Ruth Bell photographed by Michal Pudelka for Vogue Japan May 2017
Stylist: Sissy Vian
Hair: Sebastien Richard
Makeup: Alice Ghendrih
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When beauty practices are carried to extremes they are the subject of research, however, as a form of mental illness. Thus 30 years after the publication of Andrea Dworkin’s work the anxious and obsessive beauty practices that she describes so well have been identified as symptomatic of a newly discovered and labelled mental health problem called ‘body dysmorphic disorder’ or BDD. Katharine Phillips, an expert in the field, tells us that clues to the disorder are, ‘frequent mirror checking, excessive grooming, face picking, and reassurance seeking’. When she describes the clues in more detail they turn out to resemble quite precisely the ordinary everyday practices of femininity.
Sheila Jeffreys, Beauty and Misogyny
as someone diagnosed with BDD this is something i’ve alwaysssss thought. it is directly related to my socialization into femininity and not some isolated psychological incident.
(via genderheretic)
I love how literally every great male “genius” in the world was a raging, shameless misogynist, but as soon as Valerie Solanas wrote the SCUM manifesto, everyone who conveniently ignored the misogyny of the “great thinkers” suddenly found themselves in a rage over ONE fucking book that vilifies men. Pathetic. Society only notices this shit when it happens to men. Where were all of you when Aristotle said “as regards the sexes, the male is by nature superior and the female inferior, the male ruler and the female subject” ? Or how about when Nietzsche sharted out this misogynist garbage “what is truth to a woman? From the very first nothing has been more alien, repugnant, inimical to woman than truth - her great art is the lie, her supreme concern is appearance and beauty” ? I could write an entire dissertation on the misogyny of the so called “great thinkers” that everyone is forced to learn about and respect. But ONE book that flips all of that over onto men is the final straw? Fucking please lmao!
Woman wants to be independent[…]this is one of the worst developments in the general uglification of Europe. Woman has so much reason for shame; in woman there is concealed so much superficiality, petty presumption and petty immodesty – one needs only to study her behaviour with children!” – Nietzsche, ‘Beyond Good and evil"
“When a woman turns to scholarship there is usually something wrong with her sexual apparatus” -Nietzche
“One need only look at a woman’s shape to discover that she is not intended for either too much mental or too much physical work.She pays the debt of life not by what she does but by what she suffers—by the pains of child-bearing, care for the child, and by subjection to man, to whom she should be a patient and cheerful companion.”-Arthur Schopenhauer, “On Women.“
“Women are apt to seduce men into making irrational political decisions” -Spinoza
“A man’s face is his autobiography. A woman’s face is her work of fiction.” - Oscar Wild
You can always trade one healthy woman in on another. But start with a sick woman and see where you get. Sick in the head or sick anywhere. But sick anywhere and in a little while they are sick in the head. (…) If you leave a woman, though, you probably ought to shoot her. It would save enough trouble in the end even if they hanged you.— Ernest Hemingway to his editor, Maxwell Perkins, 1943
“All the pursuits of men are the pursuits of women also, but in all of them a woman is inferior to a man.” Plato
“The great question that has never been answered and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my 30 years of research into the feminine soul, is: ‘What does a woman want?’” - Freud
“The female is as it were a deformed male” – Aristotle
“A proper wife should be as obedient as a slave.” - Aristotle
“The woman who refuses to see her sexual organs as mere wood chips, designed to make the man’s life more comfortable, is in danger of becoming a lesbian–an active, phallic woman, an intellectual virago with a fire of her own …. The lesbian body is a particularly pernicious and depraved version of the female body in general; it is susceptible to auto-eroticism, clitoral pleasure and self-actualization.” ― Sigmund Freud
“It is the law of nature that woman should be held under the dominance of man.” - Confusius
There are only a half dozen men of letters (and no women) worth printing.
