The legacy we have about beauty is the idea that it’s a canon to aspire to. This is why phrases like “Fat is beautiful” can make people angry, because they think automatically means “aspire to be fat”. But beauty is not a “model” to arrive at.
This idea was born in the modern era due to the economic interests that make beauty something to be sought through the use of products or services. But beauty is not to be sought. Beauty exists and can have the most different shapes and sizes. And that’s why EVEN fat can be beautiful, as can a body of non-Caucasian ethnicity, a trans body, a disabled body.
The problem of “not recognizing it” arises from the fact that we can’t do it: we are exposed to images, especially “mainstream” ones, that are always of certain types of bodies and so our eye has been educated to that . It’s important that the world becomes more inclusive in the bodies representation so that we can truly give dignity to the concept of beauty by stripping it of this aura of simulacrum to aim for.
Beauty as a personal experience, not as a model to arrive at
In this type of communication when we try to be more inclusive, however, we must not fall into the error of finding those who embody these “new” standards by promoting the idea of other “aesthetic models”, people that always make feeling us inadequate.
Seeking guidance in models in this way is counterproductive. Not because it’s not important to have references, but because the reference should not be based on the person, but on what that person conveys in terms of messages, ideas and emotions. These are people, their body will change, they can make mistakes about their body, but above all they must be free to live their life, to experiment on their body and not to have all the answers. They are not perfect beings because no one is and this is the mistake of this type of communication.
Instead, we need to seek the truth and variety of information and experiences by listening to as many references as possible and understanding how the same thing we are experiencing can have different interpretations and perspectives. This could help us understand how to apply them in a personal way on our body, which being unique can never really be similar to someone else’s just because “it’s a model”.
