“The problem of unsafe plastic surgeries also has not been taken seriously because Colombian society divides victims into ‘good’ and ‘bad.’ It has a serious lack of empathy with the victims of unsafe cosmetic surgeries… The surgeries that society rejects are those that have to do with women’s sexualisation. And in Colombia, for women, there is only one thing worse than being a sexual object: not being one.”
Beauty ideals and their consequences are not immutable, natural or unavoidable. They are socially constructed. This means that what people take to be normal and fixed facts about the world are actually determined by social norms, culture and social interaction. Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann have established this theory, showing how individuals’ knowledge and perception about social reality are shaped by their social position within a given society, otherwise known as their social status. While there are positive and negative social outcomes that flow on from beauty hierarchies, these are not the logical result of natural selection and biological drive. Renditions of beauty found in art and pop culture reflect the way in which broader narratives about beauty are socially constructed.
Read my work on the social construction of beauty and its link to discrimination.
Quote source: Al Jazeera English.
The Other Sociologist 