This post is intended as a lament of sorts, a lament for something in the culture that is dying and may never been seen again.
Pretty, pretty is dying.
People will define pretty differently. For the purposes of this piece, I define pretty as a mutually enriching balanced combination of beauty and projected innocence.
Once upon a time, women wanted to project an innocence. I am not idealizing another age and I have no illusions about the virtues of our grandparents, concupiscence being what it is. But some things were different in the back then. First and foremost, many beautiful women, whatever the state of their souls, still wished to project a public innocence and virtue.''
The writer contrast prettiness with 'hotness', seeing the two as different.
Read the whole article at the link.
I agree with the point of the article, and I've noticed for some time the difference between female attractiveness or the feminine 'persona' as seen today and as seen in almost any past era.
Some of this ties in with the loss of feminine modesty in recent decades, and of the loss of modesty generally in our culture.
The feminist hand is to be seen in all of this, of course; the feminists of 40 or so years ago insisted that they wanted to 'liberate' women from the need to 'conform to external standards of beauty' and especially to 'liberate' women from the need to appear attractive at all. 'Beauty' was an artificial standard, and it was innately 'sexist' as well as 'racist', or so they said, as it was devised by the White sexist male, and it was oppressive to women. So they said.
In the decades since feminism began to dominate our public discourse, women have become more masculinized in some ways (women in the co-ed military, women taking part in many traditionally masculine professions and pastimes, like firefighting and bodybuilding) and women affecting grotesque 'styles' involving over-provocative clothes, tattooing and body-piercing. Hence we have the likes of Janeane Garofalo and other such women who seem to embody a kind of anti-beauty sentiment.
But as the writer of the NCR piece says, the point is not just about changing external appearance, but about the loss of the quality of innocence, and I would add, wholesomeness. Nowadays, wholesomeness is jeered at as being 'boring', bland, hypocritical, and as innately 'sexist' because it involves the sexual double standard: women used to be expected to be wholesome (clean-living, demure, ladylike) whereas men could get away with bolder behavior.
The charge of hypocrisy is one of the favorites of feminists, and of leftists in general. They seem to relish calling normal people 'hypocrites' because it is an article of faith with them that nobody is really decent and wholesome; people are by nature sluts and sleazes, and anyone who does not appear to be so is just hiding it, and pretending to be innocent or wholesome. By this convoluted rationalization, the ''liberals'' justify their own corruption and lack of standards in personal behavior.
The fact that standards of beauty have taken a sharp turn away from innocence and prettiness toward a kind of wantonness and sluttiness is evident when we look at pictures from the past compared to today's female celebrities and even average women on the street. We can see it in advertising; although granted, the world of commercials is a bizarre caricature of real life; watch how women who are deemed 'hot' are shown with sullen or outright snarling faces, rather than with sweet smiles as yesterday's beauties often posed. Today's 'sex symbols' look angry, hostile, and defiant. They look hardened and corrupted.
Today's women, and not just celebrities, are more likely to have had some kind of cosmetic surgery like breast augmentation (even teenaged girls are having this done at a fairly early age in some cases) or facial plastic surgery -- pumped-up lips, cheekbone augmentation, tattooed-on eye makeup. Today's celebrity females have almost all had some kind of procedure done to alter their faces, and generally this gives them a grotesque appearance, if they but knew it. The women generally thought to be beauties in the past were far more likely to look natural, and even though they wore some make-up, were pretty much as God made them, no artificial add-ons or implantations.
Mary Pickford, (above) once known as 'America's sweetheart', was noted for her sweet, demure persona. Now, that may have been just an image, and not her real self, but that image influenced many young girls to emulate her sweet qualities. Nowadays, look at the celebrities young girls look up to and imitate. The difference is stark.
But the crucial fact is that the beauties of the past often had a softness, a sweetness, and a feminine demeanor that is mostly absent today.
Modesty and sweetness are far rarer today than they were even a couple of decades ago.
Some of the dissenting commenters on the article make the criticism that the writer wants girls to adopt a false innocence, and seem to assume that the women of earlier times were feigning their own innocence. And yes, we are all born sinners, and yes, corruption and vice have always been with us. But the difference is that in earlier times, vice was not given the seal of approval that society gives it today. It was actually looked down on; it was not given pride of place. Neither was it whitewashed, or excused on the basis of 'dysfunctional families' or other such rationalizations. It was stigmatized. It used to be thought of as 'trashy'. It was not necessarily poverty that made people 'trashy', but lack of standards and morals; lack of shame. Now, goodness is stigmatized and sneered at. It's boring. It's old-fashioned. It's repressive. And so on, and on.
When we come right down to it, though, innocence or wholesomeness or sweetness can be feigned, but in order to produce the real beauty as described in 1 Peter 3 -- it's vital to know that the such beauty comes from the inner person.
So the real issue here is how to return to the older standard of feminine character and conduct; if we pay heed to that, then the real 'prettiness' will take its place again as something to be aspired to, rather than 'hotness' with its emphasis on raw sexual attraction.
O, how much more doth beauty beauteous seem
By that sweet ornament which truth doth give.
- William Shakespeare
By that sweet ornament which truth doth give.
- William Shakespeare
