Beholding Beauty in Culture
If I was famous and someone in a throng of reporters asked me who I considered the most beautiful woman in the world, that would be an unfair question. It is based on culture. Sure, I could give some names of famous people, but those have changed over the years. I cannot remember the name of the night nurse in the hospital, but I was stunned. The idea of beauty (or handsome) is not objective.
This article is going to emphasize ideas of female beauty.
Cleopatra was famous for her beauty, but we really do not have a good idea of her appearance. If you look for Cleopatra at WikiArt, you will see a variety of paintings using artistic license in rendering her appearance. They are based on the culture in which the artists lived.
Women often claim that men "objectify" them. This is true to some extent, but the blame lies not only in society, but in marketing and Hollywood. Ideas of beauty have changed through history. Men today may like women with large breasts (except when they don't care), but in the Roaring Twenties, the American "flapper girls" were attractive — and had small breasts. Interesting that both men and women take pride in their private parts as if they were not the results of DNA; you didn't build that.
I knew a man from Trinidad who had married an American woman who was, to use a medical term, morbidly obese. She had numerous health issues that took several years off her life, but people from his culture preferred larger women. If I rightly recollect, he wanted me to get my wife fattened up. Odd that the man was skinny as a rail.
For that matter, have you ever seen movies where men from Western civilization find themselves on an island? They win the favor of the chief, and one man in particular is chosen to be the husband of his daughter. However, the daughter is considered beautiful by the islanders, but would not be considered suitable for modeling work.
Believers in particles-to-photographer evolution have problems discussing the origins and purpose of beauty. They can evosplain it as a way of attracting a mate, but this utilitarian idea does not explain beauty in nature nor how it would have changed through the ages and still been a viable evolutionary mechanism.
Our Creator gave us beauty in nature to appreciate, and we can appreciate physical beauty in other people. Physical beauty fades through age, unhealthy or dangerous lifestyles, accidents, and more. The old "beauty is only skin deep" adage is true because it is inner beauty that is more important, and the ultimate source of beauty is godliness. That gives hope to my homely self.
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| Modified from The Banquet of Cleopatra, Jacob Jordaens, 1653 |
Cleopatra was famous for her beauty, but we really do not have a good idea of her appearance. If you look for Cleopatra at WikiArt, you will see a variety of paintings using artistic license in rendering her appearance. They are based on the culture in which the artists lived.
Women often claim that men "objectify" them. This is true to some extent, but the blame lies not only in society, but in marketing and Hollywood. Ideas of beauty have changed through history. Men today may like women with large breasts (except when they don't care), but in the Roaring Twenties, the American "flapper girls" were attractive — and had small breasts. Interesting that both men and women take pride in their private parts as if they were not the results of DNA; you didn't build that.
I knew a man from Trinidad who had married an American woman who was, to use a medical term, morbidly obese. She had numerous health issues that took several years off her life, but people from his culture preferred larger women. If I rightly recollect, he wanted me to get my wife fattened up. Odd that the man was skinny as a rail.
For that matter, have you ever seen movies where men from Western civilization find themselves on an island? They win the favor of the chief, and one man in particular is chosen to be the husband of his daughter. However, the daughter is considered beautiful by the islanders, but would not be considered suitable for modeling work.
Believers in particles-to-photographer evolution have problems discussing the origins and purpose of beauty. They can evosplain it as a way of attracting a mate, but this utilitarian idea does not explain beauty in nature nor how it would have changed through the ages and still been a viable evolutionary mechanism.
Our Creator gave us beauty in nature to appreciate, and we can appreciate physical beauty in other people. Physical beauty fades through age, unhealthy or dangerous lifestyles, accidents, and more. The old "beauty is only skin deep" adage is true because it is inner beauty that is more important, and the ultimate source of beauty is godliness. That gives hope to my homely self.
To read the rest, click on "Biblical Beauty and the Culture Beast".I was nine years old the first time I looked in the mirror and really evaluated my appearance. In a yellow sundress that my mother loved, I stood at the mirror, sides of my long, dull blonde hair pulled back by a beret. “What a chubby face,” I thought. My stomach seemed so round, my teeth looked so gapped and crooked. “I’m ugly,” I said to myself, and I’ve struggled with those words for over two decades, regardless of how many compliments I’ve received since.Humans are fearfully and wonderfully made, Psalm 139:14 says. Yet, for many women, men, and even young girls and boys, physical attractiveness is a never-ending, sometimes unwinnable battle made even more difficult by cultural trends and philosophies. And is the fight even biblical?