Myth, Legend, or Tale?

First of all, I'd like to tell everybody about an interesting fact. The United States spends more money on pornogrophy than the entire sum of Sub-Saharan Africa's national debt. Stating this fact shows nothing apart from the fact that a lot of men watch or read pornography. However, in this article, titled the Beauty Myth, the authour uses pornogrophy as a way of saying that women are being debased in this pornogrophy.  As the authour states, the media industry making the most money at this point in time is porn. This is interesting, as it seems to be rising as do women's rights. I believe it is simply because of the ease with which it becomes accessible. Five years ago, we did not have as good internet as we do now. This means that, as internet becomes more and more accessible, we are able to access things such as porn more easily. I belive that the author is connecting two un-related facts. She is doing the same thing as newspapers, who will take something such as Ice-cream sales rising, and shark attacks rising as being related. When it is infact an outside force, such as it being summer, that affects the results of the statistic.

She talks about how how women are feeling worse about their appearance than their grandmothers did, despite all the moving forward for the feminist movement in others. I believe that again there is an explanation for this in advancing technology. Women in the 1800's, while having to worry about their experience, didn't have as much of an incentive, as their image, when recorded, could be modified easily, as it was predominantly done using portraits that're painted. Any photographs that were taken were in black and white and therefore the colouration of the women didn't matter. Nowadays, any pictures taken will persist for ages, and are in colour. Anybody can see today's photographs, as social media sites such as Facebook and Flickr! come along. These sites are enabling people to easily comment on each others appearances, and nobody wants to have bad comments on their appearances, leading women to caring about their appearances a lot more.

In one of Alex Millers posts, he talks about how the beauty myth gives women an image to strive for. 'One can go through pictures of supermodels and understand why society and you would consider them attractive. If there wasn't an accepted form of beauty than women would not have an image to pursue.'  I agree with Alex, as without these outside influences, women (and men, who also have influences) would have no image to strive for. This would have many different effects. Number one, it would be difficult to tell who you think is attractive, because what is attractiveness but a benchmark against the accepted appearance. Number two, thousands of companies, and people, would be out of buisness, because they make their money off people buying their clothes to get closer to the beauty myth. Because of this, I believe that the reason the beauty myth was created was exactly for the reason that women would buy items from the purveyors of the myth.