think FEEL

consider
decide
BELIEVEACT
 Beauty can illustrate an ideal; a perfection.
Or, because of its identification with women
(more accurately, with Woman), it can trigger
COVER PHOTO: MENIKA VAN DER POORTEN

the usual ambivalence that stems from the

age-old denigration of the feminine . . .

. . . if women are worshiped because they are

beautiful, they are condescended
to for their preoccupation with making or
keeping themselves beautiful.

Beauty is theatrical, it is for being looked at and

Khema
admired; and the word is as likely to suggest the
beauty industry (beauty magazines, beauty
ISSN 1391-5673
parlors, beauty products) – the theatre of
feminine frivolity – as the beauties of art and of
publisher
© The Women and Media Collective nature. How else to explain the association of
174, Alwis Avenue, Castle Street
Colombo 8, Sri Lanka. beauty – i.e. women – with mindlessness?
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Sharni Jayawardena

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 PICTURE

4 EDITORIAL |Sharni Jayawardena

7 Beauty: Does it have a sinister side? Or we just

skin deep?|Yichaelle Vander Poorten Devendra
THINK . FEEL . CONSIDER . DECIDE . BELIEVE . ACT
10 POEM | dem natural beauties|Olumide Popoola

12 Blind at the Gallery|Leo Pasqualge

CONTENTS
16 The Beauty of the Beast| Niluka Gunawardena

19 Pursuing the Perfect Body | Madushala Senaratne

21 This business of beautification | Chandini Perera

23 Getting there| Tari Wickremeratne

27 Beauty: The Delusion of Our Time| Ru Freeman

30 Miss. Moti and the Mirror Image | Kripa Joshi

33 Cupid in the pool| Sepali Kottegoda

36 Saying No to Oprah | Subha Wijesiriwardena

38 What comes naturally | Jayanthi Liyanage

39 POEM|My hair and I| Shabnam

40 New Homely Doll to Improve Self Image of Young Girls|

the ONION

41 Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder | OG

43 Beauty in the making | Menika van der Poorten

47 Weak for Beauty| Samyuktha Varma

49 The Tribulations of Beauty | Richard Simon

52 Tits | masii

53 The call of beauty | Robert Crusz

55 Beauty is the number 14 and it lasts for 72 hours |

Malinda Seneviratne

57 Goddesses descending | Anoli Perera

59 On beauty| Sanjana Hattotuwa

61 POEM|Wanni Woman |Jean Arasanayagam

63 Beauty | Nazreen Philips

64 Three beautiful things |Tuppy McIntosh

66 Analysing an Argument on Beauty | Indira KG

From the Editor
The appearance of beauty
I asked a friend to write an essay on Beauty for this issue of Options. He was quick to refuse, but
with a smile that was beautiful: “Let’s not open that can of worms.” Perhaps not the perfect
analogy, but I’d thought about (and read up on) the subject enough in the past few weeks to
know what he meant.

Many philosophers decry contemporary art’s ‘flight from beauty’. “Wherever beauty lies in wait
for us, there arises a desire to preempt its appeal, to smother it,” says the philosopher writer Roger
Scruton, who published a book called Beauty this year. He is convinced that beauty is, above all,
contemplative, a function of the rational mind. And he insists on a certain disengagement. “Beauty
comes,” he writes, “from setting human life, sex included, at the distance from which it can be
viewed without disgust or prurience.”

And that’s precisely the problem for some others. The feminist academic Christine Koggel believes
that the distanced perceiver judging the beautiful and the community of perceivers reaching
agreement on what is called beautiful reflect the male perspective and masculine values. And it
has its consequences. “Concepts of beauty and of art are influential aspects of culture, shaping
and maintaining gender roles,” says Koggel, “It is most evident in notions of beauty as applied to
women themselves.”

Harvard Medical School psychologist Nancy Etcoff dismisses the belief that beauty is a cultural
construct, arguing instead that: “It provokes pleasure, rivets attention, and impels actions that
help ensure the survival of our genes.” In her book Survival of the Prettiest she argues that sensitivity
to beauty is a biological adaptation shaped by natural selection. She goes on to make the point
that high heels accentuate a woman’s breasts and buttocks, signalling fertility, and believes she
has some good advice for feminists: “Rather than denigrate one source of women’s power, it
would seem far more useful for feminists to attempt to elevate all sources of women’s power.”

Natural selection seems to be less on the minds of feminists than the paradoxical nature of
conceptualizing beauty. Sunila Abeysekera, artiste, critic and human rights activist, recognizes
that, “In a country like Sri Lanka where the Buddhist canon describes female beauty as having the
potential for evil – take for example the daughters of Mara who tried to tempt the Buddha away
from his meditation – we are caught in the tensions between our desire to attract others through
our appearance and our religious and spiritual ‘knowledge’ that in fact the only attractiveness
that should matter is one that grows from within.”

And then we find an Assistant Superintendent of Police warning a group of Colombo schoolgirls
just the other day that if Sudanese law, which prescribes 40 lashes for women found guilty of
being ‘sexually offensive’, were enforced in Sri Lanka, both girls and their mothers would have to
suffer the lashings. She was referring to the alluring way females of all ages dressed these days.

Feminists have shown that beauty is not only culture specific but also embodies unequal power
relations – with the ideologically and economically more powerful defining what is mainstreamed.
The range of perceptions and arguments on the subject need to be discussed, even though we
can expect little agreement. This then is a necessary opening of the can of worms, if only to
understand what drives us and where we are being driven.

References
Roger Scruton, Beauty, Oxford University Press, 2009
Christine Koggel, Concepts of Beauty: A Feminist Philosopher Thinks about Paradigms and Consequences, Beauty Symposium, 2004
Kathy Davis, Beauty (the feminine beauty system) from the Encyclopaedia of Feminist Theories, edited by Lorraine Code, Routledge Press, 2000
Nancy Etcoff, Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty, Anchor, 1999

Sharni Jayawardena
Leah Sunil Situnayake

Do I love you because you're beautiful,

Or are you beautiful because I love you?

Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II

Cinderella
 6
Choice is Power | OPTIONS 2009

Beauty
Priyanthi Anusha

Beauty: Does it have a
sinister side? Or are we
just skin deep?
Beauty is a currency system like the
gold standard. Like any economy, it
is determined by politics, and in the
modern age in the West it is the last,
best belief system that keeps male
dominance intact. In assigning value
to women in a vertical hierarchy
according to a culturally imposed
physical standard, it is an expression
of power relations in which women
must unnaturally compete for
resources that men have appro-
priated for themselves.
Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth
A re too many women becoming obsessed with
how they look and too busy trying to look like film
stars? Is the media going overboard, seducing young
people in particular to try out all kinds of skin
treatments and diets just to look like what the media
suggests is ‘beautiful’? Is there too much attention
being drawn to beauty stereotypes?
Yichaelle Vander Poorten
Devendra
Yichaelle Vander Poorten Devendra writes poetry and
paints. Mostly she writes about issues she feels strongly
about. She wants to play her part in making the world
aware of the hidden truth about those who are
marginalized and exploited in different ways.
beauty
Images of women’s faces and bodies are to be
found everywhere. From billboards to backpacks,
selling everything from houses to hair dyes. Women’s
magazines are chock-full of doubtful information and
glossy pictures tempting women to take on weight
reduction programmes that would help them reduce
that last twenty pounds, which in turn would ensure
them a completely successful life, with a fulfilling
career, children, spouse and even great sex.
Why? Well, the reasons are most obviously economic.
By keeping women feeling just a little too fat, ugly
and old, the beauty product industries and diet
companies are assured of profit and growth.
Everyone knows that the majority of women in the
world are heavier and bigger than those extremely
thin youthful models projected on the screen, in glossy
magazines and television commercials.
It has been found that constant viewing of images
of thin, young, ‘perfect’ female bodies is linked to
depression and low self-esteem among women.
Research also shows that women who are insecure
about their bodies and appearance spend more on 7
clothes, beauty products and diet aids.1 The global
Choice is Power | OPTIONS 2009
diet industry is valued at 40-100 billion U.S. dollars –
so we see the stakes are phenomenally high.
Advertising is of key importance. It is estimated that
90-95 per cent of women regain the weight they
lose.2
In addition to imposing unattainable beauty
standards on women, the media also misrepresents
women. False representation of women in popular
 beauty
music, mainly through music videos, shows women
to be primarily sexually motivated with the intent of
alluring and attracting the male. This fantasy
representation leads women to be abused and taken
advantage of. The way women really behave or sing
or talk is never shown.
My attention was drawn to a new music video posted
on Facebook - ‘Oya Mage Nam’ sung by a popular
male singing duo in Sri Lanka. What initially drew my
attention to it was the diversity of cultures represented
through costumes and dancing ranging from Mardi
Gras masks to cheerleaders, with some Bollywood
thrown in and topped up with a ‘papara’ band. The
video shows a man in his quest for this beautiful ultra-
sexualized girl who dances seductively, fluttering
eyelashes. The man is at one point serenading her
with a ukulele and next, dressed in a cowboy hat,
pointing a gun in her direction; later, he brings the
gun closer to his face while singing about how
mesmerized he is by her eyes. The woman’s act of
The woman in her passivity
and submissiveness is shown
8 to be a dependent creature,
Choice is Power | OPTIONS 2009
making her less human, a
‘thing’ rather than a person.
sashaying around swaying her hips and batting her
eyelids while he pursues her unrelentingly conforms
to and perpetuates the negative false
representations of female beauty, sexuality and
submissiveness. The woman in her passivity and
submissiveness is shown to be a dependent creature,
making her less human, a ‘thing’ rather than a person.
Writer and documentary filmmaker Jean Killbourne
says: “Turning a human being into a thing, an object,
is almost always the first step toward justifying
violence against that person.”3
The obvious connotations of sexuality and aggression
inherent in the symbolism of the gun are disturbing.
The message that it is okay to scare/threaten/punish
a woman even if she is the object of a man’s
attraction is being transmitted through this very
popular music video (judging by the positive,
comments about it online – mostly from young
women). What is even more appalling is how the
woman in the video is made to look alluring, demure
and seductive at all times.
The refrain of the song Oya mage nam jeewithe mal
(If you are mine, my life is/will be as beautiful as
flowers) speaks for itself. The patriarchal urge to
possess and control is upheld and the man’s ‘quest’
to make his life meaningful by making her his own, is
rewarded in the end.
Many Sinhala music videos I have watched in recent
times show the man stalking or following a girl who
initially is apprehensive of such behaviour but later is
shown to succumb to his advances. It seems to me
that this is a very dangerous trend built upon
misunderstanding, which teaches young men that
they need/could be aggressive and persistent in their

