Monday, April 11, 2011

Historical portrayal of beauty and insecurity

Conventional wisdom is that people have more body insecurity today because such high standards of beauty are depicted in the media. But I find myself wondering whether this happened even more in the past.

I've blogged before about what it felt like to be a hairy preteen in a world where no other girl or woman around me was hairy. During one of those hairy preteen years, my family went to England. We went to a lot of museums and art galleries there, and I saw a lot of nude paintings (nothing sexual - renaissance/classical era Serious Art). I had never seen nudity before. I had seen women nursing, and I knew from knowing where babies come from that men have penises and that I would get pubic hair when I got older, but I went from never having seen full nudity before to seeing dozens of depictions a day.

And it made me feel ugly, because none of the women in the paintings were hairy like me. Some of them had pubic hair, although many didn't, but there were absolutely no depictions of the armpit hair that was currently troubling me. From this, I concluded that it was unnatural for a woman to have armpit hair, and I must be some kind of freak of nature.

This all came to mind with Elizabeth Taylor's recent passing, when the news was full of gorgeous old black and white pictures of her. She looked flawless in these pictures, because people tend to look more flawless in low-definition black and white. My most recent driver's licence photo was black and white, and my skin looks perfect in it! If I'd ever been in a position where I was comparing myself to a black-and-white Elizabeth Taylor, I would have felt hideous because my own real-life skin has flaws that I and everyone else can see.

But with current high-definition photography, you can see more of the actor's or model's flaws. Off the top of my head, in Ocean's Twelve you can tell that Catherine Zeta-Jones has acne scars under her makeup. She still looks gorgeous, of course, but the fact that her skin isn't 100% flawless is visible in the high-definition photography where it wouldn't be in Elizabeth Taylor's black and white days. I'm seeing flaws that I can identify with in portrayals of beauty on screen, which I wouldn't have seen in the 1950s watching Elizabeth Taylor, or in the renaissance period looking at Botticelli's Venus.

On top of this, there's the fact that we have access to more beauty and cosmetic products and technology today. In the renaissance era, I wouldn't even have been able to bathe regularly, to say nothing of removing my body hair with any degree of long-term effectiveness. But in the 21st century, I can be clean and shiny, and shave or wax or tweeze or bleach or epilate anything I want on a daily basis - plus there are dozens of businesses in my neighbourhood alone where they'd be happy to do a more professional job for an amount of money that I probably have in my bank account right now. I have a tube of touche eclat in my purse right now, they sell medical-grade foundation in my local drugstore, and I'm fully aware of the wonders of photoshop. The gap between beauty portrayed in the media and what I can achieve with the resources available to me is narrower than it has ever been.

So did people in the past have insecurity about their physical appearance because of media depictions? If not, why not? And why would it be happening today?

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