INTRODUCTION
The Relevance of the Key Concepts
Beauty, femininity and sexuality are the key concepts crucial to our understanding of why women and girls feel the need to alter their appearance.
They are what give persuasive weight to advertisements for hair removal products, anti-ageing creams, hair dye, make-up, shampoo… and because we don’t think carefully about what each word means and whether the advertisements are depicting reality, we are easily duped into believing in the artificial representations of singular feminine beauty.
When women and girls mistake the promoted idea; the idea of feminine beauty that requires construction, to be the only real and accepted image, beauty in their eyes becomes something separate from the real woman, a word that refers to the artificial representation of femininity and excludes acknowledgement of any other.
As I go on to talk about each of the three main concepts individually you will notice that all three ideas are inextricably linked. Beauty is considered to be a feminine attribute while femininity is rarely represented without sexual connotations. |