AndrewFowler

This post discusses beauty as an ethical ideal as defined by Heather Widdows in her book Perfect Me: Beauty As An Ethical Ideal, particularly focusing on the actions required to meet that ideal, and what happens when you are prevented from doing them. Before going into my argument, I want to clarify that this post does not wish to criticise people with disabilities or chronic illnesses who engage in beautifying behaviours; none of us are really free from beauty as an ethical ideal, including the author, so it would be wrong to condemn anyone who takes part in it. Part of the complexity of beauty is that these practices can genuinely be tools for bonding, self-expression and empowerment; to totally denounce them would be nonsensical. The aim instead is to consider how some of these behaviours support the concept of beauty as an ethical ideal.  Beauty as an ethical ideal involves actions � meaningful pursuits towards a goal. These can include: �maintenance� or routine behaviours to e...

[This piece was originally published in Healthy  magazine] We�re encouraged to think of �looking good� as a moral imperative - if you don�t have a great body then there�s a sense that you must have let yourself go ( Widdows, 2018) . While appearance is key to how we present ourselves to the world, most of us are unnecessarily self critical and our relationships with our bodies suffer as a result. There are a number of issues at play here, primarily our urge to measure ourselves against others (social comparison theory). While some measures such as academic achievements are objective � qualifications prove what you can do � comparing appearance is subjective, and difficult to get into proportion. This works in tandem with self-discrepancy theory, which suggests we have three views of the self: the actual, the ideal � what we aspire to look like - and the ought � what we think we ought to look like. Evidence shows that our view of the �actual� self is distorted by the other two views...

Selfies have often been associated with the ongoing influence of beauty ideals as an aspirational imperative ( MacCallum and Widdows, 2016 ) but simultaneously have been criticised as forms of narcissism ( Burns 2015 , Walker Rettberg, 2014 ).   In fact, selfies are a diverse form of self-representation that includes images which their creators characterise as �ugly�. This is perhaps surprising given that �ugly� carries strongly negative connotations. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the adjective as: Offensive or repulsive to the eye; unpleasing in appearance; of disagreeable or unsightly aspect A word sketch of �ugly� in the British National Corpus confirms that the evaluative negativity of the adjective in its contemporary use, showing that it is used typically to modify unpleasant creatures ( brute, ogre, beast, troll, monster ) or an insult ( motherfucker, bastard, bitch ).   Why then would a person characterise their selfie with the modifier �ugly�? In the mainstre...

�The beauty ideal is not an evil taskmaster, but it is an ethical ideal and powerful and only when we recognise it can we begin to address it. What we need is beauty without the beast� Friday 1 st June 2018 saw the official launch of Professor Widdows' new book � Perfect Me: Beauty as an Ethical Idea l�, published by Princeton University Press, at the University of Birmingham.   Perfect Me is the culmination of nearly ten years of research in the philosophy of body and beauty for Professor Widdows. The book explores the changing and ethical nature of the beauty ideal, where the pressure to achieve the �perfect� body has become increasingly more dominant, more demanding, and more global than ever before. Guest speakers for the launch included Dr Clare Chambers (University of Cambridge), and Professor Alison Jagger (University of Colorado at Boulder and University of Birmingham) who each summarised the arguments in Perfect Me before highlighting its most significant aspects. ...

And would you call that beautiful which wants and does not possess beauty? 1 S ummer is in full bloom. Our screens are filled with Love Island   and the World Cup. Tanned, toned and athletic bodies are ubiquitous, and as we aspire to achieve these ideals, magazine stands are full of titles that promise to help us achieve beach body fitness (e.g. Men's Health )  and beauty, through a variety of exercise or diet plans .  Emerging from the toxicity of popular media, are movements such as ' I weigh ',   which has shunned conventional societal beauty demands and aims to move away from physical appearance as being a valuable determinant of self-worth. Many �body positive� movements, fitness plans and media sites nonetheless still have at their core a particular physical ideal to which to aspire.  Fitspo  and �Strong is the new skinny� (Holland & Tiggemann, 2016)  strongly associate a specific narrowly defined physical ideal with good health, or fit...

Almost all young adults aged 16 to 24 years in the UK (98%) access the internet on their mobile phones or smartphones (Office of National Statistics (ONS), 2018), and 91% of 16-24 year olds in the UK used social media in 2016 (ONS, 2017). When using social spaces such as Facebook and Instagram, women (and men) choose how to represent their bodies to others in the online world, and arguably the kinds of images they present tell us something about how they view their bodies.   Selfies: Problematic or empowering? Many scholars have focused on the role of selfies in how we present ourselves online (e.g. Las�n, 2015; Miguel, 2016), including the choices we make about which aspects of our bodies to reveal, and ways in which we might self-censor our bodies in selfies to protect against any potential backlash. Views of different researchers have been mixed in relation to impact of selfie posting on women�s body image; on the one hand, it has been argued that posting selfies encourages bod...

F rom the 1920�s onwards, tanning was seen as aspirational.   It spoke of foreign holidays and the lifestyle of the rich and famous. It was a matter of �looking good� and �looking well�.  The growth of the domestic tanning industry followed and tanning salons became common in the high street and in the health club.  However, over time concerns began to arise due to the health risks of sunbeds and in particular the link with skin cancer. In 2006, the World Health Organization�s (WHO) International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) published the first report by experts on sunbed use and its association with skin cancer or melanoma.   This meta-analysis of 19 studies of associations between the use of sunbeds and the risk of melanoma showed an increase of 15% in the risk of melanoma  amongst those who had used a sunbed compared to those who had not.   Subsequently the IARC added UV-emitting tanning devices to its list of group 1 carcinogens (�car...