happiness, and beauty. He reveals how ideas of race and gender structured early understandings of aesthetic surgery in discussions of both the "abnormality" of the Jewish nose and the historical requirement that healthy and virtuous females look "normal," thereby enabling them to achieve invisibility. Reflecting upon historically widespread prejudices, Gilman describes the persecutions, harrassment, attacks, and even murders that continue to result from bodily difference and he encourages readers to question the cultural assumptions that underlie the increasing acceptability of this surgical form of psychotherapy. Synthesizing a vast body of related literature and containing a comprehensive bibliography, Creating Beauty to Cure the Soul will appeal to a broad audience, including those interested in the histories of medicine and psychiatry, and in philosophy, cultural studies, Jewish cultural studies, and race and ethnicity. (shrink)

Candidate evaluation for breast implantation presents a more important obstacle to the fulfillment of the normative requirements of informed consent than do the social roles of women or cultural norms governing female beauty. I argue that women's decisions to receive breast implants may indeed be informed, competently made, and substantially voluntary, but that the cultural construction of beauty may undermine women's autonomy by influencing the evaluation of surgical candidates and risk disclosure during informed consent.

This essay addresses the link between sex trafficking and European citizesnhip by examining several anti-trafficking campaigns launched in post-socialist Europe. In illustrating which techniques are used in the production of images, it points to the highly symbolic and stereotypical constructions of femininity (victims) and masculinity (criminals) of eastern European nationals. A close analysis of female bodies dispayed in the campaigns indicates that the use of victimizing images goes hand in hand with the erotization of women's bodies. Wounded and dead (...) women's bodies are read as attempts to stabilize the current political and social transformations in Europe by capturing women within the highly immobile boundaries of the sign ‘Woman’. The essay suggests that the representation of violence is thus violent itself since it confirms the stereotypes about eastern European women, equates the feminine with the passive object, severs the body from its materiality and from the historical context in which trafficking occurs, and finally confines women within the highly disabling symbolic register of ‘Woman’ as to maintain an imaginary social order in Europe. (shrink)