... women are constantly
being promised that they
could be just a little younger,
taller, lighter, firmer, tighter,
thinner or softer ...
quest for a woman they like. The issue of whether
the woman likes these advances is never raised in
these videos because the men always win their prize
and women are shown to submit in the end. The
sheer lack of social responsibility in such productions
is masked by colourful costumes and catchy rhythms
and sadly many young men and women fail to see
the negativity involved. Whether this is due to
ignorance and the lack of information or whether it
is the general apathy of society towards issues related
to women’s wellbeing, safety or respect is something
I have not yet resolved.
When Susan Boyle first appeared on Britain’s Got
Talent contest this year I couldn’t concentrate on
the person or her voice because I kept noticing the
sarcasm of the audience watching her. The raised
eyebrows, the rolling of eyes – the surprise when she
announced her age. I am not talking only about
the judges. The media was agog with how unusual
it was for such a frumpy woman to be able to sing
beautifully. Susan Boyle was not skinny, didn’t have
straightened long hair and above all she was not
groomed or glossed. But boy, did she know how to
sing. The audience sat in stunned silence as she sang
but I sensed the cruelty, the waiting for this ugly horror
to fall. If you were not skinny, didn’t have the right
makeup and the right hair, then you were not
supposed to succeed.
Counter Campaigns
There have been some efforts around the world to
counter false representation of beauty and to
encourage women to be more accepting and
positive about the real beauty they possess. One
such effort is the campaign run by the Dove beauty
company which encourages girls and women to
challenge these ideas and embrace their own
personal beauty. The film Evolution created by Dove
in Canada for the Dove Self Esteem Fund won the
Grand Prix at the Cannes advertising awards in 2007.
In this video the model is shown to be given a
complete makeover and then her looks are altered
digitally using Photoshop, exposing the way beauty
product companies generate perfectly flawless skin
and features to advertise their beauty products. The
video ends with the slogan: “No wonder our
perception is distorted.”
In the video titled Onslaught a little girl’s face appears
and then a series of visuals documents which way
she’ll be pressurized to go – the hideous nature of
fad diets, slimming pills, liposuction, and cosmetic
surgery. The girl’s innocent face appears again with
the following slogan: “Talk to your daughter before
the beauty industry does.”
Some films too have tried to counter false
representations of physical beauty; films like My Big
Fat Greek Wedding, Phat Girlz, and Real Women
Have Curves. So has the television show Ugly Betty.
In a world where beauty product companies and
weight loss programmes or their businesses will grow;
where women are constantly being promised that
they could be just a little younger, taller, lighter, firmer,
tighter, thinner or softer; where showbiz and glitz is
more important than simple human contact and
love; let’s try to inculcate some real values, to make
the world a better place for us. A world where there
is more respect for all.
References
Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth (1990) Random House, Toronto
Jean Killbourne’s film Killing us Softly (1979) and Still Killing us Softly (1987)
Dove Campaign for Real Beauty can be viewed at: http://
www.campaignforrealbeauty.ca
The video Oba Mage Nam can be viewed at: http://www.facebook.
com/home.php?#/pages/Bathiya-and-Santhush-BNS/6872124214 9
The video Evolution can be viewed at
Choice is Power | OPTIONS 2009
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYhCn0jf46U
The video Onslaught can be viewed at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ei6JvK0W60I
1
The Canadian Women’s Health Network
(Body Image and the Media). http://www.cwhn.ca/resources/faq/
biMedia.html
2
The diet business: Banking on failure. (BBC News World Edition, Feb 5
2003). http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/2725943.stm
3
Kilbourne, Jean Still Killing Us Softly – Advertising’s image of women
(video) Cambridge Documentary Films 1987
 she say
dem natural
de other woman color reeeally fine
not like ours not like mine
de right shade it was she said
I enjoyed it like I did mine and yours
how tired I was
after years and years
having to change into right
she say
de other woman reeeal pretty
meaning that I was not quite
to me she looked rather uneventful
but of course
my hair did not match fashion magazines
nor did my face and least my style
dey say
dem no like my hair
I must shave my legs
wax every little hair that is there
I did it and yes!
it did feel very light
but still I didn’t make me no right
she looked and complained
say how I behave
say I must be tamed
so I can’t have a place
in high society
I looked at her closely and said
no
look at yourself for a minute
and tell me where exactly
did you go
not being yourself
then there was dis one
she always knew better
everything she said
was a fact for that matter
she would tell me
10
no, you’re wrong
Choice is Power | OPTIONS 2009
when I was just explaining
what in my life went down
she made her own rules
applied dem to de whole world
funny enough I never heard
how she herself was doing
but I guess when you’re so busy
telling people what is right
there’s not much time left
for your own life
beauties
then there was dis one
she had a big behind
flesh on her bones and she was all mine
people were disappointed
said I could have gotten better
they disapproved
I couldn’t care less
she didn’t give me any blues
one day we went to the park
cause we were bored
sister came up to me and shouted
yo! you could be so nice
if you just tried a little more
I couldn’t help myself
my heart went sore
I needed to have my say
and corrected her right there
you got it wrong
I am how I should
and if you’d stop trying so hard
it would be all good
you got it wrong, baby
I am just fine
whatever you see here
at least it’s purely mine
you got it wrong sister
you are trying too hard
instead of so much good advice
I’d rather have a glimpse at your heart
a big up to dem natural beauties
dem afro hair and all dem other goodies
a big up to queen self esteem
work dat pride girl
and respect what you see
 a big up to nappy hair
and that nose you got
I love your mouth
especially between de front teeth de gap

word up now
to dem black people behind
we all know what they can do for you
at night

a big up now and forever

to your thighs, your belly
and all dem problem zones
believe me baby
they all go really really well
with your bones

a big up to hairy legs

or dem shaved behinds
well whatever suits you
who am I to decide

a big up now and forever

to all our beauties
dem light skinned ones
and dem dark dark cuties

much respect now

to queen self esteem
isn’t it lovely
so different are we

© 2000 olumide

Olumide Popoola

11
11
© Ingrid Pollard
ower | OPTIONS 2009

Award-winning NIgerian German spoken word artist Olumide Popoola has performed internationally,
in solo and ensemble shows, creating work with artists of different trades and disciplines. She is
always looking for cross forms, links and collaborations. Her poetry and writing has appeared and
Choice is Power

