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David Roberts's avatar

I enjoyed this essay very much and found it to be persuasive.

I have two comments.

I thought of the Golden Ratio when you mentioned the attraction of things found in nature.

I thought as well that as I've aged I've found more mature women more beautiful. Perhaps it's because I'm no longer looking for a child bearing mate and so when I see a woman (like my wife of 38 years) who carries her maturity and her beauty in one inseparable piece, I find that more beautiful than a twenty something year old. It's an interesting question, and I wonder if that shift is typical. I also wonder if women shift their ideals of a beautiful man as they grow older.

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Skeptic Fail's avatar

What a fantastic essay. Thank you for sharing these thoughts. Beauty is indeed something that uplifts, and something we need to recapture in our lives in this modern world. People behave differently depending on the beauty in the environment. Beauty calls us to a higher plane of existence.

One thought on beauty definitions being oppressive for women. As a woman, I will say that for me personally, it is not a definition of beauty or a culturally informed beauty ideal that is oppressive. In ancient cultures, if you were a working class woman in the fields, your skin was dry and cracked and darkened, you wouldn't dream of a world where you compete in a beauty contest on Instagram. Beauty (capital B) was a luxury of kings and queens. (I like how you referred to capital B Beautiful and lowercase b beautiful.) We working class women are not barred from any measure of beauty (lowercase b), but our beauty is a pale image of the radiance that is possible---something that leads us to stretch our vision beyond ourselves.

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