This review aims to identify (1) sources of knowledge and (2) important themes of the ethical debate related to surgical alteration of facial features in East Asians. This article integrates narrative and systematic review methods. In March 2014, we searched databases including PubMed, Philosopher’s Index, Web of Science, Sociological Abstracts, and Communication Abstracts using key terms “cosmetic surgery,” “ethnic*,” “ethics,” “Asia*,” and “Western*.” The study included all types of papers written in English that discuss the debate on rhinoplasty and blepharoplasty (...) in East Asians. No limit was put on date of publication. Combining both narrative and systematic review methods, a total of 31 articles were critically appraised on their contribution to ethical reflection founded on the debates regarding the surgical alteration of Asian features. Sources of knowledge were drawn from four main disciplines, including the humanities, medicine or surgery, communications, and economics. Focusing on cosmetic surgery perceived as a westernising practice, the key debate themes included authenticity of identity, interpersonal relationships and socio-economic utility in the context of Asian culture. The study shows how cosmetic surgery of ethnic features plays an important role in understanding female identity in the Asian context. Based on the debate themes authenticity of identity, interpersonal relationships, and socio-economic utility, this article argues that identity should be understood as less individualistic and more as relational and transformational in the Asian context. In addition, this article also proposes to consider cosmetic surgery of Asian features as an interplay of cultural imperialism and cultural nationalism, which can both be a source of social pressure to modify one’s appearance. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 38.2 (2004) 80-87 [Access article in PDF] The Beauty of Henri Matisse David Carrier Because beauty has for a long time now been politically incorrect (at least among certain influential critics and academic historians) the art of Henri Matisse has recently suffered from a kind of benign neglect. His goals were luxury, calm, and voluptuousness, not social critique. He painted female (...) nudes, and was preoccupied with artistic tradition. Celebrated in his own lifetime, he died a rich man. Matisse's famous identification of the work of art with a good armchair is another provocation. His paintings, after all, are very expensive armchairs. Liberated from any vital connection with everyday life, they often seem merely escapist. In her recent book, On Beauty and Being Just, Elaine Scarry remarks, "Matisse never hoped to save lives. But he repeatedly said that he wanted to make paintings so serenely beautiful that when one came upon them, suddenly all problems would subside."1 That some of Matisse's paintings succeed in being serenely beautiful seems self-evident to Scarry, to me, and to a great many other art lovers. What is perhaps worth exploring at greater length, however, is precisely how Matisse's paintings succeed in achieving their unfashionable goal. What is it that makes the work of Matisse so serenely beautiful?To start, consider The Painter and His Model (1918-1921), made just after his move from Paris to Nice. Like other works from this period of his career, this picture raises special problems, even for many commentators who admire his earlier experimentation. At the left, we see the painter working on a canvas of a nude. "Expression, for me," Matisse wrote, "does not reside in passions glowing in a human face."2 Like most of his models, this one appears expressionless. She poses at the center of the picture, beneath a window that admits the light filling the room. A flowering palm, a symbol of fertility, is the only object visible from the world outside the studio.Leaving behind his family and the luxury of his Paris home, Matisse lived and worked in a small room like this one. The entire picture is filled [End Page 80] with patterns — a red tablecloth on the left, orange wallpaper on the right, blue stripes on the painter's shirt, a red grid on the floor. A dark painting hangs above flowers on the table. The Painter and His Model shows the artist hard at work, but the composition appears effortlessly spontaneous. Matisse, who lived only to paint during his time in Nice, concealed the endless effort required to make his beautiful pictures. A man from North France, he discovered the power of light. There is nothing special about this room, but under the spell of his model Matisse makes it appear ravishing. Intense Mediterranean sunlight transforms ordinary patterns into a world of visual luxury.We know that The Painter and His Model is beautiful because we get great pleasure seeing the model in the golden room. Her skin is close in tone to, or in harmony with the colors of the walls; her curves harmonize with the two vases, and play against the spreading linear grids. As we move our eyes easily from the model to the entire picture, we experience a kind of sublimated erotic pleasure. In "Notes of a Painter," Matisse gave an apt description of his approach in The Painter and His Model. Suppose I want to paint a woman's body: first of all I imbue it with grace and charm, but I know that I must give something more. I will condense the meaning of this body by seeking its essential lines. The charm will be less apparent at first glance, but it must eventually emerge from the new image which will have a broader meaning, one more fully human. (MA, 36) He does not use the word "beauty," but speaks instead about expression and harmony. When he published this manifesto, Matisse was painting very different sorts of pictures — portraits, scenes of nudes in utopian settings, and... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 38.2 (2004) 80-87 [Access article in PDF] The Beauty of Henri Matisse David Carrier Because beauty has for a long time now been politically incorrect (at least among certain influential critics and academic historians) the art of Henri Matisse has recently suffered from a kind of benign neglect. His goals were luxury, calm, and voluptuousness, not social critique. He painted female (...) nudes, and was preoccupied with artistic tradition. Celebrated in his own lifetime, he died a rich man. Matisse's famous identification of the work of art with a good armchair is another provocation. His paintings, after all, are very expensive armchairs. Liberated from any vital connection with everyday life, they often seem merely escapist. In her recent book, On Beauty and Being Just, Elaine Scarry remarks, "Matisse never hoped to save lives. But he repeatedly said that he wanted to make paintings so serenely beautiful that when one came upon them, suddenly all problems would subside."1 That some of Matisse's paintings succeed in being serenely beautiful seems self-evident to Scarry, to me, and to a great many other art lovers. What is perhaps worth exploring at greater length, however, is precisely how Matisse's paintings succeed in achieving their unfashionable goal. What is it that makes the work of Matisse so serenely beautiful?To start, consider The Painter and His Model (1918-1921), made just after his move from Paris to Nice. Like other works from this period of his career, this picture raises special problems, even for many commentators who admire his earlier experimentation. At the left, we see the painter working on a canvas of a nude. "Expression, for me," Matisse wrote, "does not reside in passions glowing in a human face."2 Like most of his models, this one appears expressionless. She poses at the center of the picture, beneath a window that admits the light filling the room. A flowering palm, a symbol of fertility, is the only object visible from the world outside the studio.Leaving behind his family and the luxury of his Paris home, Matisse lived and worked in a small room like this one. The entire picture is filled [End Page 80] with patterns — a red tablecloth on the left, orange wallpaper on the right, blue stripes on the painter's shirt, a red grid on the floor. A dark painting hangs above flowers on the table. The Painter and His Model shows the artist hard at work, but the composition appears effortlessly spontaneous. Matisse, who lived only to paint during his time in Nice, concealed the endless effort required to make his beautiful pictures. A man from North France, he discovered the power of light. There is nothing special about this room, but under the spell of his model Matisse makes it appear ravishing. Intense Mediterranean sunlight transforms ordinary patterns into a world of visual luxury.We know that The Painter and His Model is beautiful because we get great pleasure seeing the model in the golden room. Her skin is close in tone to, or in harmony with the colors of the walls; her curves harmonize with the two vases, and play against the spreading linear grids. As we move our eyes easily from the model to the entire picture, we experience a kind of sublimated erotic pleasure. In "Notes of a Painter," Matisse gave an apt description of his approach in The Painter and His Model. Suppose I want to paint a woman's body: first of all I imbue it with grace and charm, but I know that I must give something more. I will condense the meaning of this body by seeking its essential lines. The charm will be less apparent at first glance, but it must eventually emerge from the new image which will have a broader meaning, one more fully human. (MA, 36) He does not use the word "beauty," but speaks instead about expression and harmony. When he published this manifesto, Matisse was painting very different sorts of pictures — portraits, scenes of nudes in utopian settings, and... (shrink)