been critically reviewed in anthologies, academic writings and magazines. She is currently working
on an experimental novella for her dissertation project which will complete her MA in creative
writing at the University of East London.
 BLIND
AT THE
GALLERY
A ll of us are involved daily in dealing with issues
of what is beautiful, in choices we make, right up to
systems and ideologies we evaluate, and criticize.
On what basis do we determine such things?
Complex issues are involved, with many related
factors. In viewing works of art are our evaluations
truly based on aesthetic considerations?
Aesthetics i s, stri ctly speaking, a branch of
philosophy that has occupied thinkers from Plato to
the present day. It is defined as dealing with the
nature of and judgments concerning beauty. It is
also defined as the description and explanation of
artistic phenomena and aesthetic experience by
means of other sciences such as psychology,
sociology, ethnology, or history. Neither philosophy
nor other sci ences has come to a defi ni te
agreement.
I will address this issue using Modernist aesthetic
principals, with a focus on visual arts. I will only deal
with manmade objects or events – natural beauty
cannot be taken as a work of art.
12
Choice is Power | OPTIONS 2009
Leo Pasqualge
Leo Pasqualge is an artist, art teacher and musician
currently living and working in Sri Lanka. He
graduated in Fine Arts from Pratt Institute, New York.
There are two traditional views concerning what
constitutes aesthetic values. The first finds beauty
to be objective, that is inherent in the entity itself.
The second position holds that beauty is
subjective, in that it depends on the attitude of
the observer.1
A cliché illustrates the second position, and I will
deconstruct it to make an argument for objectivity,
essential quality and universality. “Beauty is in the
eyes of the beholder” first appeared in print in the
19th century in the book Molly Baum by Margaret
Hungerford, an Irish novelist of popular, light,
romantic fiction. Similar sentiments were expressed
in the 3rd century BC in Greece, and were echoed
by the philosopher David Hume and Shakespeare,
among others.
As with all clichés, this one has some truth to it. It
adamantly insists that aesthetics is purely subjective.
The reader must decide if this is the only truth
possible. To me, subjectivity as an idea and fact
cannot exist without non-subjectivity, i.e., objectivity.
Can light exist without dark? Is crime only a
perception of the victim?
While this attempt at aesthetic evaluation by
deconstruction may not bring definite results, the
inquiry could be fruitful. It raises many questions.
What is art? Who makes it? What is beauty? Who
defines it? Who exactly is the beholder?

I will start by separating the cliché into four distinct
components: w ork of art, artist, beauty and
beholder.
The Work of Art
What is art? Few questions provoke such heated
debate and provide so few satisfactory answers. The
critic Roger Fry referred to “...Tolstoy’s marvellously
original, and yet perverse and even exasperating
book, What is Art?” 2 If there are no definitive
conclusions, there is still a good deal to be said. Art
is first of all a word – one that acknowledges both
the idea and fact of art. Without it, one might ask
whether art exists at all; the term was not found in
every society. Yet, art is made everywhere. Art,
therefore, is also an object, but not just any kind of
object. Art is an aesthetic object. So what makes a
work of art beautiful?
A work of art is an event where an observer
participates by the very process of observation. This
interaction cannot be avoided. “...we learn to see
only as much as is needful for our purposes. But this
in fact is very little.”3
The Artist
The artist does not define, but challenges, the
existing and accepted notions of beauty. The truly
creative artist deals with vulgarity, and tragedy.
Something may seem vulgar to professionals,
because in their code of beauty vulgarity is not
recognised nor are rules made for its acceptance.
To the artist, no subject is taboo. Art is poetic and
poetically irrational. Most beholders wait for the
aesthetician’s explanation.
In the early 1900s one reputable painter wrote, “The
art of painting is the art of imitating solid objects
upon a flat surface by means of pigments.” Is that
all? Plato, indeed, gave a similar account, and
posed the question – is it then worthwhile? And, he
proceeded to turn artists out of the ideal republic. 4
When does a representation of a landscape
become a work of art?
Aesthetics are written conclusions or directives – but
painting is not an appendage of literature. To
Matisse, painters address the public to present their
works, AND to reveal some of their ideas on the art
beauty
of painting. He believed that the painter’s best
spokesperson is the work, which belongs to its time
and share its opinions, feelings and delusions.
So artists meet the world with their work. What is their
aim? For whom do they make art? If the majority
rejects it, they feel it.
Beauty
Beauty has been defined as the quality or qualities
that delight the aesthetic senses or pleasurably
exalts the mind or spirit.
The Beholder
In addition to the artist, beholders include other
artists, philosophers, professional aestheticians, art
critics and curators – and people who are none of
the above.
Nobody can be as interested in the making of art
as the artist. Does the beholder possess the intensity
of the artist? Does the artist deal with such things as
taste and quality at all? What about the context?
The Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce saw art as
vision or intuition, rather than any physical object or
range of objects. The artist produces an image or
picture. Beholders turn their eye in the direction that
the artist points out, and reproduces in themselves
the artist’s image.
Roger Fry believed that the beholder’s reaction to
a work of art includes the consciousness of purpose,
the consciousness of a peculiar relation of sympathy
with the artist in order to arouse precisely the
sensations we experience. And, this recognition of
purpose is an essential part of the aesthetic
judgment proper.
Fellow critic and contemporary Clive Bell believed
that, “The starting point for all systems of aesthetics
13
Choice is Power | OPTIONS 2009
A work of art is an
event where an
observer participates
by the very process
of observation.
 beauty
must be the personal experience of a peculiar
emotion. The objects that provoke this emotion are
works of art.”5 He called this the aesthetic emotion.
In the book Art, published in 1914, he asked: Is there
an essential quality in works of art that distinguish
them from all other classes of objects? Only one
answer is possible – significant form. Significant form
is relations and combinations of lines and color
combined in a particular way, as are certain forms
and relations of forms.
Abstract art, justified by analogy with music, could
be expressive. It is art with forms that signify,
represent and remind us of nothing, which arouses
us as deeply and strongly as music has always been
able to do. Can a disinterested contemplation of
line, mass, space, light and shade, color and
composition evoke the aesthetic emotion? Before
a work of art, people who feel little or no emotion
for pure form find themselves at a loss. They are deaf
at a concert.
Who can get a purely visual satisfaction from looking
at a picture? The figure represented may be dear
to us and awaken the most delightful memories, but
the picture may be ugly. On the other hand, the
picture may be beautiful, but the figure represented
abominable, or the picture itself, which we approve
as beautiful, may not get the attention it deserves,
owing to its being the work of an enemy or a rival.
All this may lead to a confused and disquieted
aesthetic interest. Does the image represent the
concept? Is the beholder making an aesthetic
evaluation?
Since the nature of an artistic experience deals with
such i mprecise matters as taste, qual ity or
expressiveness, there has never been unanimity of
opinion. Complicating matters further is the fact that
taste seems to be conditioned solely by culture. And
14
taste is so varied that absolute qualities in art will
continue to elude us. Therefore, we cannot escape
Choice is Power | OPTIONS 2009
vi ew ing art in the contexts of ti me and
circumstance.6
Earlier I asked, can light exist without dark? Further,
can the conditioned exi st w i thout the
unconditioned? Does state of mind make a
difference? In viewing a work of art, do we take
into consideration the social, cultural, economic
and political? Who controls taste? What are the
Since the nature of an
artistic experience deals
with such imprecise
matters as taste, quality
or expressiveness, there
has never been unanimity
of opinion.
rules? Who sets them? By now we should be
convinced of the invention of tradition – mostly pure
artifice by the dominant culture.
Who sets the rules? Who tells us what is beautiful
and what is not? At an exhibition we view the
curator’s opinion. A work of art is a commodity
awaiting a buyer. The curator may be challenged.
For the Paris Exposition of 1855, Gustave Courbet
built his own pavilion and displayed The Painter’s
Studio. Equally important, in 1863 Emperor Napoleon
III allowed a Salon des Refuses, in response to the
appeals of artists working in ways unacceptable to
the official Salon. Among the more than 2,500
submissions that failed the academic standards set
by the jury was Edouard Manet’s Déjeuner sur
l’herbe. Eleven years later, the Modernist movement
took its next decisive step by mounting their own
exhibition. One shocked, reactionary critic called
the painters mere “Impressionists.”
Beware of the critic whose reputation depends on
the power to impress the public with a semblance
of knowledge, and the artist who attempts to do
the same with skill and technical swagger. 7
The exhibition of ‘degenerate art’ was held in
Munich in 1937. Representative work of the avant
garde was presented as evidence of corruption,
madness and “cultural Bolshevism” – the work, as
Hitler put it, of “fools, liars and criminals who belong
in insane asylums or prisons.” He blamed Judaism
for taking possession of those means and institutions
of communication which form, and thus finally rule
over, publi c opi ni on. Art had become an
international communal experience, and he
wanted a German art, an art with eternal value.
Such artists were pitiful misfortunates, suffering from
eyesight deformation – and of great interest to the

