Tag: media

My Truth about Beauty

Your beauty takes nothing away from mine! There is space in the world for each of us to be beautiful. Our uniqueness, rarity and individuality makes each of us gorgeous. When we try to subscribe to the media’s notions of beauty is when it all get’s ugly. I love the Dove commercials. Especially this one:

It is sad to see people in competitions about beauty. These range from the school yard quasi popularity contests to the pageants and contests held all over the world to determine beauty. We all know these kinds of things are fleeting, in the eye of the beholder and irrelevant to the real things in life. Most of us are aware of the forces that come into play when these contests occur. Look at the movies about them:

“Little Miss Sunshine”, “Beautiful”, ,“Miss Congeniality” ,“Drop Dead Gorgeous” are films giving some insight into the ugliness of the beauty competition. It’s all wrong!

I remember when my daughter was a baby, one of my most embarrassing memories was putting her in a baby photography competition. I knew she would win because she was divine. She was absolutely gorgeous. My best friend Jane, whom I dragged along with me, begged me not to do it. She sanely pleaded that it was a stupid idea. I couldn’t see the harm. I’m not sure what it was I wanted to prove to the world (and a small world it was). Strangely my daughter did not win. I was shocked, as was every other parent in the room whose child didn’t win. We all know our children are amazing and beautiful and the truth is they are. I didn’t make that same mistake with my second child.

I have been showing my students the evolution clip this week and discussing with all classes the impact of what we see in the media about our gender, beauty and sexuality. It’s been interesting and has been inspired from the great talk I heard on Monday by Anthea Paul. I have purchased ‘girlosophy’ and have loved what I have read so far. It is visually stunning.

Epic 2014

If you are interested in the future of media and or the history of the Internet, this little 8 minute clip Epic 2014, is a very interesting and thought provoking watch. I have always loved the ‘future history’genre although I find it difficult to find material.

I remember in the late 80’s I had this book called ‘The Third Millennium:A History of the World:AD 2000-3000’ by Brian Stableford and David Langford. I loved it and read it cover to cover. It inspired many ideas for me and some of the future I eagerly awaited, just as I did for the Internet to get how I knew it would. I remember being on Compuserve which was all American almost and I felt like a lone Aussie, plodding along looking for the diversity of a global community. Not that I didn’t like learning about America and americans, but I knew one day it would be like it is now.

This little clip however has a much smaller scale than the Millennium of the book, but still food for thought and interesting.