American+Beauty

Beauty Through American Eyes  What do Americans think is pretty?    http://ws2m.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/1.jpg 



http://www.impawards.com/tv/posters/americas_next_top_model.jpg



"Here was an ugly girl asking for beauty. A little black girl who wanted to rise out of the pit of her blackness and see the world with blue eyes" -The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison, p. 174

 Are their OTHER KINDS of beauty than these? code I have gone out, a possessed witch, haunting the black air, braver at night; dreaming evil, I have done my hitch over the plain houses, light by light: lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind. A woman like that is not a woman, quite. I have been her kind.

I have found the warm caves in the woods, filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves, closets, silks, innumerable goods; fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves: whining, rearranging the disaligned. A woman like that is misunderstood. I have been her kind.

I have ridden in your cart, driver, waved my nude arms at villages going by, learning the last bright routes, survivor where your flames still bite my thigh and my ribs crack where your wheels wind. A woman like that is not ashamed to die. I have been her kind. code -Anne Sexton

 “The most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched, they must be felt with the heart"  -Helen Keller  Are we willing to break the stereotype or will we continue to allow ourselvs to only accept one type of beauty? media type="youtube" key="321Kb8pBu5s" height="344" width="425"

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"It's beauty that captures your attention; it is personality that captures your heart."

"Physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion." -The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison, p. 122 <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS', cursive; font-size: 140%; color: rgb(128, 0, 128);"> There is hope of future generations that the media will learn to recognize all different kinds of beauty. <span style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family: David; font-size: 11px; line-height: 17px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px;"> <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS', cursive; font-size: 11px; color: rgb(0, 0, 255);">My daughter, at eleven (almost twelve), is like a garden. Oh, darling! Born in that sweet birthday suit and having owned it and known it for so long, now you must watch high noon enter - noon, that ghost hour. Oh, funny little girl – this one under a blueberry sky, this one! How can I say that I've known just what you know and just where you are? It's not a strange place, this odd home where your face sits in my hand so full of distance, so full of its immediate fever. The summer has seized you, as when, last month in Amalfi, I saw lemons as large as your desk-side globe - that miniature map of the world - and I could mention, too, the market stalls of mushrooms and garlic buds all engorged. Or I think even of the orchard next door, where the berries are done and the apples are beginning to swell. And once, with our first backyard, I remember I planted an acre of yellow beans we couldn't eat. <span style="font-size: 11px; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS', cursive; color: rgb(128, 0, 128);">Oh, little girl, my stringbean, how do you grow? You grow this way. You are too many to eat. <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS', cursive; font-size: 11px; color: rgb(0, 0, 255);">I hear as in a dream the conversation of the old wives speaking of womanhood. I remember that I heard nothing myself. I was alone. I waited like a target. Let high noon enter – the hour of the ghosts. Once the Romans believed that noon was the ghost hour, and I can believe it, too, under that startling sun, and someday they will come to you, someday, men bare to the waist, young Romans at noon where they belong, with ladders and hammers while no one sleeps. But before they enter I will have said, Your bones are lovely, and before their strange hands there was always this hand that formed. Oh, darling, let your body in, let it tie you in, in comfort. What I want to say, Linda, is that women are born twice. If I could have watched you grow as a magical mother might, if I could have seen through my magical transparent belly, there would have been such a ripening within: your embryo, the seed taking on its own, life clapping the bedpost, bones from the pond, thumbs and two mysterious eyes, the awfully human head, the heart jumping like a puppy, the important lungs, the becoming - while it becomes! as it does now, a world of its own, a delicate place. I say hello to such shakes and knockings and high jinks, such music, such sprouts, such dancing-mad-bears of music, such necessary sugar, such goings-on! <span style="font-size: 11px; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS', cursive; color: rgb(128, 0, 128);">Oh, little girl, my stringbean, how do you grow? You grow this way. You are too many to eat. <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS', cursive; font-size: 11px; color: rgb(0, 0, 255);">What I want to say, Linda, is that there is nothing in your body that lies. All that is new is telling the truth. I'm here, that somebody else, an old tree in the background. Darling, stand still at your door, sure of yourself, a white stone, a good stone - as exceptional as laughter you will strike fire, <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS', cursive; color: rgb(0, 0, 255);">that new thing! -Anne Sexton

"It's beauty that captures your attention; it is personality that captures your heart."

Reflection on American Beauty and standards[[Change on the American Frontier ]]

The American Voice