The Mystery of Aesthetic Body

Hannah Duffy ’28

Contributing Writer

Magazines are covered in them: images of the new “it” girl who specializes in the new trendy body type. After a lifetime of seeing these trends changing faster than one can blink, I’ve realized that somewhere along the way, we’ve become confused about the real purpose of our bodies — to help us survive rather than be modeling devices to scrutinize. In reality, we shouldn’t ogle at ourselves, treating ourselves like dress up dolls. Instead, I believe we should view our bodies as the containers, altering in size and shape, that keep us breathing.

Bodies have been treated as aesthetics since the beginning of time, like when Botticelli painted Venus, and when Marilyn Monroe sang a sultry “Happy Birthday” in a bullet bra. We’re an appreciative species. We enjoy beauty and colors that make us ooh and aah — we are simple, mindful creatures. We exist in two planes. One: the spiritual world, full of logic and reason and infinite truthful emotion. And the second: a bounded, finite container which is leered upon by the rest of the vast world. 

Somehow, somewhere between Neanderthals and Kate Moss, we confused “surviving” with “stunning” — instead of working with our bodies, depending on them for heat and blood, we’ve stumbled upon the idea of working for our bodies, narrowingly scrutinizing them to fit a specific desire. Our bodies become aesthetics, images to be projected on billboards, rather than natural boxes that hold the more interesting, unique sociological substances. We’ve witnessed the quickening pace of evolution, seeing how apes lengthened out from their squat torsos, guts growing to accept meat, and yet today, in the twenty-first century, we find it hard to accept that our bodies, along with the rest of our foolish society, might still be evolving.  

The 1920s saw a historic rise of feminism, yet couldn’t bear to bite the bullet on deconstructing a staggering, suffocating trend of enforced disordered eating in the name of wearing a flapper dress. We see this theme of “boyish,” thin frames returning with the nineties, migrating heavily into mainstream culture under the term “heroin chic.” Then, there were the fifties: Elizabeth Taylor, dwarfish waists and weight gain supplements taken with a shot of whiskey at night. The timeline again repeats itself with the 2010’s: Kim Kardashian, robust lips and maintaining a “healthy skinny” look. So we can ask ourselves — what about looking in the mirror gives us such pleasure or distaste? Why does a specific jutting bone, or a buxom breast, give us such a great sense of pride? 

Scholars, along with scientists, believe our body aesthetics have grown from a place of survival. Youthfulness, such as plush cheeks and a wrinkleless forehead, scream ‘biological dream’ — implying that one is a perfectly suitable match for mating. Our inner consciousness searches for people who will help us continue a healthy, striking lineage into the future. This begs the question: Why do humans often stray from this “perfect mate” ideology, and begin obsessing over beauty aesthetics that completely defy this? Perhaps it comes from this need for defiance, a need to completely break the rules and undermine all that society knows and holds beloved. “Heroin chic” is an aesthetic that doesn’t exactly fit into the category of having “child-bearing hips,” yet the nineties adored this because the aesthetic was a perverse kind of counter-culture, fighting against norms while perpetuating dangerous values. And when we become sick of what we see, we can always simply revert to another aesthetic.

It’s my belief that these aesthetics are exactly what we’ve become rooted in as a society, and exactly what we must break out of in order to acknowledge our differences as positives. Carving a path for this future involves breaking down these body stigmas. Our bodies are what keep us alive; plain and simple. And despite any unique outward appearance, we all have the same insides— blood and muscle and bone, all working tirelessly for us to survive another grueling day. The least we can do to give our bodies a break is to relieve a bit of pressure on ourselves for not fitting an aesthetic. We earned that break.