From da Vinci Concept

What is Beauty? What is Ugliness?(topic)

Journal #7

We use our experiences to determine the characteristics of the beings and events that surround us. Based on that, we express what we felt in our experiences and transfer them into the meanings' world, where we finally give an explanation to that experience. Indeed, those meanings attributed to our experiences are based in many cases in what we could say is the "society's experience". We follow fashion and some established rules due to the status-quo that manages our brains and our behavior. That happens with some concepts of our lives that are linked to the most primitive but essential feelings of the Human Being: To determine if something is black or white, good or bad, or in this particular case that we are about to discuss; beautiful or ugly.

What is beautiful? And... what is ugly? This meanings have changed along the centuries, and we base our tastes and preferences upon someone or something because of these prefixed meanings. We don't born with these meanings, but we acquire them by the impact of Media, parents' influence on us or other ways in which subliminally we distinguish finally - by means of what we heard and saw - what is "beautiful" or "ugly".

Beauty Seems to be linked to the ability of a female to reproduce and benefit offspring, in the genetic sense, and in the social sense. When one thinks about it, if dark skin gives the impression that one is poor, then it is considered ugly because the woman will not have money to support children. On the other hand, in america, women who have dark skin( a tan) show that they have liesure. They have the time to work on a "tan", and thus will have time to raise children.

We can go back to the beginning of the twentieth century and see another "beauty" concept rather than the one we have nowadays. At those times, a "beautiful" girl would be a chubby, fatty girl that would mean richness and privileges, beside a thin girl that would mean sickness and death. Now, in the twenty first century, we find "beauty" a girl who is quite thin and with no sign of fat in her body, beside a girl who would have been considered beautiful at other times, and in fact, would be considered as sick or with health problems.

Indeed. As alvaro says, chubby and voluptuous women were the greatly admrired in times like the roman empire and such. Why? Because food was scarce and hard to come by, and thus if you had the money to buy food, you could afford to feed children and provide them with a healthy life. Nowadays, fat is a rather unhealthy thing. With most fat people at risk for diabetes and heart attacks. What's more, organic food and eating right costs more money than just buying a bunch of snickers bars. It's actually a sign of better affluence to be skinny!

It is possible to say, due to the facts that we face now, that "society concepts" are created after innovation and research, where we find that some signs are associated with other bad meanings rather than good ones. Is in this case that the "association of meanings" takes part of this situation.

Not sure what my comrade is saying here, but I wonder if it is possible to change the concepts of beauty through activism or not? Certainly, woman used to rely on outside influences to shape their body, like corsets and metheas. But now the emphasis is on controlling the woman's body internally. Perhaps this change in perspective arose because of the modern cosmetics and marketing industry?

We can prove that not by only going back in our own society, but also going to other societies which lifestyles can be really different, like eastern cultures. As the example explained before, we can determine what is "ugly" and "beauty" for chinese people, for example, because of what they link to those concepts, which can be considered as "society meaning" concepts too.

alvaro, can you be more clear with the above paragraph?

A girl who is tanned in China is considered "ugly" despite the situation that could happen in the western hemisphere. What we could consider as "beauty" because of the nice skin-color someone could have, in China is considered of bad taste and "ugly" just because it means to work under the sun and, ergo, being poor.

yes, see above.

So, it is feasible to make emphasize in what are the linking of meanings. Beauty and ugliness are not just those terms, but include some social meanings in which we associate - without thinking about that association in an explicit way - to social status, health, behavior, self-esteem and maybe lots more.

Finally, we conclude that some concepts like "beauty" and "ugliness" which have been with us along our existence as human beings, are determined most of times - if not always - to some "implicit conventions" made by society, where we adopt those meanings and turn them into our meanings too, regardless our own taste. It has to do with a society's idiosyncrasy and therefore, with our fears reflected to it. We won't never want to be poor and unhealthy, thus, we convert those meanings into a primitive but strong one: Beauty or ugly.

changes in beauty and ugliness are linked strongly to the ability of the woman to raise children to the top of society. Thus, as time goes on, and technonlogy becomes more and more important, perhaps smarter women will become beautiful, the better to teach their children skills and the like. Or, maybe women who are not smart, but have much more time on their hands will be considered beautiful, as time is becoming an increasingly scarce resource. Who knows? Only time will tell. ;)

Alvaro & JoseLuis

TheLiberal Tue Oct 2 1:46:25 2007

This page is a collaborative work between myself and a fellow classmate of St.Mary's University. If you wish, you may add your voice to the paper, which is under the heading Journal #7. Feel free to add any comments on the subject below.

Hey, Alvaro, here's the page. We can edit each other's work till we both agree on what the paper says, but I think we should limit deletions to simple symantic errors, or if we want to delete something from the paper, we both have to agree to it. Because, the more content, the more provocative the thought, eh?

Thanks,
--JoseLuis a.k.a TheLiberal See above date.

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Hi Jose Luis,

Here's my part, or what I thought about this topic. Take a look at it and add whatever you like, if you want to discuss something I wrote, we can do it tomorrow or you can send me an e-mail to azapatel@stmarytx.edu.

See ya and take care.

Alvaro