Is beauty really only in the eye of the beholder? Susan Sontag begins by noting in "A Women's Beauty" the extreme differences between the description of an attractive man and an attractive woman. Sontag has a point that women are forced to preen and yet are categorized as superficial for doing so.
To consider beauty superficial is to misunderstand the Christian view about beauty. God made a lot of things beautiful even though we tend to think of nature as his masterpiece. Unfortunately most people have the idea switched because everyone is actually created in GOD’S image. Can it get any better than that? There are different aspects of beauty which include inner and outer beauty. We separate the two ideas instead of seeing that they are both part of a whole. We cannot simply shrug off beauty like a set of clothes because we are stuck with what God gave us no matter if we like it or not.
Sontag describes the women’s relationship to beauty as “enslavement.” Women are reduced to having one feature being scrutinized, which is their beauty or lack thereof. Their beauty is controlled in a same way that a slave is reduced to labor. Women’s enslavement is more thorough than a man’s because men are relatively unhindered in their quest for a lifelong partner. The media and other worldly cultures define beauty. So if you do not fit into the perfect equation, then what happens? Do you eventually find a mate? Beauty is objective in the sense that everyone is beautiful so we have to be careful in the way that we wield our power. Christians need to think about beauty more often but also in a different perspective than the dominant culture does.
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