Reich’s Ministry of Interior. Hitler left no doubt that
sooner or later such artists would be liquidated. 8
Who influences the beholder of beauty? If beauty
is determined subjectively, the assumption is that
there are no outside influences. So is it genetically
determined? Obviously false – to wit, influences such
as family, education and media. Thus, even if the
determination of beauty is individual, it is not
necessarily subjective. There is a false assumption
that no standards are created. There are standards,
conformity and value placed on objects. Are any
deviations allowed? Is any 14th-century painting of
the Virgin Mary not beautiful? Francis Fukuyama
wrote of the end of history. Is there then an end of
beauty?
Key players who also set rules are the beauty and
fashion industries ably assisted by the advertising
industry. Highly gender biased, their job is to make
women ‘beautiful.’ Products such as Fair and Lovely
make the dark feel insecure. In fact, these industries
specialize in insecurity. There is constant and
incessant change, modification, acceptance and
rejection of products, a process that itself conditions
consumers. Can we assume that the beholder
makes an independent decision bereft of influence
or response? Do we accept the advertising industry’s
claim that ‘we respond to individual wants, not
shape them’?
Kitsch has won. By kitsch is meant “popular,
commercial art and literature, with their magazine
covers, illustrations, advertisements, pulp fiction,
comics, tinpan alley music, Hollywood movies etc.”
– the folk art of our time. “Fantasy resides in film stars,
perfume ads, beauty and the beast situations,
terrible deaths and sexy women. The sexy model is
shaped by datable fashion as well as by timeless
lust. Thus, the mass arts orient the consumer in current
styles, even when they seem purely, timelessly erotic
and fantastic. They give us perpetual lessons in
assimilation.”9
We live in a world where a beautifully executed
military maneuver kills hundreds of people. An
artistic image can depict a morally praiseworthy or
blameworthy act, but the image itself, as such, is
neither. But if art is beyond morals, the artist is not.
beauty
Hitler’s favorite film director Leni Riefenstahl, writing
in Cahier’s Du Cinema in 1966, insisted that “Triumph
of the Will” was only a documentary. Actually, it is a
hypnotic rendering of the Nazi party rally in
Nuremberg in 1934, one of the most impressive
pseudo events ever staged for camera. After the
war she insisted that she was not a Nazi party
member, but she was placed in an internment
camp. She claimed that she had made “a purely
historical film.” No one can dispute the impact of
the startling compositions and editing, grand design,
power and structure of certain sequences. Some of
the depicted camps were designed as streamlined
factories intended to incinerate races and bodies
of individuals, by the millions.
Finally, does gender play a role in aesthetics? I
believe that there are more differences among
women and among men than between men and
women. Does a poor painting by a woman artist
get accolades over a good painting by a male
artist, if the beholder is a woman? Should the
beholder recognize the distinction? I see Frida Kahlo
first as a great artist and not as a great woman artist.
Gender is a system of assigned meaning, and
gender roles are socially and not biologically
determined. After all, Margaret Hungerford’s quote
referenced the beauty of a w oman, as did
Shakespeare. Similarly, how many women beholders
are aware of great women artists such as Suzanne
Valadon, Kathe Kollwitz, Olga Rozanova or Agnes
Martin? Obviously, regardless of gender, the
beholder’s level of cultural education (of their
culture and others’) is crucial.
“Appreciation of visual form is something which must
be acquired. It is only that which is seen clearly,
which can hold some meaning for us.” 10
1
Kristen L. Zacharias, “World of the Body,” answers.com.
2
Roger Fry, “An Essay on Aesthetics” (1909), in Charles Harris and Paul 15
Wood, eds, Art in Theory 1900-1990 Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 1992.
Choice is Power | OPTIONS 2009
3
Ibid.
4
Roger Fry, “An Essay on Aesthetics.”
5
Clive Bell, “The Aesthetic Hypothesis,” (1914), in Charles Harris and Paul
Wood, eds, Art in Theory 1900-1990
6
Anthony F. Janson, History of Art Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, Inc.,
1991.
7
Clive Bell, “The Aesthetic Hypothesis.”
8
Adolph Hitler, “Speech Inaugurating the ‘Great Exhibition of German
Art’” (1937), in Charles Harris and Paul Wood, eds,
Art in Theory 1900-1990
9
Lawrence Alloway, “The Arts and the Mass Media,” in Charles Harris
and Paul Wood, eds, Art in Theory 1900-1990
10
August Endell, “The Beauty of Form and Decorative Art” (1897-98), in
Charles Harris and Paul Wood, eds, Art in Theory 1900-1990
 She comes closer, and you realize that she carries a
stump. You blink a little. Yes, she carries a stump.
Great figure, stunning face, but her stumpy arm
bothers you a little. In walks the next ravishing
beauty. Wait! She is not walking! She is actually
smoothly rolling in on a Mercedes-like wheelchair.
Something feels wrong, terribly wrong. Before you
can figure out what exactly it is, the next woman
walks in with visible braces around her arms. Perhaps
it is the new fashion? Perhaps they are extended

http://images.chinagate.cn
designer bracelets? The final woman enters. At last,
at least she seems to be perfect in every way,
unembellished and non-discomforting. But wait, as
you admire her smooth, long legs beneath her short,

The Beauty of
tight, figure-hugging dress, you realize that they
have an unnatural, plastic gleam. You look closer,
no offence to her, after all you are a decent,

the Beast
respectable person. You suddenly realize that she
is wearing lower limb prostheses! Conflicting feelings
swarm through your head: attraction, repulsion,
confusion. Yes, it’s kind of kinky. That’s probably what
the designer was thinking. But still, all this queerness

S he burns the catwalk with her

feels like a dream… a bad dream.

confident strides, eyes fixed on no one ‘Stylish, sassy, classy… disabled?’ Thus reads the

in particular, seducing, teasing, with an promotional tagline of Britain’s Missing Top Model.
Fashioned around prime time reality shows like
expressionless face that is incompara-
America’s Next Top Model, Britain’s Missing Top
ble in beauty to even Helen’s visage
Model features eight ‘disabled’ women trying to
which set a thousand ships sailing
make their way into the glamorously cut-throat
across the Aegean. She is the epitome world of Super Model careers. At the outset, the
of female beauty. She is a super show is designed to challenge concepts of beauty
model. She is graced with the perfect and disability which are most often than not seen
figure, even if it meant living on an as occupying mutually exclusive spaces.
anorexic diet of air and water. How Contestants vie for a place on the cover of Marie

small is the cost of near starvation Claire, with dramatic eliminations, cat fights and
teary goodbyes so emblematic of such shows.
compared to constant admiration and
Interestingly, unlike in other Top Model shows, the
16
multimillion dollar contracts with mega
winner of Britain’s Missing Top Model does not
brand designers?
Choice is Power | OPTIONS 2009

automatically get a modelling contract. She is

Niluka Gunawardena
Niluka is a perpetual student who is fascinated by
the preoccupation of human societies with creatively
disabling constructions of ‘bodies’. She will fuel this
obsession by embarking on a MA in Disability and
Gender at the University of Leeds in September.
followed to a modelling agency by cameramen for
a casting call to see if she would be ’accepted’
into the world of professional modelling amidst
‘normal’ models.
Disability, be it visible or invisible, has been
traditionally seen as an anomaly, freakery and
abomination unfit to meet the gaze of ‘normal’

