The Truth About Beauty
It is the same in the eye of every beholder.
Cosmetics makers have always sold “hope in a jar”—creams and potions that promise youth, beauty, sex appeal, and even love for the women who use them. Over the last few years, the marketers at Dove have added some new-and-improved enticements. They’re now promising self-esteem and cultural transformation. Dove’s “Campaign for Real Beauty,” declares a press release, is “a global effort that is intended to serve as a starting point for societal change and act as a catalyst for widening the definition and discussion of beauty.” Along with its thigh-firming creams, self-tanners, and hair conditioners, Dove is peddling the crowd-pleasing notions that beauty is a media creation, that recognizing plural forms of beauty is the same as declaring every woman beautiful, and that self-esteem means ignoring imperfections.
Dove won widespread acclaim in June 2005 when it rolled out its thigh-firming cream with billboards of attractive but variously sized “real women” frolicking in their underwear. It advertised its hair-care products by showing hundreds of women in identical platinum-blonde wigs—described as “the kind of hair found in magazines”—tossing off those artificial manes and celebrating their real (perfectly styled, colored, and conditioned) hair. It ran print ads that featured atypical models, including a plump brunette and a ninety-five-year-old, and invited readers to choose between pejorative and complimentary adjectives: “Wrinkled or wonderful?” “Oversized or outstanding?” The public and press got the point, and Dove got attention. Oprah covered the story, and so did the Today show. Dove’s campaign, wrote Advertising Age, “undermines the basic proposition of decades of beauty-care advertising by telling women—and young girls—they’re beautiful just the way they are.”
Last fall, Dove extended its image building with a successful bit of viral marketing: a seventy-five-second online video called Evolution. Created by Ogilvy & Mather, the video is a close-up of a seemingly ordinary woman, shot in harsh lighting that calls attention to her uneven skin tone, slightly lopsided eyes, and dull, flat hair. In twenty seconds of time-lapse video, makeup artists and hair stylists turn her into a wide-eyed, big-haired beauty with sculpted cheeks and perfect skin. It’s Extreme Makeover without the surgical gore.
Dove won widespread acclaim in June 2005 when it rolled out its thigh-firming cream with billboards of attractive but variously sized “real women” frolicking in their underwear. It advertised its hair-care products by showing hundreds of women in identical platinum-blonde wigs—described as “the kind of hair found in magazines”—tossing off those artificial manes and celebrating their real (perfectly styled, colored, and conditioned) hair. It ran print ads that featured atypical models, including a plump brunette and a ninety-five-year-old, and invited readers to choose between pejorative and complimentary adjectives: “Wrinkled or wonderful?” “Oversized or outstanding?” The public and press got the point, and Dove got attention. Oprah covered the story, and so did the Today show. Dove’s campaign, wrote Advertising Age, “undermines the basic proposition of decades of beauty-care advertising by telling women—and young girls—they’re beautiful just the way they are.”
Last fall, Dove extended its image building with a successful bit of viral marketing: a seventy-five-second online video called Evolution. Created by Ogilvy & Mather, the video is a close-up of a seemingly ordinary woman, shot in harsh lighting that calls attention to her uneven skin tone, slightly lopsided eyes, and dull, flat hair. In twenty seconds of time-lapse video, makeup artists and hair stylists turn her into a wide-eyed, big-haired beauty with sculpted cheeks and perfect skin. It’s Extreme Makeover without the surgical gore.
Denial
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word denial denotes the act of ‘asserting (of anything) to be untrue or untenable’. That is why denial has been inextricably linked to critical thought throughout the ages. Those who deny the official version of events have always faced hostility, and sometimes physical repression. Today, the word denial has become denuded of its radical and critical associations. Instead it is used as a synonym for refusing to acknowledge the truth – as in Holocaust Denial. In its colloquial and everyday usage, denial is seen as an act driven by base and dishonest motives. This draws on the psychoanalytical usage of the word. In psychoanalysis, denial means the suppression of painful and shameful recollections and experiences. In today’s therapy culture, people who express views that contradict our own are often told that they are ‘in denial’ (18). It has become a way of discrediting their viewpoint, or shutting them up.
Contemporary culture encourages the public disclosure of emotion – and it encourages the recognition and acknowledgement of others’ feelings (19). In these circumstances, denial has come to be seen as a negative emotional response. One account says denial represents the refusal to ‘recognise a disturbing or painful reality’ (20). So being in denial is the polar opposite of acknowledging pain and other uncomfortable facts. In an age that prides itself on public confessionalism, the charge of denial is a powerful expression of moral disapproval. People can be forgiven for doing drugs or drinking too much, so long as they go on a 12-step recovery programme and acknowledge their wrongdoing. Denial, on the other hand, is seen as a symptom of a destructive and dangerous personality; part of a disease that dooms the individual to behave self-destructively. According to one account, alcoholism is ‘the disease of denial’ and ‘denial is the life-blood of addiction’ (21). In popular culture, denial often serves as a marker for a sick mind. One self-help website informs the world that the ‘disease of denial kills more people every year than any other disease’. Apparently ‘it also maims, cripples, disables and incapacitates more people, and those close to them, than anything else’ (22).
