lizdexia:

lizdexia:

A friend just shared these two images on Facebook with the caption “Remember the days when beauty was truly beautiful?” And, well, first of all, no you don’t. You were born in 1991. The earliest beauty icons you can “remember” are, like, Kelly Kapowski and DJ Tanner. But also, give me a fucking break.

Beauty standards have always existed. Back in Ye Olde Days, when most people were starving in the streets (or starving in the fields, or starving in the wherever), it was cool to be fat. This is pretty much common knowledge. Fat was a status symbol. It signified that you had a lot to eat. That’s why statues and paintings of larger ladies were so common in this time — the subjects of those paintings were most likely super wealthy. THIS IS NOT NEW INFORMATION. Blah blah blah fast forward a while, and say hello to the Industrial Revolution! Aside from being responsible for pollution and a whole lot of shitty child labor standards, it also ushered in the new concept of standard sizing — before clothing was mass-produced, you (or your wife or your mom or your tailor) made it by hand for you. It had to last a long time, because folks were not exactly rolling in ca$h back then, and it’s not like you could just pop into J. Crew or Uniqlo if you got a big gaping hole in your only work smock, so clothing was made to a higher standard and tailored exactly to fit your body. But with the advent of the textile industry, people started buying clothes made by total strangers, so a standard sizing chart had to be created. Yaaay, Industrial Revolution! Your #1 supplier of fucked-up beauty standards and orphans working 18-hour workdays since the 1750s!

Stuff kind of pogoed around for a while after that. Newspapers and mass media as a whole were just becoming a thing, and then there was this war that people had to deal with or something? Anyway, then the 20th century hit, and it hit hard. Gibson Girls were the first major development, around the late 1800s and spanning into the early 1900s. The Gibson Girl “was tall and slender, yet with ample bosom, hips and bottom. She had an exaggerated S-curve torso shape achieved by wearing a swan-bill corset. Images of her epitomized the late 19th- and early 20th-century Western preoccupation with youthful features and ephemeral beauty.” Pretty much the first widespread American ladies’ beauty standard. When flappers became a thing in the ’20s, it became trendy to be very thin and flat-chested, as to best wear the fashions of the time. Then movies happened, and Americans pretty much shit their pants. Movie stars were a thing! And they were beautiful things! And frequently very slender things, albeit with sweet boobs and a moderately heart-shaped ass! Movies were immediately huge, especially during WWII, because they were cheap and there wasn’t a lot else that you could do for fun. This was the first time you could actually put people on screens and have other people stare at them and go, “Yes. This is what I want to look like.” (Or, “Yes. This is what I want my wife to look like.”) Hollywood and ADVERTISERS (the main culprits here, because one could argue that Hollywood and the film/TV industries only exist by the grace of advertisers) has pretty much dictated how women “should” look ever since — we’ve gone through phases, obviously, but it’s not as if American women as a whole have been particularly in control of our beauty standards ever since the advent of moving pictures.

Which brings me back to the ads above! Come on. You can’t seriously argue that ad men telling you not to be skinny is any better than ad men telling you not to be fat. (Which, by the way, they were doing back then, too. Just sayin’.) It’s the other side of the same coin. And, for that matter, standards of beauty were even stricter back then, because not only did you have to be slender and conventionally pretty to fit that standard, you also had to be white. Post all the old-school “nobody wants a skinny girl!” ads you want, but you have to admit, none of those women are anything but lily-white.

I’m not going to try to argue that today’s body image standards aren’t totally fucked-up, because, well, Toddlers & Tiaras exists. So does Cosmopolitan. So does that lady in England who gave her teenage daughter Botox and even Anderson Cooper was like, “I can’t even look at you. Leave. Get out.” But I definitely can argue that things weren’t significantly better back during the Cold War, or even before. And honestly, we don’t know how people will see us in the future — Earth-people in like, 2200 will probably look back at our Maxim Hot 100s and what not and see Christina Hendricks and be like, “This was the ultimate standard of beauty in the 2000s! All woman had to look like this!” Or they might do that with Beyonce! (Let’s be real, though. It’ll probably be Lady Gaga or Ke$ha, because I’m convinced that in the future, everyone will dress like them.) Point is, it’s full of tricky gray areas. And also, that girl on my Facebook was a dumbass.

Hey, I wrote this thing last night and if you haven’t read it yet, I think you should! I’m pretty proud of it! (Even though it kind of falls apart near the end. Gimme a break. It was like 1am.)

(Source: mishasteaparty)

likelucyinthesky:

Grow the fuck up, Carrie.

(Source: thingsilearnedfromsatc)