The Heterosexual Feminine Beauty: Construction, Resistance, and Identity

The concept of feminine beauty is dynamic and multi-dimensional. The United States’ mainstream, however, has created an ideal. Currently, long straight hair, petite yet well endowed with curves, among other traits, define the idealized relatively fictitious heterosexual feminine image. Bodies are malleable. Throughout this paper, malleability will be defined as the ability to sculpt the human body like an object. The question is: who controls the sculptor? Often the media, societal pressures, and capitalist incentives heavily influence, if not dictate heterosexual feminine beauty, but there are exceptions. Since the body can be crafted through cosmetics, surgery, and exercise, the pursuit of a better or perfect body is seemingly possible. In reality, achieving the perfect body is a stretch because the target ideal continues to evolve become less humanly possible. These conforming pressures separate body from identity. They impose a beauty image that limits one’s agency and self-worth, but at the same time present an opportunity for redefining …show more content…
Feminist philosopher Susan Bordo coined the term “Cultural Plastic” to discuss the endless push driven by cultural discourse to transform one’s body. Bordo notes that the body is no longer tied to history or “social location.” Women are literally remaking themselves into ‘inhuman,’ essentially ‘plastic’ illustrations of humans. One’s identity is torn from their body. It is unique to contrast the remodeling of the female body with the biology and gender studies professor Anne Fausto-Sterling argument that “our bodies physically imbibe culture.” Culture and social practices affect our skeletons. For instance, the bones of Neolithic peoples clearly show “a gendered division of labor, culture, and biology.” Women ground grain on all fours, a repetitive stress that left skeletal