 |
The modern world is so anti-beauty that anyonewho searches for beauty and emulates it is regarded as some kind of anomaly. This is most strongly communicated to (and by) those who should most be our examples of beauty: movie stars.
Laura Wood at the Thinking Housewife has a post on beauty, and links to an essay on beauty by Peter Singleton titled: The Beautiful Female Face - And It's Feminist Enemies.
Laura Wood writes, commenting on a photo of the actress Jennifer Aniston:
Reading this essay, I was reminded of the sheer banality of one prominent celebrity: Jennifer Aniston. I cannot understand why people find her face interesting enough to see everwhere. It devoid of mystique.In an earlier post, Laura writes about The Beauty of Therese of Lisieux, a nineteenth century saint, hardly a physical beauty, and perhaps with spiritual beauty, although I find even that hard to see in her harsh expression.
It is not that ordinary women (including ordinary movie actresses) want to uglify themselves, it is the gatekeepers of modern aesthetics who have decided that ugliness rules. The reasons are complex and long, and I'm in the process of expounding on that. But here's basically what I think:
Modern aesthetics refers to evil, rather than the good, to define our world. And ugliness is the manifestation of evil, whereas beauty is the manifestation of good.Here's an excerpt from the essay by Singleton:
The contemporary American woman's beauty...is a complete fraud that seems to recognize itself as a complete fraud...Since I cannot suppose that our women actually have fewer physical attractions than others around the world, I must conclude that our culture has fed their souls upon something that has dulled their their spiritual radiance. And why, I ask, should that conclusion strike anyone as a surprise? How are you to be beautiful in the context of paleo-feminism, whose ambition was that women should become men?Since women cannot become men, in body or soul the next best thing is not to become women (or, more precicely, not to be feminine). That leaves the strange option of a non-feminine, anti-beauty female, who either looks androgynous, or who dresses as ugly as possible to camouflage her femininity. After all, her fashion bibles are telling her that looks good!
Here are excerpts from a couple of articles I wrote on Jennifer Aniston:
From Jennifer's Momentary Radiance:
She looks so radiant and happy with her flowing locks and pretty veil.And after her husband Brad Pitt cheated on her with that formidable Angelina Jolie, she linked up with Justine Theroux. I wrote abiut them in my blog post Modern Couples:
Well here's Jenn in New York's West Village, and that's how to look urban and chic.This post was tongue in cheek. Jennifer looks drab and dreary, although she cannot help styling her scarf.
One final thing, before Jennifer's transformation into the mousy looking, hurt woman (everything about her exudes hurt, and who can blame her, after her husband cheated on her), I think she had charm and style and became the only talented actress on that awful sitcom Friends, running circles around her "friends" in her stylish clothes and clever lines. And her confidence and charm transferred over to her actual persona. She may not be a refined beauty, but she has enough ordinary prettiness that her sitcom fans (ordinary women) can relate to. Beauty does come in gradations, and prettiness is one of them.