Mademoiselle Helen; Intercultural Variation on the Concept of Beauty

If you ask any man a simple question you will get a pretty straight forward answer, “do you like beautiful women?,” you would be hard pressed to find someone out right rejecting beauty (In the case of homosexual men “do you like beautiful men”) even the ones who profess an attraction to untraditional beauty still are attached to the concept. The greatest laugh we can have at this joke is “there are no universal standards of physical beauty.”1 Everyone has a different picture in their head when they read Helen of Troy. There must be something to this universal acceptance of a appreciation for the term beauty, but a total disagreement on what it means.

In America our definition is one of the most outrageous. The market picture is a girl who looks like the victim of a famine, one that you feel could collapse from starvation any moment, than watching a show on the television about models it will cut to a commercial offering you buy one get one free “Big Macs”, and super sized French fries, and the next commercial is for a weight loss drug. Within a thirty minuet slot you will be barraged with this essential debate. Our culture is sick with contradiction, and confusion.

We are a country as my grandfather once said “You can sit down in New York to read, and on the same street corner that you see prostitutes, thugs, and beggars; you see Mercedes Bends driving by, and you wonder how they can be the same people.” 40 million people are starving today; “20 million Americans are hungry and poorly nourished largely because they lack sufficient money2”, but 20 million people are hungry because they are on the newest fad diet as well. How can these two worlds coexist in the same place?

Each class is personified by different ideals of the good life. What one group wants another discards. I work for a cooperate coffee company (Starbucks) I wonder, the amount of milk they throw away in a day, if they were not so wasteful how many people could live just a little better. There is something seriously wrong with this country. We are masters of excess, but only to some. The egalitarian experiment failed. Why is this? I think it failed because people are essentially different.

Standards of beauty can not be the same neither can the means of attaining them. Helen is different in every individual’s interpretation. (I use the term Helen to be my word concept for ideal woman, knowing full well the paradox I create choosing one cultures concept of beauty, and I use this as further evidence for my point that my choice of Helen proves my bias, and thus also proves intercultural variation.) When we each sit down to think of whom our Helen would be we see a much different person. I think my Helen would be Irish, a fiery woman full of pride. I know Helen wasn’t Irish, but to think of sending the largest naval fleet of my times after a woman I think she would have to be Irish.

What can one say to the world, when everyone can say they love beauty, but one man’s beauty is Helen, when the next man dreams of a Hassiba Ben Bouali (the Algerian resistance fighter)? I think that the problem of the world is far deeper than objectifying women into categories of beauty. Beauty categories are a symptom of modernity. We need to find the disease that pollutes the less extreme beliefs on beauty. I can honestly say I would prefer my culture not to be one of such extremes where people feel there are only two choices; the anorexic model, or the obese other. I think this is just another call for an end to social categorization and a call for unity, but not conformity.