people. Disability is an unwelcome reminder of the
inherent vulnerability and fickleness of youth, virility,
’beauty’ and other such obsessions. It has been
met with either social denial, with such ‘deformed’
minds and bodies being confined to the back rooms
of homes or institutions, or curiosity bordering on
perverse stares. Legacies such as Ripley’s Believe it
or Not continue to keep such entertainment alive.
With Reader’s Digest defining beauty as physical
symmetry, it is no w onder that persons w ith
disabilities AND ’normal’ people dismiss disability
into the realms of undesirable imperfection. In a
perfect world, many persons with disabilities do feel
ugly. This is compounded by cultures of shame and
pity as is prevalent in Sri Lanka. Socially, beauty is
intrinsically linked to sexuality. Living in a country
where even the mention of sexuality is taboo, there
is no such thing as sexuality for persons w ith
disabilities. At the most, such persons are treated as
asexual.
In the face of such biases and rigid notions of
beauty, will shows like Britain’s Missing Top Model
redefine our understanding of disability, beauty and
sexuality? Will it make us realize that a woman with
a disability is as Super Model worthy as any other?
In a world where even supposedly normal women
do not cut the mark for such status, such an
accomplishment by a perceivably imperfect
woman would be a herculean feat. Finally, young
girls with disabilities will have new Barbie doll figures
‘with a difference’ to admire. Perhaps disability will
even become sexy. Judging from comments made
about the show on disability related blogs like BBC’s
Ouch! (http://w w w .bbc.co.uk/ouch/), many
persons with disabilities feel a sense of validation,
or recognition and expression through Britain’s
Missing Top Model and other such beauty bending
shows that are cropping up around the world. Some
claim that such positive and even celebratory
portrayals of disability enable individuals with
imperfect bodies to embrace the image they see
in the mirror and to love their bodies. Certain bolder,
‘artsy’ San Franciscan live performances, which are
of a different league and genre, portray sex,
sexuality and politically incorrect but glaring notions
such as the ’Crip body’ in explicitly creative terms
beauty
under the tagline ’Sins Invalid: An Unashamed Claim
to Beauty in the Face of Invisibility‘. One who sees
this show may arguably never look at a disabled
person as asexual again!
Then again, the fact remains that many such shows
continue to redefine beauty in commercially
defined terms of objectification. Disabled beauties
in this context are typically Caucasian, middle class
women who can compensate for their missing
physical faculties by flaunting stunning figures and
si mi lar ’assets’. With neo-colonial ideal s of
womanhood revolving around a Caucasian Eve, it
is only recently that even ‘normal’ minority women
started getting a spot on Benetton ads. It is one
thing to claim that a disabled person is beautiful,
but it is nearly impossible to say that a Black or Asian
woman with a disability is beautiful. Even if such
women were ‘accommodated’ through some
implausible form of racial diversity or affirmative
action policy in the fashion world, self-enforced
’Eastern’ cultural mores (with questionable origins)
w oul d place them among the pantheon of
www.news.com.au
westernized cultural degenerates. Furthermore,
disability is seen as synonymous with conventional 17
Choice is Power | OPTIONS 2009
markers of ’ugliness’. This was indicated when a
participant at the 2008 South Asian People’s Forum
Disability Caucus raised the issue of dark skin being
a disability for South Asian women. This seemingly
trivial point is indicative of the most random, non-
essential nature in which disability, beauty, and
hence abnormality is created within our social
consciousness. Interestingly, such constructs, though
 beauty
seldom challenged, are highly politically and
economically convenient.
Disabled people can be beautiful if they can
conform as closely as possible to ‘normal’ people’s
definitions of beauty. It’s a matter of making up for
one’s deficiencies and fitting in. It is an added
dimension to the pressure of normalization faced
by individuals with disabilities. Somehow it is difficult
to see any redefinition of beauty in such a process
of standardization. In many pageants, disability is
defined in terms of visible disabilities, effectively
precluding individuals with invisible disabilities such
as visual impairment, auditory impairment or mental
illness and learning disabilities. Ironically, explicit or
’too visible’ disabilities like facial disfigurement are
used as an immediate disqualification.
It is highly unlikely that we will see a Disabled
Avurudu Kumari pageant in Sri Lanka any time soon.
Perhaps the absence of such objectification is a
blessing for individuals with disabilities. However,
many individuals with disabilities would rather bask
in their entitlement to social stereotypes than to be
deemed unworthy of such patriarchal, hetero-
normative privileges. There are countless women
with disabilities who would get married just to prove
that they too are worthy of marriage like other
‘normal’ women. It may be an indication of the
need to be desired, the need to be accepted within
exclusive definitions of beauty. There is an ironic
18
Choice is Power | OPTIONS 2009
need among disabled women to be subjected to
societal expectations and pressures that are taken
for granted and at times dismissed by countless
women. In a world where beauty can only be
conceived through enforced imaginations; socially
and commercially validating shows, pageants and
magazine covers may be among the few avenues
of repackaging the beauty (or the lack thereof) of
disability.
One still has to pause and wonder why sculptures
such as Venus de Milo and Alison Lapper Pregnant
are celebrated, while any real life woman with even
a remote resemblance is still looked upon with
revulsion. Perhaps such questions should be brushed
aside now that limbless women can be displayed
on strip posters.
Maybe the beast is finally transforming into a
handsome prince (or princess) upon receiving the
kiss of approval by commercial beauty pageants.
While reading the tale of Beauty and the Beast, one
may question why the Beast was never beautiful in
his own skin, why he had to be saved and beautified
through normalization. Somewhere down the line,
one wonders if the fairytale was ever really about
any radical transformation. After all, the Beast had
to become beautiful. Beauty never became the
beast. Is it really so difficult for one to see the Beauty
of the Beast?
Alison Lapper Pregnant by Marc Quinn
Pursuing the
Perfect Body
A h, that perfect body. We often dream about
it, don’t we? And what crazy things might some of
us do in pursuit of that tiny waist and that right-sized
nose. That’s not all either. Some wouldn’t stop till
they get their hands on that ultra expensive designer
dress which complements their perfect body
structure. And, when these crazy things get out of
hand, well, that’s when beauty turns ugly and takes
its toll on you.
Some women tend to believe that having the
perfect look or perfect body would make their lives
perfectly happy. So they work hard to achieve it.
They work out vigorously, they try diets, without really
know ing much about w hat they’re getti ng
themselves into.
Fail ure to attai n thi s perfect body leads to
disappointment, frustration, low self-worth and a
sense of inadequacy. There is also confusion,
unhappiness, misery and insecurity.
And to some, attaining that perfect body can
become an obsession, a never ending cycle,
resulting in more stress and more anxiety.
Madhushala Senaratne
Madhushala Senaratne is a freelance writer with a
degree in International Relations and Media from
Keele University, UK
stock.xchng.com
“There will always be something that they are
unhappy with, like their nose being too big, their
ears too large, or their breasts too small,” says
dietitian Sigrid De Silva. “Then they try to change
the way they look and when they can’t do that,
when they can’t achieve that perfect body, they
feel like a failure.”
As we know, perfection comes at a price. Suffering
for beauty is a concept familiar to many women, in
many cultures. Ten-foot bandages were used to
bind the feet of Chinese girls into four-inch ‘golden
lotuses’. In 16th century Europe, women wore corsets
to flatten their breasts and abdomen to obtain that
perfect body. Corsets, physicians warned then, can
displace and damage internal organs and affect
the breathing mechanisms. Miscarriages were
known to result in pregnant women who insisted on
corsets.
As time went by, the ideal body image changed.
Full hips and bustline became the norm and it is said
that some w omen even had their lower ribs
removed to attain this perfect body. 19
Choice is Power | OPTIONS 2009
Tattoos, piercing, high heels and cosmetics are all
part and parcel of that perfect body image, and
they all have their consequences. Tattooing and ear
piercing can lead to serious infections. Chemicals
in cosmetics can be poisonous. Diet pills are not safe
 beauty