— TS Eliot to Ezra Pound, 1922 (when Virginia Woolf was writing)
“Men are by nature merely indifferent to one another; but women are by nature enemies” -Schopenhauer
These men’s names shouldn’t even be said out loud in shool and academia, that’s hate.It’s time to banish misogyny from education and to stop worshiping woman-hating dipshits who didn’t contribute shit to the development of society 99,9% of the time.
I’m all for the “everyone is beautiful” message but even more so:
Beauty is not the same as worth.
You don’t have to be beautiful to be important, valuable, worthy of attention and love.
You don’t have to alter your body or wish you had a different one to deserve good things and justify the space you take up on this planet.
i can’t believe that the media propagates misogynistic beauty standards (and women subsequently follow them) so intensely that many men actually don’t even know that women normally grow body hair (and sometimes lots of it that’s just as thick and dark as theirs)
as a feminist how does the concept of beauty not disgust you? it is literally putting value on your body based on its desirability compared to other women’s bodies. how is that not dehumanizing.
Desirability TO MEN no less
there is no less
im always torn between WE ARE ALL INNATELY BEAUTIFUL and NO ONE HAS TO BE BEAUTIFUL AND THE POWER DYNAMICS AND SOCIAL CONSTRUCT OF BEAUTY ARE MISOGYNIST RACIST ETC AND IM WARY OF ANYTHING THAT PROMOTES WOMEN AS BEAUTIFUL EVEN IF ITS FEEL GOOD BODY ACCEPTANCE BEAUTIFUL BC WE DONT HAVE TO BE
the thing i hate the most about “”””beauty”””” routines and products is how they are marketed and viewed as ways of taking care of your body in the same way as getting a massage or some quality rest. nothing is farther from the truth. smoothing how wax on your skin and ripping our hairs is not healthy, obsessing over how thin you look is not healthy, spending time making sure your face is “presentable” by lathering various products on it is! not! healthy! always being self-conscious about how others see you is incredibly damaging. taking care of yourself has nothing to do with conforming to beauty, as tough and impossible as that sounds.
Does anybody else feel like the “Body Positive” movement kinda failed? Like i fell like all it did was attempt to widen the parameters of being considered “fuckable” rather than attack the concept of beauty actually being a necessity
it definitely failed and was inherently flawed in the fact that it relied almost exclusively on defining “alternative beauty” and “inclusive beauty”, instead of attacking the political, economic, and social structures that cause beauty to be an foremost societal value. it was a “movement” fixated only on a symptom and not a cause, as are most 20th century liberal movements. although it did make a slight shift in the way beauty- & aesthetic- based industries market towards audiences (in that they’re willing to pay to at least project a false image of acceptance instead of no image at all), and there are even some fashion designers likely prompted by said shifts using models with like, severe acne or whatever they manage to think of. which is better than the models i saw in the early 2000s. i guess it’s just important to remember that in a culture immersed in and controlled by corporations and their media, progress is always going to consist of small ass steps.
This is a perfect analysis
Here, here. Saying “all women are beautiful” is a poor substitute for saying “all women are valuable”. Widening the parameters of beauty is nice, but doesn’t address why we see beauty as the standard for being human, especially for women. Body positivity ideally says that bodies are worthwhile, not for their aesthetic value, but because they are human beings. They deserve things like good food, health care, and decent places to live. This is way more important than whether or not someone finds you sexually attractive.
it failed and it failed miserably. right after the body positive movement started getting bigger on social media and YouTube, companies saw that it was something they needed to cash in on as more women became aware of the Photoshop being used-they quickly realized that their market -young women- wanted representation,you then had companies like dove all of the sudden caring about ‘real women’ and geared their advertisement to represent this,makeup companies trying to pretend their for empowerment (lmao) ..but what do you still have? women’s insecurity,their face and bodies have become so focused on that the body positive movement failed because at the end of the day their movement was geared to wards ‘expanding the definitions of beauty’ which ultimately doesn’t do much for women,instead of helping people find worth in things other than the exterior,showing women that beauty isn’t the most important currency,that you don’t owe it to anyone else,but women still see being beautiful as the most important thing to feel and be.
meanplastic