The articles under analysis describe pros and cons of plastic surgery and its perception by women. The issue of plastic surgery is closely connected with the question of ideal beauty as one of the most controversial one for philosophers and social critics. The articles discuss the principles applied to ideal beauty and depict the urge to classify all the world’s many things as an impulse which has received encouragement from science. The paper includes historical examples of women ideal beauty and their role in society. A special attention is given to the beauty of bodies of young women who want to improve their appearance.
Nauert connects the desire to change one’s body with self-esteem and; pw worth. The authors state that beautiful forms are mainly aesthetic (meant to induce innocently pleasurable sensations, even if on occasion they threatened to appeal to amoral tastes), and they must be explicitly moral in order to further principles of love and virtue. Ideal beauty image requires that each generation collaboratively create and declare its own social and aesthetic standards, codes, and norms for ideal truth and beauty.
The ideal is a matter of individual preference, and individual since the experience of truth and beauty can neither be created nor discovered but can only — simply, amazingly –happen. The main problem identified by the research is that: “There may be patients who will never be satisfied with their bodies no matter how much surgery they receive or feel that their life will completely change after plastic surgery” (Nauert 2007).
The women and men’s desires for being judged fashionable could conflict with their interests in developing other characteristics they valued, such as the characteristic of individuality; however, the girls remained painfully aware of the problems associated with low performance with respect to fashion. That is, they explained how an assignation as not fashionable carried a heavy social cost by relegating a girl to an inferior social position (Bily, 2001).
When judged as not fashionable any girl could expect to be considered as generally undesirable. Women are identified by the ideals they represent. Even the staunchest supporters of stability had to admit that there was precious little about late-nineteenth-century life that satisfied their taste. It was not enough for them to repeat the tiresome fact that permanence was what they desired, although it was not what they had. The visual representations of virtuous order which the American advocates of ideal values commissioned for the walls, corridors, and rotundas of churches, libraries, and courthouses existed in a tarnished world. They had to justify representations of serene forms in the midst of the raucous “rotary system” of modern times (Dittman, 2005).
The authors conclude that some people tried to go home again into the timeless realms where absolute principles supposedly once existed in happy contiguity with great men and women. most of those committed to idealism tried to bring its tenets to bear directly upon the particular scene in which they were fated to live. In many cases, plastic surgery cannot fulfill desires of patients and change their life for better. The ideal beauty is a complex notion which involves ideals of body and soul. The urge to classify all the world’s many things is an impulse which has received encouragement from science.
The social sciences with their avidity for categorizing behavioral patterns were already elbowing their way forward with statistics, charts, and lists of norms and averages. Exclusion remains in force wherever desire for “the better thing” (defined according to social conventions of virtue) controls the content of art. In contrast, there is no room for disgust per se with objects included within patterns laid across art surfaces. Finally design exacts correctness; it excludes forms that do not meet its stern criteria for aesthetic beauty.
Reference
Bily, L. (2001). Breast Reconstruction: One Woman’s Choice. JAMA. Web.
Dittman, M. (2005). Plastic surgery: Beauty or beast?Monitor on Psychology. Web.
Nauert, R. (2007). “Plastic Surgery Help self esteem”. Web.