either. Plastic surgery can result in loss of blood and
other complications, while silicone implants can
result in breast cancer. And yes, there’s something
that many of us already know: high heels can cause
lower back pain.
Many women tend to go on diets to get into shape.
However, even here, if you’re not careful enough,
it can have a negative impact on your health. “For
instance,” explains Sigrid de Silva, “your body
demands certain nutrition, such as carbohydrates,
protein, fat, vitamin, minerals and water. If, as a result
of the diet you are following, your body lacks these,
then it’s not very wise to follow such a diet. Lack of
these basic elements can result in imbalance and
loss of hair.” It is important then to have a good
understanding about your diet and how it may
affect your body.
Women often exercise. However, gone are the days
when this was a pleasurable activity. You need to
be careful while exercising, warns Sigrid de Silva,
and be aware of the way your body is being used.
Having worked in the psycho-social field, Asela
Abeywardene believes that being addicted to the
notion of the ‘perfect body’ can be harmful to a
person’s mind, body and health. She explains that
we have to be in control of ourselves and not give
into what others may think is perfect. “When we lose
control over our own lives and give into what ‘others
would think of me’ then we lose track of who we
are and what our true calling in life should be. We
place value on something that others think of as
important and try to live our lives to please the
world.”
misunderstood and dismissed as choices made by
women obsessed with their weight. But, she says,
“they can be as lethal as guns”, leading to
“emotional pain and existential dread”. Recovery
must focus on the discovery of a sense of self in the
individual suffering from these illnesses. 1
Anorexia nervosa is characterized by low body
weight, body image distortion and an obsessive fear
of gaining weight. People who suffer from it are said
to control body weight through voluntary starvation,
purging, and excessive exercise or by using diet pills.
Bulimia nervosa is a pattern of binge eating, which
involves consumption of large amounts of food in a
short space of time and then crash dieting,
overexercising and purging to compensate for the
excessive caloric intake. Feelings of disgust and guilt,
resulting from binge eating can also lead to
depression.
So, is there such a thing as the perfect body?
“The notion of the ‘perfect body’ is a relative
concept and depends on your cultural context, time
and of course, individual perceptions”, Liu says,
adding that how we deal with this notion or image
is vital.
For those pursuing that perfect body, Sigrid de Silva
has this to say:”We shouldn’t think of it in terms of
the perfect body, because there’s nothing like that
really and nobody is perfect. What’s important is a
healthy body and that’s what you should aim for.
So, as long as your diets and exercises keep you
healthy and happy, then it’s fine that you do it. But
never compromise on your health.”

We often hear of eating disorders and related

illnesses. Aimee Liu who wrote Gaining: the truth
1
Liu, Aimee, (2009) The Perfect Pantomime, Ms. Magazine, Spring issue.
20 about life after eating disorders, warns of the
Choice is Power | OPTIONS 2009

dangers of eating disorders such as anorexia

nervosa and bulimia nervosa, which are often

There is no excellent beauty that hath not

some strangeness in the proportion.
Francis Bacon
 aseachange.com B&W
A n eighteen-year-old student has come to
me with a request. Her father wished to give her
a present for passing her exams and what she
w ants i s a face transplant. A new face.
Something she had learned from television was
possible.

I look in bewilderment at her flawless skin and

glowing face. I feel real pity at her lack of self
esteem. Her face, she thinks, is too dark and too
Asian; brainwashed by the images in women’s
magazines and other media, she wants a more
anglicized version.

This business of
What precisel y i s the rol e of a pl astic and
reconstructive surgeon?

We restore, rebuild and make whole those parts

which nature has given, but fortune has taken away,
not so much that it may delight the eye, but that
beautification
they may buoy the spirit and help the mind of the
afflicted.

Gaspare Tagliacozzi, plastic surgeon, 1570

There are times when nature results in distortions or

anomalies that cannot be modified by diets, lifestyle now disturbs me in more ways than one. We have
changes or exercise, and that is where surgical become victims of the illusion created in our minds
expertise and artistry can come together. But surgery by images in the media and clever marketing - an
for vanity is mere trivialization of our uniqueness, a unreal ideal of beauty. The desired result seems to
submission to the market. be to make us all fit into the same mould, much like
a boring plastic doll.
To me beauty has always been an intangible
something – an attitude, an essence of something Fairness 21
Choice is Power | OPTIONS 2009

that defies exactness and sameness. So what I see No longer is beauty something unique and original.
It is about us all looking the idealized same. Perhaps
never has it been more apparent as in the obsession
with fairness. Everyone wants to be lighter - ’fairer’.
But why? Some fairness advertisements make me
Chandini Perera
Dr. Chandini Perera is a Consultant Plastic Surgeon
heading the Burns and Reconstructive Surgical Unit
of the National Hospital of Sri Lanka. She currently
focuses on burn reconstruction and rehabilitation
and is concerned about violence and burns. She
has an ongoing and abiding interest in trends of
beauty and beautification.
 beauty

cringe. Your intrinsic value, skills and ability all Ageing

diminish in comparison to the color of your face. From miracle creams to a multitude of vitamins the
And what happens to the rest of your body or does anti-ageing gimmicks go on and on. There are
being fair matter only to facial skin? So we have instant fixes to look younger. We are still years away
millions of brown skinned Asian girls scrubbing, from knowing the side effects of some of these
abradi ng, scrapi ng, bleachi ng and literal ly procedures. When all wrinkles are erased, faces
tormenting their otherwise perfectly flawless skins, sometimes become mask-like, lacking definition. Is
(that are pigmented to tolerate our hot tropical sun) that actually beautiful? The need for such a face
to be ‘fair’. If we are not fair we are less beautiful. completely baffles me. While some rare exceptions
Darker pigmented races are blessed with skin that may require surgical attention, a line or two in an
ages well (provided you do not torment it!), with ageing face can actually add to character and
minimum maintenance. But common and good beauty.
sense seems to have deserted us. Natural anti-
ageing treatments are as ancient as our culture Weight loss and liposuction
itself. Rituals of beauty were a part of every Asian
Removing fat using vacuum suction does reduce
woman’s life - massage, the use of natural essential
fat volume and distribution but it is really an invasive
oils, flowers and pastes from materials all found in
surgical procedure for localized indications. It is
every home and garden. These rituals w ere
certainly not a quick fix weight loss method. Weight
abandoned as we became urbanized, settling for
gain is the result of consuming more calories than
a quick shower, bottled soaps, aerosols… until we
we expend. Obesity is the disease of the century.
have come full circle and spas are in, but only for
Food has lost its primary reason for being consumed;
the rich!
that is, to provide energy and nutrition. It is now
either a fashion statement or a political issue and
For Asians beautification was not just for special
we struggle between morbid obesity and anorexia.
occasions but part of dail y l ife, as w as
The Big Question is: How can we have it all? How
ornamentation and adornment. Modern l ife
do we eat as much as we like of food we do not
trivialized these rituals, discarding the therapeutic
need and fit into clothes that teens wear? The
and anti-ageing effects of those regimens. It was
answer, of course, is liposuction or the latest fad
not limited to queens but also a part of ordinary
Bariatric Surgery. And the surgery is not without side
day to day village life. Sandalwood, rose essence,
effects – it can leave you tired and nutritionally
henna, or kajol were affordable everyday cosmetics
depleted!.
used by a temple dancer, queen or woman at work
in the fields.
Real beauty is not boring. It can shock or mesmerize,
but it can never bore. Is it really being cosmopolitan
Exercise too, was natural to an Asian lifestyle which
or cool when we want to rid ourselves of all things
involved much physical work outdoors and walking.
22 Asian, whether the colour of our skin, the waviness
Lack of exposure to sunlight, ventilation or exercise
or length of our hair, the shape of our bodies, the
Choice is Power | OPTIONS 2009

leads to stress, bad posture, mood swings and early

slant of our eyes, the shape of our lips? Is the tradeoff
ageing. Obesity, the result of poor dietary habits and
worth it?
lack of exercise (not to mention prolonged sitting
and reclining), was rare in our ancient cultures. These
ills cannot be reversed by mere diets or gyms. The
lifestyle must suit the conditions of the environment.
A young girl peruses her wardrobe, looking for
the perfect outfit. At the cusp of adolescence, she
is just beginning to care about how she looks,
shooting shy glances at her reflection as she
mentally models and then discards item upon item
of clothing. She looks at her twin, who is mirroring
her actions and for a moment their eyes meet. “I
h av e no th i n g to w ea r ,” s h e e x cl a i ms w i th
con v i cti o n a n d h e r tw i n s i g h s h e a vi l y i n
agreement. “I know.” Pablo Picasso. Girl Before a Mirror. 1932.
The Museum of Modern Arts, New York, NY, USA.

Their mother walks in and regards this typically

teenage exchange, taking care not to let her

Getting there
amusement show . Her tw ins are completely
different: one is thin (so much so that it is a
despairing exercise to find clothes that fit her) and
tall, with the darker skin of her husband, while the
other has inherited her fairer colour and short
stature. She watches as this one tries on a top that
is getting a little too tight and purses her lips.
“I have nothing to
“Darling, you’re putting on a little weight,” she
says, before remembering something she has to wear,” she exclaims
do and walking away. with conviction and
The casual statement turns the girl to stone. The her twin sighs
hands tugging off the t-shirt freeze mid-tug; she heavily in agreement.
had been about to say something to her twin but
her voice cuts off. An ugly blush pricks at her
“I know.”
cheeks and her eyes feel hot with tears she didn’t
kno w w e re there . He r si ster has n’t noti ced 23
anything and continues to fuss over her clothes,
Choice is Power | OPTIONS 2009

all too loose.

