Thursday, September 30, 2004

Mars/Venus: Beauty is not in the eye of the beholder

NEW YORK (Wireless Flash) -- This is some pretty weird news: Only two percent of the world's women consider themselves beautiful.

That's the ugly truth of a new survey by Dove soap which asked ladies around the globe what they thought of their looks.

Only two percent of women describe themselves as beautiful, including three percent of American ladies and six percent of Brazilian babes.

By comparison, not one Japanese woman surveyed considers herself "beautiful" while 43 percent use the term "natural," and 26 percent say they have "average" looks.

Other stunning stats from the pretty poll include....

-- Nine percent of women arond the globe -- including 20 percent of British women -- claim they are "attractive."

-- Eight percent prefer the term "feminine"; seven percent say they are "good looking"; and seven percent will call themselves "cute."
-- Finally, only two percent of women describe themselves as "sexy."


Short Story Long: Why does the author think these results are "weird"? Aren't they to be expected when you consider what media messages are sent to women about what beauty is and what men find attractive? I don't know a single woman AT ALL who would ever say, "I am beautiful, d*mmit!" and actually, in her core, believe it to the exclusion of all other messages being sent to her. More often you hear, "I'd be beautiful, I guess, if I had bigger boobs, longer legs, better skin, longer hair, thinner thighs, [insert name of non-Maxim-ready body part here]." Women don't feel beautiful, as a rule, because they don't publish men's magazines with photos of women who look like them. It is impossible to measure up to what the media (and let's be honest, gentlemen) the subscription numbers for those magazines and web sites tell a woman what standards she needs to meet to be beautiful.

Those results are really not confusing or weird at all.

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