When denial is then attached to a painful historical event like the Holocaust, it ceases to be merely self-destructive and apparently becomes a threat to others, too. Denial is not simply the psychological attribute of an individual – it has become a cultural force that threatens people’s wellbeing. In the domain of culture, denial has acquired powerful physical and existential attributes with apparently grave consequences for its victims. The criminalisation of denial is most developed in debates about genocide. According to Gregory Stanton, former president of Genocide Watch, denial represents the final stage in what he calls the ‘eight stages of genocide’, and moreover it is among the ‘surest indicators of further genocidal massacres’ (23). From this perspective, denial is not simply an act of speech; it is part of the physical act of extermination.
Therapy culture encourages people to interpret their emotional distress as being more painful and damaging than physical distress. And from this perspective, the pain caused by denial is portrayed as uniquely grave and hurtful. This is what Elie Wiesel meant when he characterised genocide denial as a ‘double killing’, because he believes it also murders the memory of the crime. This transformation of words and metaphors into weapons of mass destruction has also become part of the green alarmists’ strategy. Psychobabble about individuals in denial who cannot acknowledge the truth is cited as an explanation for why the public is not always in a state of panic about the impending environmental apocalypse. Indian journalist Mihir Shah has described it as the ‘environment denial syndrome’ (24). Others preach that ‘we can intellectually accept the evidence of climate change, but we find it extremely hard to accept our responsibility for a crime of such enormity’. In this case, the deniers are condemned for refusing to accept responsibility for an enormous crime. According to George Marshall, this shows that denial is a fundamentally immoral deed. ‘Indeed, the most powerful evidence of our denial is the failure to even recognise that there is a moral dimension with identifiable perpetrators and victims’, he argues (25).
Tuesday, Feb. 18, 2003
The Real Meaning of Evil
The word evil — brandished so often by George W. Bush and just as regularly scorned by those who oppose him — could use some serious parsing.It is possible that neither side in the debate about evil quite knows what it is talking about. Philosophically and theologically, both are fighting the last war. They are talking about a world that no longer exists, or rather, they fail to see what evil lies in the world that now exists.
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Bush's critics, hearing the word, go ironic. They put evil in quotes and think of Dana Carvey's Church Lady: "Well, isn't that special, Saddam? Who's your little friend? Could it be Satan!!!???" They mock Bush for what they see as a primitive, frightening and atavistic use of a medieval term that should probably be banished from civilized discourse in a multicultural world.
Evil, these critics say, is in any case such an elusive term that it can only cause mischief in human affairs and has a way of evaporating — or turning into something else as time passes. Toward the end of World War I, when labor unions threatened strikes in England, Minister of Munitions Winston Churchill sternly blamed "evil and subterranean influences," meaning, he said, "pacifism, defeatism and Bolshevism." Of course, the real evils of World War I, which slaughtered an entire generation of Europe's young men, were obdurate military stupidity, the effectiveness of newly industrialized war and a monstrous official indifference to the value of human life. (A neglected dimension of evil, by the way, is stupidity.)
But even if it's elusive and even if the term is used brainlessly, evil is still there — a mystery, a black hole into which reason and sunshine vanish but nonetheless ... there. Talk to the children with chopped-off hands in Sierra Leone. It is as fatuous to deny the existence of evil as it is to toss the word around irresponsibly. The children of the Enlightenment sometimes have an inadequate understanding of the possibilities of the Endarkenment. The question is how evil exists, how it works.
Go back 40 years to the controversy that surrounded Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem, a study of the Adolf Eichmann trial, in which she coined the famous phrase "the banality of evil." Arendt did not seem satisfied with the term and afterward wrote in a letter to a friend (the great scholar of Jewish mysticism Gershom Scholem), "It is indeed my opinion now that evil is never 'radical,' that it is only extreme, and that it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension. It can overgrow and lay waste the whole world precisely because it spreads like a fungus on the surface." This was what W.H. Auden meant: "Evil is unspectacular and always human,/And shares our bed and eats at our own table." The normality of evil.
The truth about evil that needs attention now is its shallow, deadly, fungus quality. Nice people — especially in a tiny, multicultural world in which different civilizations inhabit different centuries — are often moved to evil deeds, like blowing up the Other. Don't bother demonizing people as being inherently evil (as Satan is evil). That's not how it works. Opportunistic evil passes like an electric current through the world and through people, or wanders like an infection that takes up residence in individuals or cultures from time to time.
Distance once helped dampen the effects of human wickedness, and weapons once had limited range. But evil has burst into a new dimension. The globalization, democratization and miniaturization of the instruments of destruction (nuclear weapons or their diabolical chemical-biological stepbrothers) mean a quantum leap in the delivery systems of evil. This levels the playing field — and the level field has fungus on it. Every tinhorn with a chemistry set becomes a potential world-historical force with more discretionary destructive power at hand than the great old monsters, from Caligula to Stalin, ever had. In the new dimension, micro-evil (the dark impulse to rape or murder, say) and macro-evil (the urge to genocide) achieve an ominous reunion in any bid for the apocalyptic gesture. That's the real evil that is going around.
Reflect on these three different words. Based on what the authro wrote, write three definitons and understandings of these words AS ACCORDING to the author, but in your own words
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