Tuesday 10 June 2014

Beauty: Voluntary Servitude?



Video by Swiss organisation Pro Infirmis.


Wow: even without following the subtitles nor listening to the spoken German, I was dumb-struck after watching this profoundly moving and inspiring video.

It questions our notions of æsthetics and the morality of the constrictions and strictures main-stream culture places on we citizens. So much so, that even individuals considered conventionally attractive worry obsessively about their looks. We have allowed ourselves to be dictated to by the media and have willingly become enslaved to the fashion, beauty, fitness and cosmetic-surgery industries. We indoctrinate future generations through children's books and films into believing that beautiful/young = good and ugly/old = bad. Our perverted sense of beauty is a completely vacuous and unattainable ideal: perfect for industries to permanently prey on our fears; not so good for folk who suffer from illnesses related to this fetishistic perniciousness. So amour-propre is damaged in us all, and we all suffer permanent low self-esteem.

None of us need to nor ought to be so down on ourselves over our appearance. As the tag-line states, "Because who is perfect?".

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