Heather Widdows: Perfect Me. Beauty as an Ethical Ideal
- PDF / 133,831 Bytes
- 3 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 24 Downloads / 184 Views
Heather Widdows: Perfect Me. Beauty as an Ethical Ideal Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018. Paperback (ISBN 9780691197142). 343 pages. R. F. Bentzon 1 Accepted: 1 September 2020/ # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
In ‘Perfect Me’, Heather Widdows argues that beauty – or striving to be beautiful – has become a dominant ethical ideal. The book covers many interesting topics, including beauty as a duty, the dominance of the current beauty ideal compared to previous ideals, and how the self is located in the actual body as well as in what Widdows calls ‘the transforming body’, where you are working on your body (e.g. undergoing cosmetic surgery) and ‘the imagined body’, which is the body towards which you are striving. The book contains four main arguments. Chapter 1 (‘A Duty to be Beautiful?’) presents the first argument for beauty being an increasingly demanding ethical ideal and outlines the features of the current ideal (i.e. size, firmness, smoothness, and youthfulness). Widdows claims that by saying someone is ‘good’ at engaging in beauty work, or that someone is beautiful, what we mean is that they are morally good. Therefore, beauty becomes something that we value in and for itself. She emphasizes two features of the beauty ideal as an ethical ideal. Firstly, it is a collective ideal, since the beauty ideal has become a broadly shared moral framework; secondly, beauty norms are more dominant and powerful than social or prudential norms. Transgressing a beauty norm tends to be enforced more forcefully compared to transgressing a social or prudential norm, since the enforcement of beauty norms is connected with disgust and disdain. The fact that we judge others collectively on how well they live up to the ideal is a significant feature of the beauty ideal as ethical: it is shared in a community. Even though Widdows believes the scope of the beauty ideal to be global, she notes that the social standards and group pressure to live up to the ideal vary. Chapter 3 (‘A New (Miss) World Order?’) builds on the argument from the first two chapters and claims that even while there is not one single global beauty ideal (yet), beauty ideals are converging towards a global ideal. The different ideals get mixed together to become more and more homogeneous, and everyone needs to do some beauty-work in order to be good enough to suit the new global standards, e.g. skin-lightning cream compared to selftanning cream to achieve the just right bronzed skin. Widdows concludes that as the beauty * R. F. Bentzon [email protected]
1
University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark
R. F. Bentzon
ideal expands, the minimal effort one must and should do to be beautiful enough, becomes more and more demanding. The definition of the beauty ideal is used to argue for the self as located not only in the actual body but also the imagined body (chapter 7, ‘My Body, Myself’). The argument draws on feminist literature on the objectification of women (Simone de Beauvior and Sandra Bartky in particular): Widdows’ argument is that the se
Data Loading...
