Women and Beauty Related to Capitalism

19 mentally, and psychologically, woman is more complex than man. These distinct characteristics affect them in the way they think and act. In selecting spouse, man and woman put many qualities in their order of importance. According to Fisher 1999:233 love or mutual attraction come firstly of the rank for both sexes. The next are dependable character, emotional stability and maturing and a pleasing disposition. However, they have different tastes and consideration whether someone is attractive or not. Again she argued, men are three times more likely than women to seek a good-looking partner. Therefore, men are preferable to choose a woman who is attractive physically. Buss Fisher, 1999:234 maintained that these males prefer for youth and beauty is inherited. Whilst for women, physical appearance is not the most important in looking for a spouse. Instead of that, both men and women also wanted a spouse who was kind, healthy, smart, educated, sociable, and interested in home and family.

2.3.2 Women and Beauty Related to Capitalism

As cited from The First Sex 1999:vx, Simone de Beauvoir argued that a woman is solely the product of economic and social forces. Women are placed like things that can be possessed as symbol of powerful capability. Like the upper class in days of yore that had authority and wealth could possess more than one woman as wives to prove their power. In this term, women were in the weak position. They could not choose their own way of life because of the limitation of culture at that time. Therefore, they had been forced to follow all the custom of manners. 20 Years have changed, but the social pressure still fetter women till now on, even though it is not always in the similar way as in the previous age. The discriminations and unpleasant treatment to the women as seen in the Shallow Hal movie are the example of the men’s narrow-mindedness in seeing beauty. they define beauty and perfectness in women based on their ideal body like images which capitalism attempt to carry on in the media exposure, slim, good skin, and beautiful. Wolf 1991, Bauman 1992, Giddens 1991, and Shilling 1993 have argued that within a cultural framework of late capitalism, in a consumer culture, people are obsessed with appearance. The status of body has been transformed from a fixated natural given to a malleable cultural product. As the result of that, women who feel imperfect physically obsession to try hard to lose some pounds of their weight, although they have to face eating disorder for getting ideal body as they dream of. As cited by Maasik and Salomon 2006:488, Naomi Wolf in The Beauty of Myth argued that industries and glamorous fashion photography that promotes female beauty. But these pleasures are provided only for the male spectator. Whilst the women are the object, not the subjects of the gaze and their bodies are eroticized and often fragmented. Therefore, men will be more fixated on women outside appearance rather than personality. These are some examples of capitalism effects which have reduced the meaning of true beauty.

2.3.3 Men’s Narrow-mindedness