Western Civilizaion Paper

Prior to humanities studies, I always wondered how Western tradition culture correlated to our current ideals of beauty. During those periods, beauty was characterized by exaggerated body parts in the paintings, unrealistic muscle traits, and nearly impossible solidified postures. Such arts portrays our unique need to reach the unattainable in our made up beauty world.

Our current ideals of beauty affect our daily life decisions in more ways than we fail to acknowledge. Since our Paleolithic period, mankind has always been fascinated with perfection of the human figure. Such fascination has led to figures like the Venus of Willendorf who's most recognizable and memorable traits are oversized breasts on a designated miniature woman statue.

That same burning desire to enhance our body image to perfection has led us to our current beauty obsession. Nowadays an average recreational magazine would feature some individuals in the peak of their physical fitness with their physical images electronically enhanced beyond measure. Such images give us, ordinary people, and an unrealistic goal to accomplish.

Our beauty obsession has recently to a more specific avenue: looking and staying eternally young. A couple contributing factors to such avenue would be surgeries, injected shots, pills, extreme exercising etc. Our celebrities are often portrayed to having the best possible bodies which are now defined as fit, robust and muscular for men, and slim and elegant for women.

I'm afraid that Western tradition has affected our ideals of beauty in a way that we aren't as content with our self-image as we used to be. Instead, we spend a majority of our lifetime trying to reach this imaginary level, wishing we looked younger, slimmer, and taller, had rounder eyes etc. This current generation is obsessed with the thought of being beautiful.

Setting the bar higher and higher on a daily basis, we found ourselves in a constant vicious circle.

A local article has this to say on the matter: "The ideal of the perfect human body is a result of culture: religious functions, economy, advertisement, and other factors. The definition of beauty is not an immanent and objective quality of things, since every age, place and social class formed its own ideal of it; ideal beauty is corresponding with the aesthetic feeling of people of a respecting period. "History of art" as a relatively young science earlier was called subjectively "aesthetics"."

Western tradition has modified our ideals of beauty to a point that it influences our everyday life in more areas than expected. An example would like a new vehicle: the Bugatti Veyron 16.4, this vehicle is defined by its exaggerated design combined with over the top luxury accessories, and on top of it a well-above industry average speed ability, all relative description of that time

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