Tari Wickremeratne
Tarika does not think herself a writer, but can best
express herself when words flow from her pen. She
does not think herself a singer, but fantasizes about
singing jazz in smoky bars straight out of classic noir
movies. She does not think herself a journalist but works
in the media, wide-eyed and learning all the time.
 beauty
Seconds later, when she is able to move, it’s at
lightning speed. The party clothes come off, the
loose PJs come back on, she grabs her diary and
runs off to be alone with her pen.
Why didn’t anyone tell me I was fat? Her writing is
hurried and messy, as it usually is when she is
distressed. Despised tears fall on the page and
she dashes them away impatiently, suddenly
angry, looking for someone to blame. Why hadn’t
anyone warned her? How had she not been able
to see it? Why did they wait till she was fat to say
a n yth i ng ? No w on d e r s h e l o o ke d aw f u l i n
everything.
The writing soothes. She sits alone for a long time
and after a while, calms down. But when she goes
back to her room, she views everything with new,
mortified eyes. Her reflection is no longer an old
friend. Her twin is a constant reminder of what her
own body isn’t like. Every item of clothing is
something that could potentially make her look
terrible. Chocolates, ice cream, cakes, and all her
other favourite sweets – which she found she still
could not resist despite this new, ugly revelation –
were now pleasures always accompanied with
guilt.
Her mother watches her moody child over the next
few weeks, sensing a change. Always a slow
eater, now she dawdles over her food for even
longer, announcing that she is full before she can
eat two bites. Shopping sprees that made her
whoop in delight now no longer elicit the same
reaction: instead of zooming amongst the clothes
in double time she walks through the mall with
dragging feet.
24
“
Choice is Power | OPTIONS 2009
The highs make you soar but the lows
feel like rock bottom, every time.
At a l ater date, she stands i n the doorw ay
watching her twins getting ready for another
party. There they are, with their wardrobes flung
open, rooting as one through masses of glitter-
spangled tops and skirts. The thinner twin throws
up her hands in frustration. “I have nothing to
wear!” she announces melodramatically. The
other sits on the bed, facing away from the mirror,
arms folded tightly against her chest. Her eyes are
set in a hard glower as she mutters darkly, “I
know.”
~ ~ ~
My reaction at 13 may have been over the top,
but at that age, everything is exaggerated a
hundred-fold. The highs make you soar but the
lows feel like rock bottom, every time. My mother’s
com m e nt w as a h a r ml e s s o n e, b ut to m y
m e l o d r am a ti c 1 3- y e ar - o l d s e l f , i t w as a
devastatingly cold look at reality.
The comment itself lost its sting quite quickly, but
i t w a s a t tha t p o i n t tha t I b e ca m e al m os t
obsessively aware of my weight. So much so that
I remember my teenage years being dominated
by w eight-related insecurities, helped along
generously of course by relatives and the teachers
at school who never hesitated to inform me if I
had put on weight or label my twin “the thin one”
and me “the fat one”. Sri Lankans are well known
for their tact – rather, their complete lack thereof.
Clothes became a sore subject and food – well
food was just a whole other ball game. I tried
every diet known to womankind and most didn’t
do much. (When I reached ‘The Fat Diet’ – which
is simply a process where you get someone to
follow you around for a month telling you that
”

“ . . . after battling with my own
body image for so long, it is not
something I take for granted . . .
you’re fat every time you try to eat something – I
thought it was time to stop.) And as a staunch
hater of exercise, I didn’t get any help from that
department either. A few half-hearted attempts
at my mother’s aerobics class were all I could
manage.
It may seem silly and trivial, especially to someone
who’s never had to worry about weight problems,
but for a lot of kids growing up – girls and boys
alike – body image is a huge preoccupation. And
one, that if not controlled properly, could turn
tragically dangerous. Luckily, it never got to that
point for me, but I have seen in happen during
my school days and later, my years in college
abroad. There were a few times I had worried
family and friends take me aside and give me the
“you’re wasting away” speech but, as I ruefully
assured them each and every time, I loved my
food far too much to ever go that far.
I’ve never really thought too clinically about this
fixation with my weight, but I know I hooked all
my teenage insecurities onto it, becoming much
shyer than I used to be, preferring to stay silent
and not draw too much attention to myself,
inundated as I was with exceptionally skinny
friends.
T he f un n y th i ng w as , I w a s n e ve r te r r i b l y
overweight – just slightly heavier than I should
have been.
Skipping ahead 11 years to today, I am happy to
say that I am finally happy with my body and the
way I look in general.
And, after battling with my own body image for
so long, it is not something I take for granted: I
f ee l i t ev e ry ti me I am a t a m a l l a n d ca n
confidently take only an S or XS to try on in the
fitting room. Instead of before when I’d take an
beauty
”
M and S, knowing I’d probably not fit into either,
for the same reason.
It’s nice to look in the mirror and appreciate my
reflection instead of contorting myself in all
manner of ways to see how I should stand or sit to
look thinner.
My greatest triumph, though, was earlier this year,
w hen I fi shed out an ol d pair of jeans that
belonged to my twin – I slid them cautiously up
my thighs… over my hips… gingerly zipped up all
the way… and finally buttoned it with a flourish.
What a moment! These were jeans that, before, I
couldn’t get past my knees.
Am I proud of it?
My mother jokingly (or not so jokingly!) calls me
vain because I am still fairly preoccupied with my
body and how I look. A small percentage of me
isn’t proud of this but I generally think it’s okay to
want to look good and feel good accordingly.
And going after this goal within the limits of a
healthy lifestyle is fine, as long as it’s not allowed
to control or ruin a life. I realize though, that this
line is a difficult one to draw – a line I have
struggled with myself.
Still, feeling comfortable and happy with my body
is quite a novel experience for me and it gives
me a kind of confidence I’ve never enjoyed
before. And for a painfully shy kid lugging a heavy
25
bag full of insecurities around with her, I think
Choice is Power | OPTIONS 2009
that’s an achievement.
So, how did I manage to get there? The recipe: a
sister’s wedding, a bad break-up and rigorous
practices for a stage performance. Apparently it’s
when you stop trying so hard that it all starts
happening. A life lesson if I ever heard one.
 26
Choice is Power | OPTIONS 2009

Untitled
Priyanthi Anusha
Beauty:
The Delusion of
Our Time.
It is amazing how complete is
the delusion that beauty is goodness. 
Leo Tolstoy

A few years ago I was a reader for a friend

who was in the process of editing her landmark
and in the coveting of women, disassociation with
the female aspects of their character, as well as
book, Packaging Girlhood (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). their primary female role-models, their
The book deals with the ways in which American mothers and sisters, and w ith the
marketing targets girls the world over, giving them suppression of their vulnerability. For
only two iterations of womanhood: red hot/fiery both women and men, the pursuit of
sexpot or pink/sweet and pretty. Toward this end, ‘beauty’ or self-defining their
she argues convincingly, American corporations contribution to the world in terms
have built a veritable cultural baklava of advertising of their physical attributes, leads
whose sticky layers take a female human from the to the stunting of their human
cradle to the grave down two paths that ‘empower’ spirit rather than its upliftment.
her to judge herself by the ways in which men
respond to her, carefully avoiding the ‘pitfall’ of The fads that surround the
measuring her worth by her contribution to the defi nition of beauty have
common human enterpri se of i ntell ectual w axed and w aned over the
development, personal affirmation through the centuries, and the most pervasive
pursuit of her innate talents or indeed any means fact about them is this: they
that do not include the purchase of an over-the- change. Flow er pow er, bell
counter accoutrement: a pot, a portion, a garment, bottoms, painted-on jeans, thick
a shoe or, worst of all, a Lifestyle. Lyn Mikel Brown’s thighs, thin ones, long hair, punk rock,
second book on the subject tackles the same issue leg-warmers (even in hot countries),
but this time with a focus on boys. Boys, too, are 27
baggy sweatshirts, mini skirts, wedge
Choice is Power | OPTIONS 2009

similarly packaged except that for them, their heels, open toes, Roman sandals,
‘beauty’ lies in aggressiveness toward each other bi g chests, di mi nutive ones,
androgynous men, Hulk Hogan
look alikes, all of these come but
they also go. Why, precisely,
Ru Freeman are we preoccupied then
Ru Freeman’s creative and political writing has with the business, for it is
appeared internationally. Her debut novel, A
Disobedient Girl was published in the US and Canada that, of the acquisition of
by Atria/Simon & Schuster in July, 2009, by Viking in
the UK and in translation in Italy, Israel, Taiwan, Brazil
and the Netherlands.

