Feminine beauty is a social construct

Good morning, everyone, I am deeply honoured to be given an opportunity to share my thoughts

so freely. The topic of my talk is beauty. Can you tell me its meaning off the top of your head?
Yeah, me neither. Let me say, it is quite a heavy word and many describe it differently. the word
originated from a french word sometime in the 14th century, it meant “physical attractiveness,"
also "goodness, courtesy”. But what do we actually consider “attractive”? It is quite a hard
question to answer generally, most people have their own personal views on this matter. What if
I told you, it was all fake, it didn’t actually exist? Well, let’s start from the beginning
The modern world is quite a weird place, we are constantly feeling the pressure of societal
judgement and are expected to behave and look a certain way, be “beautiful”. Meanwhile no one
really knows what it actually means, and those who do their best to fit in are sometimes judged
for “trying too hard”. I’m pretty sure most people can relate to this sentiment, but women go
through this experience on a much higher level. Nonconforming to these rules is not seen as a
choice but rather as deviation from the norm.
From a very young age I’ve tried to conclude what it is that makes people beautiful and how to
get that “something”. Watching TV and seeing a pattern in how people who were “happy,
successful and pretty” and the ones who were “envious losers who never got anything in the
end” looked like I felt like I had to change everything about me to fit a mold made to fit only few
while the rest try to squeeze themselves there. I couldn’t do much to change my perception at
that time, I’ve just learnt to live with the understanding: “beauty” was just not for everyone and
poured my all into studies and other things that would broaden my outlook and help me patch up
some insecurities and flaws by succeeding in other areas.
Growing up and seeing how big of a role your appearance plays in adult world, like
conventionally attractive people having higher chances at being hired and higher income, set me
back a couple of years in terms of accepting the environment I was in and how I would deal with
it. But this time it motivated me to try and reach the unreachable. I did everything from watching
make-up tutorials days on end to working out daily, to putting 100% of effort in my hairstyle.
Nothing helped, on the contrary, it made me feel helpless and hopeless. I would just wallow in
self pity and judge those who benefited from these standards, continuing to try to fit them. I still
remember looking up photos of supermodels and berating myself for not looking like them, I felt
quite lazy and overall a failure. I went quite deep into research and found the beauty industry has
been growing scarily quickly from the moment social media became a big thing, manufacturers
are making billions of dollars selling products that are promised to help you look a certain way,
to get that validation from society again and again, back then this didn’t make me worried or
alarmed, I simply saw it as a way to fix the things that were wrong, to enhance yourself and
finally feel better. I used to get into passionate arguments with my friends, who thought that
beauty is just measured not by your appearance but rather by how you present yourself, your
mannerisms and style of communication, how you treat others and what other character traits
you have, they said if you feel beautiful, you ARE beautiful. I simply could not agree with them,
their philosophy didn’t make sense to me as a was still so brainwashed and so hellbent on being
miserable. In the back of my mind, I knew that this is not right, I couldn’t continue living like
this, it was both exhausting and a bit stupid.
But what has helped me immensely is that I’ve realized that beauty is just a social construct. It
simply does not exist outside of society and people’s opinions, there is no beauty in nature,
animals operate on a whole lot more instinctual level when finding their mate, while people
overanalize and rationalize everything. What is considered beautiful and transmitted in the media
is just a median value. What is more, the standard of feminine beauty changes pretty much every
10 years. The 80-s had the athletic look, very prominently shown in the tv-show Baywatch, for
example, 90-s had so called heroine chic, with its sickly thinness and porcelain white skin,
popularized by models of the time, that made young girls all over the globe turn to unhealthy
eating habits, and now the modern era, characterized by having a curvy body, but a flat stomach
and lack of fat. Most of these are simply antipodes to each other, it makes no sense to try and
always follow these trends. Therefore, beauty does not define you, it defines society, its values at
that point and trends on social development. Turns out beauty does lie in the eyes of the
beholder, just not in the way we thought. It is not actually about being “beautiful” to someone’s
standards, it is about knowing beauty does not exist, there is only judgment that society instills in
us through small but persistent reminders of how “beauty” looks like. What rooted this thought
in my brain was realizing that is not only a wave of opinions in society, it is also based on a well
crafted and polished industry that only grows larger with every passing second while people
search for solutions to their problems, but plastic surgery or makeup never fix them, they just
cover them up. Even what we see online and on TV is most of the times fake, even those who we
idolize sometimes do not fit the standard. And it is quite a scary observation. This is exactly why
it is crucial for more people to understand that beauty is unreachable and start accepting
themselves as is and put a stop to this vicious cycle of pressure and adaptation.
I am not completely confident, still have not fully freed myself from the shackles of the
perspective that was spoon fed to our generation since we were able to have coherent thoughts. I
sometimes catch myself comparing my own features to what I see in the media and I have to
consciously stop these thoughts and remind myself that it is pointless. Nevertheless, everyday is
a battle worth being fought. I do not wish for future generations to be as burdened by this
problem as we are, hopefully, you don’t either. And most importantly, I hope my talk has made
you rethink a thing or two. Be yourself, don’t hide behind a pretty picture and enjoy what you
have.