Do the ethical features of an artwork bear on its aesthetic value? This movie endorses misogyny, that song is a civil rights anthem, the clay constituting this statue was extracted with underpaid labor—are facts like these the proper bases for aesthetic evaluation? I argue that this debate has suffered from a false presupposition: that if the answer is yes (for at least some such ethical features), such considerations feature as pro tanto contributions to an artwork's overall aesthetic value, i.e., as (...) merits or flaws which make something have more or less overall aesthetic value. As the case of ethically laden, aesthetic evaluation makes clear, however, good aesthetic judgement is irreducibly multi-dimensional, e.g., "the movie has an engaging soundtrack, tasteful camera work, and takes a misogynistically prurient perspective on its female lead.'' Such a "non-summative" judgement refuses to reduce those various dimensions of aesthetic value to a single aggregate aesthetic evaluation, like "it's a 6/10" or "it's a pretty good movie!" I defend both the modest claim that such non-summative evaluations are not mistaken and the extremist claim that summative (i.e., unidimensional) aesthetic evaluation is defective by considering other domains of normative assessment in which summing seems inappropriate, notably including evaluations of people's character. (shrink)

Working in collaboration with others, Agostino Veneziano produced three remarkable prints representing nude women seated or standing beside spectacular allantica vases and set before ruinous landscapes. This article investigates the authorship and origin of these unusual images. It suggests that the vases are presented as a metaphor for female beauty, and relates the visual rhetoric of these three prints to the writings of contemporary writers, including Agnolo Firenzuola, who described the beauty of women in relation to the (...) elegant proportions of such vases. (shrink)

This paper makes a number of observations on soteriology, asceticism and the female body in two Indian Buddhist narrative. The first story examined is about the enlightenment of the Buddhist saint Yasas from a collection of verses know as the Anavatapta-gatha, or Songs of Lake Anavatapta. This narrative graphically describes a rotting female corpse and associates this physical corruption with the female body in general. The second story is about a mythical girl from the ancient past found (...) in the Mahayana scripture, the Gandavyuha-sutra. The female protagonist is described as exceedingly beautiful and her beauty functions as a sign of her spiritual superiority and as a means to aid beings. After a summary of these two tales, their soteriological presuppositions are discussed. Next,the effect of Buddhist soteriology upon the construction of gendered bodies in Indian Buddhism is considered. The author argues that the first story represents an ascetic soteriology that sees the female body as corrupt, while the second story displays an alternative devotional soteriology that extols female beauty as linked to virtue and as efficacious for religious development. The paper concludes with the suggestion that the narratives employing the image of the corrupt female body were meant for a male monastic audience; while the Gandavyuha with its devotional soteriology may have been composed with a royal female audience in mind. Thus target audience should be considered when studying Indian Buddhist narratives. (shrink)

The same person who claims to be a relativist about musical beauty—who claims that all musical works are equally ‘valid’ and beautiful---adores certain musical works while detesting others. And the same person who claims to be a relativist about personal beauty—who claims that all people are beautiful, if only ‘on the inside’---finds certain people intensely attractive and finds others equally intensely repellent. And the same person who is guilty of the one hypocrisy is almost always guilty of the (...) other. So we are dealing with two hypocrisies---two ‘open secrets’, each of which has a social justification while lacking an alethic or logical justification---that parallel each other. And that is because the one hypocrisy is really just a proxy for the other: relativism about musical beauty—which is just an absurd purely philosophical position---is really just a proxy for relativism about female beauty—which is not an absurd philosophical position, but a deeply important social protocol that is rooted in the depths of female psychology. (shrink)

This essay argues that feminist theory has focused, in the main and for too long, on theories of the body, in a legitimate reaction to a Western masculine coupling of beauty with a female or idealized maternal body and the sublime with male creativity. In consequence, there are few productive feminist accounts of female or maternal beauty. However, Virginia Woolf’s writings about beauty, mothers and the body, if read through the lens of post-Lacanian theory - (...) particularly the work of Luce Irigaray and Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger - do offer a moving and positive feminist account of women and beauty. The essay analyses Woolf’s ideas about beauty in general, before focusing on To the Lighthouse and The Voyage Out in relation to the writings of Woolf’s mother Julia Stephen. (shrink)

Sex is probably the best example of stable biological variation within the human species. Scientists have tried to account for the origin of sex differences in biological terms using evolutionary theory. Although Charles Darwin derived his theories of natural and sexual selection with no consideration for sex, he assumed that the differences he observed in male and female human and animal behavior were variations related to biology. This chapter examines the link between sex and evolution by reflecting on the (...) various resonances between cultural and social norms one the one hand, and biological theory on the other. It first considers scientific explanations of women's nature, or womanhood as a subject of science, before turning to research on female choice and the animal/woman divide in the early twentieth century. The chapter also discusses the use of human and animal models of “natural” sexual behavior after World War II, sexual selection and biological determinism in the 1970s, and efforts to bridge the gap between feminism and evolutionary theory. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to present the results of a contrastive study of the ideas of male beauty among Russians and Chinese. These ideas are studied culturologically, through the restoration of the relevant fragments of national pictures of the world. For this purpose, both linguistic and comparative-historical methods are used. Russian concepts of beauty are analyzed in the corresponding concepts in the Russian language, etymology and modern meanings, Russian epics, the reign of Peter the Great, the (...) XVIII - XIX centuries, the period of the Great October Socialist Revolution, the Stalinist period and the period of late socialism, modern ideas. To analyze the Chinese view of the subject under study, the corresponding hieroglyphs, lexical combinations, idioms, philosophical and aesthetic sources, and modern realities are analyzed. Such a multidimensional consideration of beauty in the Russian and Chinese pictures of the world caused the novelty of the study. Comparisons of Russian and Chinese are the main conclusion of the work: ideas about beauty are not just different, they are opposite. It is important to note that the image of the hero in Russian culture is a symbol of male beauty, and in Chinese, on the contrary, it is a symbol of a rude and unaesthetic person. The main oppositions are male/female, West/The East, rational/emotional — are characteristic of the Russian picture of the world, but they are not completely manifested in the Chinese ideas about beauty. The Chinese do not oppose, but combine what looks like an opposition in our culture. (shrink)

