Thor’s Day, April 3: The Beauty Myth

EQ: What is Beauty, and how have thinkers defined it?

  • Welcome! Gather pen/cil, paper, wits!
  • Beautiful, Pretty, Cute, Hot
  • Reading and Writing: The Beauty Myth
  • Shakespeare, Supermodels, Poets and Computer Geeks, Girls and Cars and Stuff
  • BIG Closing Freewrite: A Personal Aesthetic

ELACC12RL-RI2: Analyze two or more themes or central ideas of text

ELACC12RI3: Analyze and explain how individuals, ideas, or events interact and develop

ELACC12RL4-RI4: Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in text

ELACC12RL6: Distinguish what is directly stated in a text from what is really meant

ELACC12RI6: Determine an author’s point of view or purpose in a text

ELACC12RI7: Integrate and evaluate multiple sources to address a question or solve a problem

ELACC12RL-RI9: Analyze for theme, purpose rhetoric, and how texts treat similar themes or topics

ELACC12RL10: Read and comprehend complex literature independently and proficiently.

ELACC12W1: Write arguments to support claims in an analysis of substantive topics or texts

ELACC12W4: Produce clear and coherent writing appropriate to task, purpose, and audience

ELACC12W10: Write routinely over extended and shorter time frames

ELACC12SL1: Initiate and participate effectively in a range of collaborative discussions

ELACC12L1: Demonstrate standard English grammar and usage in speaking and writing.

ELACC12L2: Use standard English capitalization, punctuation, spelling in writing.

ELACC12L3: Demonstrate understanding of how language functions in different contexts

ELACC12L4: Determine/clarify meaning of unknown and multiple-meaning words and phrases

ELACC12L6: Acquire and use general academic and domain-specific words and phrases

Opening Freewrite: Girls and Cars and Stuff

Film director and fashion designer Tom Ford, interviewed on the National Public Radio program “Fresh Air,” December 14, 2009. © 2009 National Public Radio.

The female form mirrors where we are culturally, aesthetically, at a period in history.

Right now everything is pumped up. Cars look like someone took an air pump and pumped them up. They look engorged. Lips pumped up, breasts pumped up, everything pumped up.

And it's kind of off-putting. It's sexual but in such a hard way that it's not sexual at all.

I think that right now we're in a very hard moment and off-putting. Look at shoes today. Women's shoes couldn't possibly get any higher and meaner and sharper.

In the 1970s, breasts were smaller. People were not wearing bras. Farrah Fawcett's beauty was a very touchable beauty. She was kissable. She was friendly.

But breasts right now don't look like breasts. They look like someone's taken a grapefruit half and inserted it under your skin. It doesn't bear any resemblance to what a natural breast looks like. But we're starting to think that this is what women should look like. And young girls are looking at these breasts and thinking, oh, I need to go have my breasts done because they've lost touch with what a real breast actually looks like.

I find that fascinating; I find that disturbing.

We're becoming post-human. We are starting to manipulate our bodies, because we can, into a shape. We are becoming our own art. But it desexualizes everything. You start to look more and more polished, more and more lacquered, and you look like a beautiful – car. Does anyone want to sleep with you? Does anyone want to touch you? Does anyone want to kiss you? Maybe not, because you're too scary. You're beautiful, you're glossy, you're shiny, but you're not human.

If you look at the 1950s, quite fascinating, tailfins, sharp, going to Mars, going to the moon, breasts pointed in a way that, when we look at them today, so bizarre. Women's lips, the beauty standard then was thin, pointy, long lines of lip, eyes the same thing.

So, culturally, graphically where we were in the 1950s was reflected in the female form. Where we are in 2009 is reflected in the female form.

In 1817, a 19-year old unwed mother named Mary Shelley

wrote the most influential novel of the past two hundred years:

Frankenstein.

What was she reading?

What was she thinking?

What was her aesthetic philosophy?

aesthetic

having to do with beauty in a theoretical or philosophical sense

William Shakespeare, Hamlet (1603)

Act III, Scene 1 – Hamlet and Ophelia argue

HAMLET: Ha, ha! are you honest?

OPHELIA: My lord?

HAMLET: Are you fair?

OPHELIA: What means your lordship?

HAMLET: That if you be honest and fair, your honesty should admit no discourse to your beauty.

OPHELIA: Could beauty, my lord, have better commerce than with honesty?

HAMLET: Ay, truly; for the power of beauty will sooner transform honesty from what it is to a bawd than the force of honesty can translate beauty into his likeness: this was sometime a paradox, but now the time gives it proof.

beauty

beatific

having qualities of blessedness;

a condition of close contact with God

In Wit, as Nature, what affects our Hearts

Is not Exactness of peculiar Parts;
'Tis not a Lip, or Eye, we Beauty call,
But the joint Force and full Result of all…
No single Parts unequally surprise;
All comes united to admiring Eyes;
No monstrous Height, or Breadth, or

Length appear;
The Whole at once is Bold, and Regular.

–Alexander Pope, Essay On Criticism, 1719

John Keats (1795-1821) – Philosopher-Poet of Beauty

A thing of beauty is a joy forever:

Its loveliness increases; it will never

Pass into nothingness; but still will keep

A bower quiet for us, and a sleep

Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.

Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing

A flowery band to bind us to the earth,

Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth

Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,

Of all the unhealthy and o'er-darkened ways

Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,

Some shape of beauty moves away the pall

From our dark spirits….

–from Endymion, 1818

When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty" - that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

–from Ode on a Grecian Urn, 1819

The Beauty Myth

I’m a juxtaposition

of flaws

from head to toe.

You can't change that.

You have to make

your flaws work for you.

– Iman, supermodel, 1990

In 1990, Judith Langlois and Lori Roggman of the University of Texas assembled photos of beautiful faces, then generated computer-composite images by averaging the intensity of pixels. Viewers judged the composite images to be “better-looking” than theoriginal faces. In the words of Langlois and Roggman, “attractive faces are, literally, average.”

  • – New Scientist, 22 February 1992

His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful – great God!

–Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, 1819

Closing Freewrite (200 words) –Formulatean aesthetic philosophy addressing ONE of these questions. Quote2 DIFFERENT AUTHORS WHOM WE READ TODAY. Use the word “aesthetic” correctly.

  1. “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty,” wrote Keats. True or False?
  1. “Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder,” runs the cliché. Do we really believe this, or do we just say it?
  1. Why and how does Beauty influence us so powerfully?
  1. What ratio of Normal and Abnormal creates “Beauty”?
  1. Discuss some other idea about Beauty.

Submit all 3 Freewrites – Opening, 50 wd, Closing