“Beauty is Dead, and we have Killed Her!”
On the Death of the Objective Feminine Ideal: An Appeal to the Ethics of Aesthetics
“Aphrodite spoke and loosened from her bosom the embroidered girdle of many colors into which all her allurements were fashioned. In it was love and in it desire and in it blandishing persuasion which steals the mind even of the wise.” – Homer
Morals, values, and ideals are guiding principles dictating the ethics and integrity of a population. Over the years, propaganda and misinformation campaigns have sought to subvert these principles to degrade the identity of our nation. The intended goal is to strip away widespread conviction and faith in institutions and systems of belief that provide an epistemic framework from which citizens operate from, thus reinventing civilizational order. These fixtures are necessary for those who are aimless and lack the Will-to-Power to contend with the chaotic nature of an untamed world.
In times of direct conflict, subversive opposition campaigns are carried out by peripheral social groups directed toward traditional cultural institutions until the foundational tenets of the cultural orthodoxy dissipate. Ultimately, the faithful ideologically perish.
Recently, a new wave of perceived feminine beauty has been forced into the Zeitgeist. It is perverse in the way it is introduced because it is not organic nor is it desired, although it is trying to appear as though it is.
Earlier this year, London had unveiled the statue that would be built in 2026 on the 4th Plinth in Trafalgar Square. Tschabalala Self’s sculpture, titled “Lady in Blue,” depicts a bronze and blue “metropolitan woman of color” where a ten-foot-tall dark female figure stands mid-stride, shrouded in a dress of lapis lazuli. The proportions are exaggerated and are not appealing to beauty whatsoever. However, instead of backlash, the sculpture received massive praise amongst the artistic elite class of London.
Cases like this are becoming ever more present in the Post-modern notion of “art”.
Since the Post-modern movement, representative art, and manifestation of reality and the idealized human form, have been becoming less popular in art galleries, commercials, and public sculptures. For most of us, it is obvious that the erection of these seemingly ‘woke’ and out-of-place statues is not worthy of artistic praise nor public adulation. For more dignified curators, these creations would be disregarded as a hair-brained and angsty passion project of a trust fund child.
And yet, they become public fixtures anyway, only to be set up in city centers, parks, and gardens. Even further worsening the issue, external institutions and philosophical movements, namely those of higher education, help legitimize these sculptures. Postmodern self-referentialism, progressive DEI hires, and the feminization of American pedagogy have eagerly done their part to formally validate these unsightly fixtures.
Resulting from this is a failure to expand the general concept of beauty, instead seeking to devour and destroy it. Instead of carefully reinventing it, they fortify its antithesis and inversion, the objectively ugly.
The Post-modernist Idea of Beauty
It is easy to find recent examples of the collective erosion of beauty. From architecture to statues to public facilities, once you begin to notice how pervasive “ugliness” is in American and greater Western culture, it becomes rather concerning.
“The Embrace” created by Hank Willis Thomas, and officially installed on Boston Common in 2022, gave rise to a much-heated discussion not about Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy, but what exactly this creation was supposed to be in the first place. It was an attempt to depict the embrace shared between Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King in a known photograph of the two, but to most onlookers, it simply looked phallic.
Although a vital element of art is to incite conversation about morale and even present a radical interpretation of dominant systems of thought, statues like “The Embrace” are far removed from providing any comprehensive analysis that is understandable to the common man.
While it may be true that cultural and even individual experiences significantly affect what one finds pleasing, it would also be amiss to forget that, amid the sea of superficial preference, there are comprehensive and all-encompassing themes and archetypes dictating the ideal feminine form.
The influence of intersectional feminism in modern culture is nothing short of palpable. Akin to Gramscian “War of Position” tactics, intersectional feminism attempts to tear down cohesive standards of objectivity, beauty, and excellence through the fabrication of a hierarchy of oppression. Intersectional pedagogics willfully construct specters of tyranny. It manufactures outrage from a solipsistic understanding of the public world by designing a pecking order of socially acceptable identities carved out of an oppressive chauvinistic and moralistic ideal system ranging anywhere from race, class, physical abilities, and appearances.
Importance to Understanding Femininity
Understanding the objective ideal of femininity means understanding the consummate elegance that comes with the archetypical softness and strength of femininity. While masculine excellence typifies the virility that flows from direct action, feminine excellence epitomizes the wisdom flowing from peaceful assurance. Each of us retains elements of both, even if one outweighs the other. However, a direct inversion of these forms will produce something unlike objective beauty.
Preserving notions of the idealized human form is requisite to maintaining the integrity of society. It is requisite to maintaining civilization.
We are living in an era of inverted forms, perpetuated by false depictions of what human excellence and objective beauty mean. It is up to us to recognize these patterns and speak truth to them, even if it goes against the modern conceptualization of righteousness.
* This piece is an abridged version of my submission to The Dissident Review Vol. IV. If you wish to read it in full, please consider purchasing the journal here.
There's underlying economic models to this. A beautiful women is a well taken care of and healthy woman. In my younger years I was fooled by things like the beauty myth, and societies bs about unrealistic beauty standards. And then I visited the Netherlands and the woman all glowed there. If our woman aren't beautiful, then we are just not healthy. They are using "beauty positivity" to deny how ill the American women is, and that is because of economics.
One couldn't know beauty without knowing truth.