The aim of the article is to examine the representation of ageing in selected issues of the Polish women’s magazine Twój Styl. With reference to Wolf’s concept of the “beauty myth,” the article argues that ageing is presented as a threat to women’s psychological integrity. Although the theme of old age is rarely directly addressed in the magazines, its presence is implied in the advertised anti-age beauty products. Based on semiotic theory and Cognitive Metaphor Theory, the paper demonstrates (...) that the advertising of anti-ageing beauty products serves the function of controlling ageing female bodies, which are positioned outside of the mainstream concept of femininity. (shrink)

'Pain and pleasure are simple ideas, incapable of definition.'In 1757 the 27-year-old Edmund Burke argued that our aesthetic responses are experienced as pure emotional arousal, unencumbered by intellectual considerations. In so doing he overturned the Platonic tradition in aesthetics that had prevailed from antiquity until the eighteenth century, and replaced metaphysics with psychology and even physiology as the basis for the subject. Burke's theory of beauty encompasses the female form, nature, art, and poetry, and he analyses our delight (...) in sublime effects that thrill and excite us. His revolution in method continues to have repercussions in the aesthetic theories of today, and his revolution in sensibility has paved the way for literary and artistic movements from the Gothic novel through Romanticism, twentieth-century painting, and beyond. In this new edition Paul Guyer conducts the reader through Burke's Enquiry, focusing on its place in the history of aesthetics and highlighting its innovations, as well as its influence on many subsequent authors from Kant and Schiller to Ruskin and Nietzsche. (shrink)

Jenny Saville is a leading contemporary painter of female nudes. This paper explores her work in light of theories of gender and embodied agency. Recent work on the phenomenology of embodiment draws a distinction between the body image and the body schema. The body image is your representation of your own body, including your visual image of it and your emotional attitudes towards it. The body schema is comprised of your proprioceptive knowledge, your corporeally encoded memories, and your corporeal (...) proficiency with respect to various environments and activities. Saville is concerned with body image issues, and I discuss how she reconfigures representational practices with respect to feminine body images. However, the most exciting potential for feminist analysis of the state of the female nude derives from the concept of the body schema, for this concept endows the human body with subjectivity and agency. My key question, then, is by what pictorial means and to what extent Saville succeeds in representing agentic womanhood. I argue that interpreting Saville’s paintings from the standpoint of the body schema demonstrates the radicality of her remaking of the female nude and the rapport between her imagery and feminist values. (shrink)

Sociobiology has ignored the results of psychology, which is the discipline between biology and society. Campbell's target article fills some of the gaps beautifully, but the fact that women's direct and physical aggression has increased during the past 20 years, undermines Campbell's evolutionary explanation of female aggression. The two classical types of theoretical explanations of aggression are that (1) aggression is a drive and (2) aggression is instrumental behavior. Expressive aggression, assumed to be typical of women, is no more (...) drive aggression than is men's aggression. (shrink)

Enlightenment optimism over mankind's progress was often voiced in terms of botanical growth by key figures such as John Millar; the mind's cultivation marked the beginning of this process. For agriculturists such as Arthur Young cultivation meant an advancement towards virtue and civilization; the cultivation of the mind can similarly be seen as an enlightenment concept which extols the human potential for improvable reason. In the course of this essay I aim to explore the relationship between ‘culture’ and ‘cultivation’ through (...) botanical metaphor. By using the recurring motif of the mind's cultivation as a site from which to explore enlightenment views on female understanding, I investigate how far concerns with human progress extended to the female mind. I examine the language of botany and cultivation in texts by authors such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Anna Laetitia Barbauld alongside that of Rousseau and Millar. Wollstonecraft's appropriation and subsequent inversion of the conventional cultivation metaphor, for example, demonstrates her desire to draw attention to society's neglect of women's educational potential by substituting images of enlightened growth with those of luxuriant decay. By pushing this analogy further she indicates how society has cultivated women rearing them like exotic flowering plants or ‘luxuriants’ where ‘strength of body and mind are sacrificed to libertine notions of beauty’. I discuss the antipastoral rationalism which enables her to unmask the false sentiment behind this traditional metaphoric association between women and flowers arguing that such familiar tropes are the language of male desire and are indicative of women's problematic relationship to culture. (shrink)

