Beauty Demands

Our Beauty Demands blog is 5 years old this year! We have had many brilliant posts over those years, so we're going to revisit some of these, starting with the ever-important topic of social media. Below is Emilie Lawrence's discussion on body positivity, which introduces a paper she presented at our workshop back in 2016:  In this post, Emilie Lawrence (UCL) discusses her work on body positivity discourse as it plays out on social media. The paper I am presenting at the forthcoming Beauty Demands workshop explores social media sites as platforms for creating networked communities (Papacharissi, 2010, 2011 & 2012) notions of the performative body (Butler, 1988) and embodied subjectivity (Braidotti, 2013.) I will explore body positive feminism ( an emerging form of online and offline activism stemming from Love Your Body (LYB) discourse, ‘positive, affirmative, seemingly feminist-inflected media messages, targeted exclusively at girls and women, that exhort us ...

Author’s note: I initially wanted to write about my aging self and the attitude people in Lebanon have towards my reluctance to follow the social norms of body and facial maintenance, but as I began to write my piece for the blog, the Lebanese people took to the streets in revolt against a corrupt government which has made life in Lebanon unbearable. The revolution began October 17 th 2019, and as of yet seems to be non-ending. I have spent all this time watching the females of my country (all ages) take to the streets and challenge norms; thus, I was motivated to change the direction of my piece. Beauty. A word that has layers of meanings. It is a word that has been used for centuries denoting the expectations of a female’s physical appearance. Even in some cases it has been used to imply the actions of a female as in the adage “beauty is as beauty does”. But what does any of this actually mean? I am a 56-year-old woman. I am a university professor and my area of study is dance. ...

In a recent study, researchers Bruch and Newman (2018: 1-6) investigated the ‘desirability’ of both male and female online dating users. Bruch and Newman determined, through analysing over 200,000 messages between online dating users, that women’s sexual desirability is at its highest at age 18 whilst men’s sexual desirability peaks at age 50. After these two ages, desirability declines for both groups. Why is this the case? One explanation offered by Bruch and Newman is that desirability varies with educational level (Bruch and Newman 2018: 2). For instance, highly educated men are perceived by women to be highly desirable. However, the same is not true of women. According to the study, women are most attractive to men when they are educated to undergraduate level, but their desirability decreases as they reach postgraduate levels of study (Bruch and Newman 2018: 2). This research has sparked a considerable amount of debate, all seeking to answer why average desirability varies w...

Johnny Weissmuller was famous, both as an Olympic swimmer and as Tarzan.  He won five Olympic gold medals in swimming between 1924 and 1928, and played Tarzan in twelve films between 1932 and 1948. Johnny Weissmuller's body is, inevitably, well documented in film and photograph.  It is the highly muscled body that is typical both of the elite swimmer of that period and of many actors.  Yet it is a very different body to that of his modern counterparts, be these the swimmer Michael Phelps or Alexander Skarsgård, the most recent actor to play Tarzan. Both these bodies are like Weissmuller's in being highly muscled.  However, the definition of the muscle is much more precise, in what body builders refer to as clean bulking.  In the case of Skarsgård the definition is almost ludicrously clean (or is this just CGI?). It might be argued, in the cases of Phelps, that this development of the body is simply a product of sports science.  It is a more efficien...

In this post, Fiona MacCallum wonders whether the Disney Princess brand is having a detrimental effect on young girls. You don’t have to be the parent of a young girl to be aware of the Disney Princess brand. The abundant merchandise (toys, clothing, lunch boxes, towels, party decorations – the list seems endless) is visible in any shopping centre, or children’s department.  In comparison to Barbie and other more overtly sexual media models, whose potentially damaging effects have been much discussed, the princesses can be seen by parents as “safe”. But with their exaggeratedly feminine body shapes and facial appearance, and with the gender stereotyped behaviours of the older examples (e.g. Snow White, Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella) who are uniformly portrayed as needing rescuing, can interacting with Disney Princesses really be so benign? New research from Professor Sarah Coyne and colleagues at Brigham Young University suggests not.  In a study of nearly 200 chil...

In this post, our new Research Network Administrator, Ruth Wareham, discusses how her research interests in the philosophy of education fit with the issues being considered as part of the Beauty Demands Project. I am hugely excited to be working as the Research Network Administrator for the Beauty Demands project. Although my own philosophical work has never dealt directly with issues relating to cosmetic enhancement or perfectionism (at least, not in the sense of a moral imperative to improve or maintain the way we look), much of my previous research has revolved around the topic of autonomy and the idea that individuals should be granted the freedom to live their lives “from the inside” (See, for example, Colburn, 2010, p.41); to decide what constitutes the ‘Good life’ from their own perspective. Given my philosophical preoccupation with the limits which ought to be set on (or may necessarily restrict) freedom of choice, the work being undertaken by the Beauty Dema...

In this post, Rikke Amundsen gives her thoughts on Chrissy Chambers' attempt to make legal history by prosecuting an ex-partner for posting revenge pornography of her online. Rikke is a member of the University of Cambridge's Centre for Gender Studies and a network member of the Beauty Demands project. On June 3rd, the Guardian published an article about Chrissy Chambers, a victim of revenge porn who is about to make legal history. Chambers is the first person in the UK to seek both a civil action for damages and criminal prosecution of an ex-partner for posting revenge porn online. As the revenge porn material involving Chambers was posted years ago, the new law criminalising revenge porn in the UK does not apply. Chambers will thus rely on a range of old laws in order to legally address her perpetrator. News coverage of cases like that of Chambers make part of a larger public debate in the UK on the legal steps that can be taken in order to challenge revenge porn o...