does online beauty culture help or harm? an analysis of the gender divide in beauty “Taught from infancy that beauty is a woman’s sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.” Mary Wollstonecraft, ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Women’, 1792 I remember watching makeup videos 3 or 4 years ago when I started to feel like my eyebrows were wrong, so I went out and I bought an eyebrow pencil and it was a bit of a mess. I’d watch these beauty videos on youtube and almost without fail, all of these beautiful women with gorgeous, flawless skin and beautiful bold eyebrows and i felt really insecure. Day to day i think i have quite a minimal beauty routine, I use moisturizer, concealer, mascara, highlighter and maybe some lip-gloss. I think about how many times i have gone out without makeup and people say that i look tired or sick, and that makes me feel like i need to put on makeup. Over the past few years, research shows that more and more women are saying that they feel beautiful. But at the same time, the vast majority of women say they feel pressure to be beautiful. What effect is this online beauty culture having on us? The State of Gender Equality for U.S. Adolescents Full Research Findings from a National Survey of Adolescents on Belief in gender equality (September 12, 2018) by PerryUndem commissioned by Plan International USA found that the vast majority of adolescents (92 percent) says they believe in gender equality, but some uncertainty exists beneath the surface. For example, over half of adolescents (54%) strongly or somewhat agrees that they are “more comfortable with women having traditional roles in society, such as caring for children and family”. Several of their findings illuminate why most girls perceive sexism as a problem and why they say gender equality does not exist. By far, girls perceive physical attractiveness as the most common trait or characteristic our society values in girls and about half of girls (53 percent) look in the mirror at least once a day and imagine how others might see them. About one in three older girls (31 percent) does so “many times a day.” Nearly two-thirds of girls (64 percent) say they are
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