The year 2014 marked the 50th Anniversary of Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue. I argue that SISI is problematic for the continued struggle of women in sport given the nature and the extent of sexual objectification. The SISI has evolved over the years from a bathing suit fashion spread to a contemporary multimedia colossal. For example, to help celebrate the 50th anniversary, SISI teamed up with Mattel and featured Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Barbie in the February 2014 issue, and a special collector’s (...) item Barbie doll was produced and sold exclusively at Target. Sport is a celebration of human variety, yet Sports Illustrated rarely includes female athletes on their covers, and instead pushes a product that celebrates heterosexuality and sexual objectification of females. (shrink)

This book holds classical liberalism responsible for an American concept of beauty that centers upon women, wilderness, and machines. For each of the three beauty components, a cultural entrepreneur supremely sensitive to liberalism’s survival agenda is introduced. P.T. Barnum’s exhibition of Jenny Lind is a masterful combination of female elegance and female potency in the subsistence realm. John Muir’s Yosemite Valley is surely exquisite, but only after a rigorous liberal education prepares for its experience. And Harley (...) Earl’s 1955 Chevrolet Bel Air is a dreamy expressionist sculpture, but with a practical 265 cubic inch V-8 underneath. Not that American beauty has been uniformly pragmatic. The 1950s are reconsidered for having temporarily facilitated a relaxation of the liberal survival priorities, and the creations of painter Jackson Pollock and jazz virtuoso Ornette Coleman are evaluated for their resistance to the pressures of pragmatism. The author concludes with a provocative speculation regarding a future liberal habitat where Emerson’s admonition to attach stars to wagons is rescinded. (shrink)

In her extant poetry, Sappho uses fourteen female personal names, four of which are not attested elsewhere. The essay is the first attempt to provide a comprehensive analysis of all of them. The results challenge the opinion, still prevailing in scholarship today, that Sappho’s companions were adolescent girls forming an educational or initiatory group, led by the poetess, that prepared them for respectable marriages. As a matter of fact, the female proper names in Sappho belong to four categories: (...) ethnics, abstract nouns, nicknames and mythological names. According to the onomastic conventions of ancient Greece, names of all these categories typically denote females as slaves and courtesans, at least until the Hellenistic period. Thus it is argued that Sappho’s nomenclature creates a ‘reality effect’, implying furthermore that her use of the term hetairai - and likewise of kalai and philai - could also point to the status of courtesans in the technical sense. This best fits the emphasis put on female beauty, seductiveness and musical skills, but also on invective and rivalry. Under the auspices of Aphrodite and from a female perspective, Sappho’s poems feature erotic experiences with lovers of both sexes as well as the reflection of those loves’ vicissitudes. The world imagined and displayed in her songs would therefore be mainly related to the symposion as the dominating realm of archaic poetry. This is how Sappho’s work was actually received in antiquity. (shrink)

Through staged photographs in which she herself is often the lead actor or through appropriation of historical photographs, contemporary African American artist Carrie Mae Weems deconstructs the shaming of the black female body in American visual culture and offers counter-hegemonic images of black female beauty. The mirror has been foundational in Western theories of subjectivity and discussions of beauty. In the artworks I analyze in this article, Weems tactically employs the mirror to engage the topos of (...) shame in order to reject it as a way of seeing the self and to offer a new way of lovingly seeing the self. I use the work of Kelly Oliver, Helen Block Lewis, and bell hooks to articulate the relationships among the mirror, shame, and black female subjectivity in Weems's work. Weems's subjects often reckon with what Oliver calls “social melancholy” as they experience shame while standing before the mirror. However, Weems also shows that by looking again—a critical strategy I explain using Oliver's model of “the loving eye”—her subjects can use the mirror as a corrective to the social shaming gaze and make it a stage for establishing black female subjectivity, a gaze of self-love, and beauty. (shrink)

Current research on construction of the female body focuses on non-Hispanic women in the United States. The idealized Latina body, however, is rapidly becoming commodified and objectified in global popular culture. Using standardized and open-ended surveys and group and individual interviews, the author examines the negotiation of sociocultural ideals and body image by adolescents at the intersection of gender, race, and beauty. These young women hold racist beauty ideals but are flexible when judging the appearance of real-life (...) women. They perceive two competing or complementary prototypes of beauty, one white and one Latina. This study fills a gap in the literature on beauty and the body by examining a non-U.S. sample that does not fit into the usual Black-white dichotomy of race. (shrink)

