Beauty and Other Deep Superficial Desires

In our cockeyed society, we arouse be said to ready everything our realize is not backbreaking. In fact, working conditions argon nigh(a), and many of us strive to do reliable work. Technology has advanced so far that we are animated thirster and better lives. We have come to address many social ills, much(prenominal) as poverty and social forms of oppression, like racism. But more than ever, we Americans reckon more and more unhappy and unsatisfied.What accounts for the disparity between the relative simplicity and affluence of our lives, and the inversely proportional pleasure we take in living our lives?In his essay The Progress of Paradox, Greg Easterbrook argues that a general discontent and estrangement in our culture today come to us because our lives are modify with choices (a glut of choices) simply have little import. Easterbrook seems to adopt a insure of human beings as naturally pessimistic (if left to their own devices), and urges Americans to be more op timistic and to return to seeking more transcendent experiences that are currently offered by the cornucopia of sex and violence that passes for American culture.Easterbrook is a self-avowed Christian, so talk of pursuing transcendence is code for religious faith, unless may be forgiven this given the work that he puts into make his arguments through evidence. Just because, as he puts it, millions of Americans can afford to spend a lot of money on vanity induced plastic surgery, such as the navel associate-up (Easterbrook, 402) does not mean that this is how our resources should or could best be spent.We should instead turn out considerable resources and wealth to trying to wangle a difference in the world of the less advantaged peoples of the world this big businessman be worth while and more fulfilling than the choices we seem to be making instead. Where Easterbrook interprets the rise of elective plastic surgery as a looking and meaningless activity, a sign of our devoluti on into decadence, Naomi Wolf, on the other hand, sees the looker industrys practices as full of meaning.For a woman who considers get plastic surgery, the question is not a superficial or white one. She writes The beauty myth is always actually prescribing behavior and not behavior (Wolf, 489). Beauty is never skin deep that is, one reason wherefore a woman might want to be beautiful is because her outdoor appearance is taken to be a sign of her worth and of her midland personhood. A beautiful woman is thought to be a good woman, one who is disciplined and whose life is in proportion.This is evidenced in work that is done with women (and increasingly more and more men) who suffer from eating disorders. These individuals report card that, for then, their eating disorders are about control, about showing the world that they have great discipline and are inherently good, disciplined, and virtuous in the oddly American protestant work ethic (See Bordo below, whom I read for an other(prenominal) class).Where Easterbrook fails to see underneath the surface of the plastic surgery craze, Naomi wolf shows us that it is behaviors that are the aim, not simply appearance. The gendered analysis is important because we can set down to question why it is womens preoccupation with image that is taken as the chief example of frivolous vacuity, when surely mens enthronement is the pornography industry can be read as a much more morally objectionable practice.In any case, all of these practices can be taken together and read as signs, as symbols by which culture communicates a code of acceptability to its members. According to popular semiology professor and cultural critic Jack Solomon America is a earth of fantasizers, often preferring the sign to the substance and easily enthralled by a veritable Fantasy Island of commercial illusions (Solomon, 413). What Solomon describes is an America closer to that imagined by Easterbrook, but minus the normativity.That is, So lomon sees meaning in every little sign or symbol in culture. Either all is surface play of meaning without depth, or all these signs point to a depth beyond the instantaneously apparent. According to this viewpoint, the problem of our culture is not that we have lost touch with some transcendent being (read God), but that we prefer not to be on communion with anything grander than a pair of Ferragamo shoes or a Ferrari car. We love our status symbols and our wealth, and the dazzling display satisfies us, if only for a defraud while.We are a nation of ambitioners and we will believe in this dream of prosperity for as long as we possibly can. Bibliography Bordo, Susan. (2004) Reading the lissom body. Unbearable Weight. Berkeley and Los Angeles University of California Press. Easterbrook, Greg. (2003) The Progress Paradox. in the altogether York Random House. Solomon, Jack. (1990) The Sign Of Our Times. New York HarperCollins. Wolf, Naomi. (2002) The Beauty Myth. New York Harper Perennial.