Love, Beauty, Objectification

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

Over half of the top twenty Instagram accounts belong to celebrities who are famous, in part, for their beauty; countless more belong to models, actors and actresses, fitness instructors, and others who also have achieved seemingly impossible levels of beauty. The film industry, the fashion and style industries (along with their advertising campaigns), other social media platforms—all of these and more daily bombard us with images defining what it is to be beautiful and promoting norms and ideals that most can achieve, if at all, only at considerable cost and often only with chemical or medical interventions. The toxicity of the contemporary cult of beauty for women in particular is well-documented and has lately been a major news item. But there seems to be no way to opt out. Being beautiful, we are told, is key to securing of the most important goods in life—love, success, self-respect, contentment, and so on. We are told in a myriad different ways that our value as a person is intimately connected with our efforts to stay fit, look young, and in other ways satisfy contemporary ideals of beauty. Some have argued that a single, relatively narrow set of beauty norms, shaped in part by racist and patriarchal ideologies, has risen to the level of a global ethical ideal - we have something like a duty to strive for beauty. This class will examine some of the most important issues in feminist philosophy that arise in connection with the cult of beauty described above, with special attention to closely related questions about love and (sexual) objectification. Here is a sampling of some of the topics on which our discussions will focus: We will talk about ways in which beauty ideals function as ethical ideals. We will talk about different theories of the relationship (or lack thereof) between disordered eating and beauty norms, and about how our own thoughts shaped by these norms can actually distort our perceptual experience of our own bodies. We will discuss the nature of sexual objectification and the complicated question of whether objectification should always be regarded as bad, or whether instead people might reasonably allow themselves to be objectified or even promote their own objectification. We will talk about how norms of feminine bodily comportment are shaped both by the prevalence of sexual objectification and the threat of sexual assault. We will discuss the different types of love, and the question whether it makes sense to talk about unjust patterns of love and sexual desire and, if so, whether that means that people might have a right to be (erotically) loved.