She was waiting in line, examining the Tasty Burger menu intently. The greasy yet delicious smell of the kitchen distracted her attention from the menu every time a new patty sizzled on the grill. Inching toward the register, she still hadn't made up her mind, and in a last minute decision, she ordered a hot dog. After picking up her order, she grabbed some ketchup and headed to an open seat. For a moment, she sat alone, waiting for her friend. A man passed by her seat rather closely and discreetly left a card under her purse. It said "You are stunning. Dinner is on me anytime. xxx-xxx-xxxx." She blushed, feeling a tad bit embarrassed.
The question put forth at its most rudimentary level is this: “What is pretty?” To this man, it was this girl.
Advertising has exploited every form of propaganda: social media, billboards, newspapers, magazines, flyers, emails, and even by using other humans. We live in an era of direction. Take a stroll down Washington Ave, Lincoln Road, and Ocean Drive, and everything you'll ever want or need will be at your fingertips, or so advertisers want you to believe.
Washington Ave is where you want to attend the best party. Lincoln Road is where you want to eat the best meal and buy the best clothes. Ocean Drive is where you want to stay during your Spring Break. The advertisements never say come here, shop here, eat here. Take another look; these stores and advertising campaigns are sending a much more threatening message. They are silently broadcasting to our subconscious mind, without our consent.
This begs a question; are our thoughts even our own? Whomever's thoughts they are, they are the brain child of someone else. The thought that our ideal of pretty has been defined for us is chilling. Do we really think The Kardashian/Jenner clan, Victoria Secret’s models, and Instagram famous personalities are the standard of pretty? We listen to social media, store posters, and E! News. We succumb to the thought of accepting these women as the standard of pretty, because someone else must set the standard for us. The media takes advantage of this “privilege,” because pretty sells. Ads sell more than just products; they sell us the concepts of pretty and sex appeal. The media wants women to strive towards perfection. Endeavoring to reach this state, real women will continuously fall short, because the flawlessness of models, movie stars, and singers is merely a product of Photoshop. By objectifying these women, the media turns regular people into real life Barbies.
The media is powerful. It has spoken and we believe. It begs another interesting question; why do we believe what everyone around us seems to believe? Societal peer pressure, maybe? In "The Power of Context," Malcom Gladwell refers to the Broken Window Theory: the theory that if vandalism and disorder exist, then crime naturally blooms because of this broken setting. The theory is correlated to why Bernie Goetz murdered black men on the dirty subway. In Bernie Goetz's case, the Broken Windows theory says that disorder and filth allow for crime to naturally thrive in places such as the subways.
I argue that Broken Windows can also be applied to media pressure. Designer campaigns, TV commercials, and highway billboards are analogous to Goetz’s dirty subway in that they set the environment that naturally allows the media to control our concept of beauty. Instead of a dirty subway, these ads are filled with glamorous men and women. Instead of murder, the media pushes for the public to see “pretty” in these ads. Because these models don’t look like real women, the idea of pretty seems to now be the absence of real physical features.
The media puts beautiful women on a pedestal precisely because they don’t look like real women. That’s also why we accept that they are pretty. To be pretty, you must be out of this world. It’s unsettling, yet chillingly accurate, that we as a nation have collectively come to accept that beauty is based on how photoshopped a model looks in comparison to a real woman.
This pragmatist take on “pretty” could not be any more textbook. Our concept and idea of pretty lives on because it’s almost universal. Richard Rorty writes that pragmatists believe what they believe because other people in their environment believe it to be true. It is a domino effect: once an idea starts to catch on, you can’t really stop it, because more and more people believe it to be true. It’s easier to spread that idea than to reverse the spread. Our thoughts, actions, and beliefs are very much impacted by our environment.
The other modern belief, that “pretty” comes in all shapes and sizes, is circulating and becoming a strong voice in society. And why not? There isn’t a mold for pretty, so why can’t pretty come in different flavors? Let’s keep this momentum going, and make the new "pretty" spread like wildfire.