For a long time, female endorsers in advertising have been doing product information promotion in the market. However, with more and more highly educated women participating in the labor force, the conception of feminist depictions in advertising have become a perplexing issue. The traditional female role portrayals or stereotypes of the past are not able to totally reflect the expectations, behavior, attitudes, and beliefs of contemporary women. The author collected print ads as data from three types of the (...) highest circulation magazines: foreign women’s magazines, domestic women’s magazines, and domestic management magazines subscribed to in Taiwan to investigate what were the favorite feminine patterns and feminist depictions in a traditionally masculine society. The results showed classical beauty and girl-next-door images were “acceptable” gender-role behavior exposed highly in domestic magazines, which might contribute to conservative Confucian beliefs. On the other hand, being trendy was a significantly high preference for contemporary feminist depictions in foreign women's magazines; it might be considered as being due to the increased educational level of women and female labor participation rate in the work place as well as upgrading of social status. (shrink)

We trained chickens to react to an average human female face but not to an average male face (or vice versa). In a subsequent test, the animals showed preferences for faces consistent with human sexual preferences (obtained from university students). This suggests that human preferences arise from general properties of nervous systems, rather than from face-specific adaptations. We discuss this result in the light of current debate on the meaning of sexual signals and suggest further tests of existing hypotheses (...) about the origin of sexual preferences. (shrink)

The term “contemplation” has played a significant role in the history of Christian spirituality. Regardless of the tradition, whether Roman Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant, contemplation has been valued. Recently, however, some Evangelicals have raised various concerns about contemplation, including its Roman Catholic origin, the tendency to devalue Jesus Christ and his atonement, the marginalization of Scripture, and the assertion that a person who seeks to grow in the contemplative life will no longer be active to witness to the gospel in (...) the world. This article while recognizing the potential for possible theological distortions argues that there is a biblical and theologically accurate manifestation of contemplation. In particular, this essay seeks to examine the presence of contemplation within the Evangelical church. To that end, the writings of four Americans representative of the beginning of eighteenth-century Evangelicalism are examined to discern whether they display a biblical and orthodox expression of contemplation. In all cases, whether male or female, Calvinist or Wesleyan, this quartet of spiritual leaders reveal and challenge contemporary Christians of all traditions to be more intentional about cultivating a loving and grateful gazing on God and desire to delight in and enjoy God more fully. (shrink)

I assess representations of black women's derrières, which are often depicted as grotesque, despite attempts by some black women artists to create a black feminist aesthetic that recognizes the black female body as beautiful and desirable. Utilizing a black feminist disability theory, I revisit the history of the Hottentot Venus, which contributed to the shaping of this representational trope, and I identify a recurring struggle among these artists to recover the "unmirrored" black female body.

I assess representations of black women's derrieres, which are often depicted as grotesque, despite attempts by some black women artists to create a black feminist aesthetic that recognizes the black female body as beautiful and desirable. Utilizing a black feminist disability theory, I revisit the history of the Hottentot Venus, which contributed to the shaping of this representational trope, and I identify a recurring struggle among these artists to recover the “unmirrored” black female body.

I assess representations of black women's derrieres, which are often depicted as grotesque, despite attempts by some black women artists to create a black feminist aesthetic that recognizes the black female body as beautiful and desirable. Utilizing a black feminist disability theory, I revisit the history of the Hottentot Venus, which contributed to the shaping of this representational trope, and I identify a recurring struggle among these artists to recover the “unmirrored” black female body.

The Phoenician Women, Euripides' peculiar retelling and refashioning of the Theban myth, offers a portrait of Antigone before she becomes the actor we mostly know today from Sophocles' play. In this under-studied Greek tragedy, Euripides portrays the political and epistemological dissolution that allows for Antigone 's appearance in public. Whereas Sophocles' Antigone appears on stage ready to confront Creon with her appeal to the universal unwritten laws of the gods and later dissolves into the female lamenting a lost womanhood, (...) Euripides' Antigone experiences the opposite journey, thereby offering insights into the conditions that allow for her exposure in the political arena. A speech by Eteocles at the center of the play questions the existence of absolutes, calls injustice beautiful, and opens the door for Antigone 's entrance into the public sphere. With this speech Eteocles challenges us to consider the conditions of political openness in the modern age. (shrink)

Zamah neoplatonističkih koncepcija i oživljavanje ideala antike uz zdušnu potporu petrarkističke lirike, u humanizmu i renesansi uzvisuju ženu na način nepojmljiv za srednjovjekovlje. Dubrovačko zakonodavstvo, već od ranije pod prevladavajućim utjecajem Crkve, bilježi značajne promjene u pozicioniranju žene u društvu, dok nove misaone orijentacije snažno utječu i na kulturni život. Tako se u Dubrovniku pojavljuju i prve pjesnikinje, a konstruira se i prvi mit o ženi, onaj o Cvijeti Zuzorić. Upravo njen suvremenik i dragi prijatelj Nikola Vitov Gučetić, svojim radovima (...) svjedoči novu mogućnost – ženski glas uklopljen u filozofski koncept i promoviran potpisom uglednog Dubrovčanina. Gučetić otvara prostor svog ljetnikovca, zaštićenog mjesta za »časna proučavanja«, dvjema ženama za njihove razgovore o ljepoti i ljubavi, a posvetu objavljenim Dijalozima upućuje još jednoj »vrlo dičnoj i prepoštovanoj gospoji«, Cvijetinoj sestri Niki. Time svojoj supruzi Maruši Gundulić i Cvijeti Zuzorić posredovano daje glas, ali i ime. U stilskom susretu pjesničkog i filozofskog, prožimanju aktera i interpretatora, premošćivanju od bogova do Boga, Gučetić prolazi tragovima autoriteta iz dobro mu znane filozofske tradicije, opredjeljujući se ipak već i samim podnaslovom za promišljanje ljubavi »u Platonovu duhu«.Ovaj rad otkriće žene prezentirano kroz ženski glas dovodi u vezu s Gučetićevim stavovima iznesenim u Upravljanju obitelji, djelu objavljenom desetak godina nakon Dijaloga o ljepoti i Dijaloga o ljubavi. Poseban naglasak stavljen je na Gučetićevo tematiziranje pojma ljubavi i snagu argumenata korištenih u rješavanju zagonetke moći, izvorišta i kompleksnosti ljubavi.The vigorousness of Neo-Platonic conceptions and the revival of the ideals of antiquity, along with wholehearted support from Petrarchian lyricism, exalted women in Humanism and the Renaissance in a way which was inconceivable in the Middle Ages. The legislature of Dubrovnik, already under the prevalent influence of the Church, witnessed significant changes in the social positioning of women, while the novel intellectual orientations exerted powerful influence on its cultural life. Accordingly, it was in Dubrovnik that the first-ever poetesses emerged, and that the first-ever female myth was constructed; namely that of Cvijeta Zuzorić. The work of her contemporary and dear friend, Nikola Vitov Gučetić, bears witness to the then novel possibility – woman voice embedded in a philosophical concept, and promoted by the signature of this reputable citizen of Dubrovnik. Gučetić opened the doors of his villa, a sheltered place for »honourable study«, to two women for their talks of beauty and love, and dedicated the published Dialogues to yet another »respectable and most fair lady«, Cvijeta’s sister Nika. With this he gave his wife Maruša Gundulić and Cvijeta Zuzorić not only mediate voice, but also a name. In the stylistic encounter of the poetical and philosophical, in the interlacement of the actor and interpreter, in the bridging from gods to God, Gučetić traces the trails of authority from a well-known philosophical tradition, opting for a reflection on love »in the spirit of Plato« already in his subtitle.This paper unveils women presented via a feminine voice, and compares them with Gučetić’s attitudes articulated in his Upravljanje obitelji , a work published some ten years or so after his Dijalog o ljepoti and Dijalog o ljubavi . Close attention is given to Gučetić’s thematisation of the concept of love and the strength of arguments used in solving the mysteries of the power, source and complexity of love. (shrink)

I have taken such pains to indicate the scope, terms, and foci of Neumann's analysis because he provides one of the main pillars on which any further systematic study of the woman hero must rest. By showing Psyche's relation to the mythic or archetypal structure of heroism, by demonstrating the particular ways in which the hero is a figure distinguished primarily by involvement in particular patterns of action and psychological development, Neumann provides an invaluable service to further studies of literature, (...) heroism, and women. Without belaboring the distinction between the hero and the heroine, Neumann validates the claim that a woman can be a hero and eliminates the awkward distinction between the heroine as heroic figure and the heroine as conventional woman that has perplexed so much recent literary, especially feminist, analysis.1 He is also very good at locating the details in Psyche's dilemma that constitute significant associative images within a narrative representing heroism by means of a female character. Specifically, he indicates how Psyche's beauty is as much a burden as a boon, shows the importance of her relationship to other female characters, and points out the ways in which the apparent hostility of other women acts as a necessary goad to Psyche's own developing independence. Neumann's analysis is also suggestive in showing the appropriateness of archetypal criticism to material which is not myth in the narrow sense. To be sure, Apuleius' Amor and Psyche results from the distillation of narratives whose origins are clearly to be found in the folklore and functioning mythologies of Greek and Roman culture; just as clearly, however, Apuleius is telling his tale as part of a highly self-conscious, complexly structured narrative2 analogous, in some ways, to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, Milton's great religious epics, and even that seemingly least mythic set of narrative structures, the novel. · 1. See, e.g., Ellen Moers' long discussion of "heroinism" in Literary Women: The Great Writers , pp. 113-242. Moers' use of this awkward term, the female version of the presumably masculine heroism, perpetuates the idea that only men can be true heroes, while extraordinary women remain "special cases" necessitating special terminology.· 2. See P. G. Walsh, The Roman Novel: The 'Satyricon' of Petronius and the 'Metamorphoses' of Apuleius , pp. 141-223. Lee R. Edwards is an editor of The Massachusetts Review and an associate professor of English at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She is presently completing The Labors of Psyche: Female Heroism and Fictional Form. (shrink)

The present study analyzes body fat distribution, a well-known and important indicator of reproductive capability, in young women between 18 and 28 years of age (mean=23.3 years) suffering from secondary amenorrhea and therefore temporary infertility resulting from self-starvation. Body composition parameters estimated by means of dual energy x-ray absorptiometry and the fat distribution index, indicating body shape, were compared with those of healthy controls. Although members of the infertile, amenorrheic group exhibited dramatically low body weight and total amount of body (...) fat, and therefore a marked negative energy balance in comparison with the healthy controls, the sex-specific fat distribution patterns did not differ between infertile and fertile young women. In contrast, the lower the weight and total fat amount, the more gynoid the fat distribution, even in infertile women. This observation may be interpreted in an evolutionary sense: Our ancestors had to cope with frequent food shortages, even starvation, and therefore lengthy periods of negative energy balance. In addition to pregnancy and lactation, temporary infertility as a result of long-term negative energy balance was not an uncommon phenomenon in female life histories. Nevertheless, after a time of plenty, reproductive function recovered, and therefore the gynoid fat distribution patterns in temporarily infertile young women may be interpreted as signal of reproductive capability, which resumes after a time of surplus. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:"An Option for Art But Not an Option for Life":Beauty as an Educational ImperativeJoe Winston (bio)IntroductionIn a recent meeting of the academic staff in the university department where I work, we were asked to state our current research interests. Responses progressed around the circle and everyone listened quietly and respectfully until I stated that my interest was beauty, to which there was general laughter—complicit, not derisory, as (...) if everyone laughing presumed it was a joke. In the same week, I heard a story from a colleague who works in another institution. She had been interviewing a prospective female candidate for their postgraduate teacher training course with a deputy principal from a local school. When it came to a decision, the latter had not been in favor of offering the young woman a place; she was "too beautiful," she thought, to the extent that she would "be a distraction" in the classroom.I offer these stories as illustrative of a fact little discussed—that beauty is a problem in educational discourse, seen as either wildly irrelevant or discordant with the job of teaching. Yet it was not always the case. Beauty has in the past been understood as one of the highest aims of education. For Schiller, it fulfilled a core human need, and he wrote in the second of his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man that "it is only through Beauty that man makes his way to Freedom."1 Matthew Arnold argued that it was in beauty that the "human race finds its ideal."2 Emerson saw beauty as "the form under which the intellect likes to study the world,"3 and Iris Murdoch argued that it should be at the base of any education in the virtues, citing Plato's argument that beauty is the one spiritual quality that we love by instinct.4 These figures could hardly be described as philosophical lightweights, yet their sentiments and the complex arguments through which they expressed [End Page 71] them have for years been neglected; only recently has this begun to change. Elaine Scarry, in particular, has written an influential book on the topic, taking up the argument of Iris Murdoch and developing a strong case for the educational power of beauty, allying it strikingly with an education in social justice.5 Two recent articles in this journal have also heralded a re-evaluation of beauty as a concept of profound significance for both the arts and education. Stuart Richmond sees in the development of our capacities to create and appreciate beauty "a way to bring us back into contact with what is sensual and intrinsically worthwhile,"6 and Howard Cannatella argues passionately "that something of the indelible quality of poiesis and delight in beauty should be the focus of specific educational concern, a factor at its core."7This article is an attempt to add further substance to the claim that-beauty should be one of our core educational values. In doing so, it develops the ideas that connect these perspectives: that beauty's power is instinctive, that it delights, that it is of deep human value. As do Murdoch and Scarry in their different ways, I will argue that beauty is powerfully formative and intrinsically associated with virtue, an idea developed in the final section of the article. First, however, I wish to consider what happened to beauty and why it became a neglected concept not only in education but also in the arts.What Happened to Beauty?Language and world refer to each other and presuppose each other for their mutual intelligibility. In this count, human learning becomes the process of aligning language and world.8In considering beauty, we begin inevitably with the word itself and with its usage. Like all evaluative concepts captured through language, beauty is a historical and cultural entity and, as such, it has both gathered and discarded meanings with the passage of time. Consequently, its nature is elusive and open to revision and debate. Is it characterized by perfect harmony and balance, as the classical world would have it, or by the soaring solidity of a medieval Gothic cathedral? Do we associate it with goodness... (shrink)

This paper presents the story of an isiXhosa traditional healer, Nomzi Hlathi, as told to the first author. Nomzi was asked about how she came to be an igqirha and the narrative focuses on those aspects of her life story that she understood as relevant to that developmental process. The material was obtained from a series of semi-structured interviews with Nomzi, with some collateral from her cousin, and synthesised into a chronological narrative presented in Nomzi’s own words. The aim of (...) the study was to examine her account of her unfolding experience within three hermeneutic frames. The first is the isiXhosa traditional account of what it is to become an igqirha, a process initiated by intwaso, an illness understood to be a call from the ancestors, and guided by messages from the ancestors in dreams and other symbolic communications. The second is the perspective of Western Clinical Psychology on the cognitive, emotional and behavioural disturbances that characterise intwaso. The third is the perspective of transpersonal psychology on the nature and development of shamanic healing gifts, as understood from observations of such practices in traditional societies across the world. As the narrative of Nomzi’s story is quite long, this paper presents her narrative as well as the methodology which gave rise to it. The interpretative review of the material from each of the three perspectives is presented in a second paper. (shrink)