beauty as though it were a constant upon whose
make up we have all agreed?
That there are certain men and women among us
who possess physical beauty is not in dispute; but
there are a few ponderables. The first of these is
why advertisers the world over attempt to sell the
idea that there is only one version of that physical
beauty? I f there i s some truth, universal ly
acknowledged, that there is a set of criteria that
defines beauty, then the ability to recognize it best
must be in the hands of the advertisers who promote
that ideal of beauty. Is it that ability that persuades
advertising executives in charge of Billboards from
Chicago, Illinois to Colombo, Sri Lanka to depict
men and women with cleft chins, smooth hair and
chiselled jaws as though we are all in line to evolve
toward a sadly circumscribed model of physical
perfection? Thus in Sri Lanka we have the sheer
absurdity of billboards depicting blonde men and
women to sell brown men and women everything
from shampoo to cell phones. Scratch the surface,
though, and what you find is
that the ski nny model
competing for Miss Sri
Lanka has nothing on the
curvy village girl from
Haputale, as far as the
majority of Sri Lankans
are concerned, and
that the l ong-
haired kurta-
clad Colombo
7 sw inger has
no appeal whatsoever – except, perhaps, the comic
– for the young women of Ratnapura. In other words,
and this is the best way to say it: beauty is and shall
remain in the eye of the beholder, and beholders
have a way of being informed by their particular
28 cultures, their socio-economic conditioning and the
sum of their experiences. There is no single model
Choice is Power | OPTIONS 2009
of human beauty that we can agree upon, which
makes the pursuit of any single form of it, devoid of
the cultural context of the pursuant, absurd.
Throughout history, the people who achieved great
things and, in the case of Hitler or Gaddafi or
... in Sri Lanka we have the
sheer absurdity of billboards
depicting blonde men and
women to sell brown men
and women everything from
shampoo to cell phones.
Mugabe, terrible things, were those whose primary
appeal w as their charisma. Does anybody
remember what handsome Prince Andrew, the
Duke of York has accomplished during the 49 years
of his life? Probably not. Nobody has forgotten,
however, that the Princess of Wales dismantled the
prejudices against patients suffering from AIDS and
leprosy, campaigned for the end of the use of
landmines, an effort lauded by the Nobel Prize
committee after her death. Was she beautiful?
Absolutely, in an English fashion, but beauty was not
her legacy. If that had been the only thing she had,
her death would have elicited no more than
sympathy; it would have been a loss for children
and friends, but not a great or significant one for
the world.
A previous American president, Theodore Roosevelt,
created the New Deal which led to the end of the
Great Depression, and ruled this country for thirteen
years from his wheelchair. Eleanor Roosevelt, the
most beloved of all American First Ladies, was a
woman whose appearance was distinctive for its
demerits rather than its beauty. JFK is remembered
for his handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis and his
assumed commitment to
ending America’s untenable
war in Vietnam; his looks
were noted but they were
noted alongside those
contributions to this nation’s
history and without those
contributions his looks
w oul d have not
mattered a w hi t.
George W. Bush
worked out every

day and many women found him charming, but he
is one of the most loathed leaders this country has
ever known, a fact that no amount of public
relations and highly paid marketing firms could
counter. And pretty Sara Palin and the suave Bobby
Jindal, two future contenders for the presidency
have found that looking good may take you as far
as the stage, but when the curtain rises on your act,
it comes down to intelligence and character.
L’Oréal and Pantene and Christian Dior can make
you look good but they can’t stand in for those
things that truly set the blessed apart from the
doomed.
That male and female physical beauty, as it is
defined by global marketing, is attainable, in the
way that any quick-fix is attainable is, perhaps, the
reason why it becomes the lazy person’s path to
self-fulfilment. Thrice weekly workouts, a little
foundation, a nip and a tuck for those who can
afford it, and creative dressing can transform the
least of us into aesthetically pleasing mobile
artifices. Which is fine if one is driving by in a fast car
and simply taking in the scenery. If, however, as we
human being are programmed to do, we want to
dismount, take a walk, and gaze at our chosen thing
of beauty, engage it, have a conversation, physical
appearance alone accomplishes very little. The
most famous characters in literature were those
whose outward appearance should have – if we
are to believe American advertising – condemned
them to a life of dishonour, tucked away with the
That male and female
physical beauty, as it is
defined by global marketing,
is attainable, in the way that
any quick-fix is attainable is,
perhaps, the reason why it
becomes the lazy person’s
path to self-fulfilment.
beauty
things that live under rugs and rocks. But consider
Victor Hugo’s Quasimodo, from The Hunchback of
Notre Dame or Jean Valjean from Les Misrables, or
Twain’s Huckleberry Finn from Tom Sawyer, or
Austen’s Jane Eyre; none of these characters were
renowned for their beauty, and yet they have
proved to be characters who transcend all cultures
to occupy each new generation of readers with
their sensibilities. And among those characters
whose physical appearance is described as being
pleasing in novels and stories dedicated to them -
Lolita, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, the Count
of Monte Cristo – it is not, ultimately, the surfaces of
their skin or the tilt of their
chins which resonate with
us, but the exposition of
their character.
These days, American
men and women alike
emulate not the designer
of the week, but the intellect
of thei r ti me: l egi ons of
American women have given
up panty hose and bared their legs because they
w i sh to have First Lady Mi chell e Obama’s
confidence. Not her legs, not her shoe size, her
confidence. And Black men in poor neighbourhoods
are trading in gangsta pants for weekend casual
slacks and the sobriety of ties. Obama’s clean
shaven face is a bonus, but these men aren’t after
his looks, they are after his example and they are
fully aware of the fact that his exemplary personal
life did not rise from the angle of his swagger but
the bent of hi s mind.
Perhaps the advertising
world will finally catch up
with this century.
29
Choice is Power | OPTIONS 2009
 Miss Moti and the Ultra Girl
Artwork created for Secret Identities -
The Asian American Superhero Anthology Exhibition

K ripa Joshi is an Illustrator and Comic Artist from Nepal. She completed her undergraduate degree in
Painting from Maharaja Sayaraja Sayajirao University in Baroda, India and worked as an Art teacher in
schools in Nepal.

In 2007, she completed her MFA in Illustration from the School of Visual Arts in New York City as a Fulbright
Scholar. At SVA she developed a visual language that was inspired by folk art traditions like the Maithali
paintings of Nepal.

Introduced to the rich genre of comics and graphic novels, Kripa created her own comics with a protagonist
called Miss. Moti. Humour has always been an important aspect of her work. The character of Miss. Moti,
developed from the artist’s own struggle with her weight and body image issues, stands as an unlikely hero
at a time when the world is obsessed with appearance.

Miss. Moti is big, plump and seemingly ordinary. However, as the stories unfold, it becomes clear that she
is indeed extraordinary. The word ‘Moti’ when pronounced with a sharp T means a plump woman in Nepali.
But when pronounced with a softer T, it means pearl.

30
Choice is Power | OPTIONS 2009
 31
Choice is Power | OPTIONS 2009
 32
Choice is Power | OPTIONS 2009
CUPID IN THE POOL
Review of The Boy
by Germaine Greer
Thames & Hudson, 2007.
Love Triumphant, Caravaggio (c. 1599)
“This is a book about male beauty…
Students of English as a foreign
language are taught that it is incorrect in
English to use the word ‘beautiful’ for a
male. Good looking males should be
described as ‘handsome’. Handsome-
ness is not an aesthetic quality so much
as a moral quality: handsome is as
handsome does. This substitution of the
word ‘handsome’ for ‘beautiful’ when
referring to a male is the linguistic sign
of an implicit understanding that it is
wrong, demeaning even, to appreciate
men for their looks.”
I
recall that I once made the observation that one
of my sons (who was two at the time) was beautiful.
(I am sure, not an unusual feeling among many
adoring parents!) An older colleague of my parents
Sepali Kottegoda
Sepali Kottegoda is a founder member of the
Women and Media Collective. She wishes she had
more time to read the books her three sons are
reading, particularly those that transport her into the
realm of science fiction and fantasy.
quickly corrected me that “one does not refer to boys
as being beautiful but as good looking.” With three
sons to show for my exercise of Reproductive Rights,
I feel that I have had much time and evidence to
examine this debate on male beauty first hand.
Beauty, many of us are prone to imagine, is very much
to do with girls and women; as Greer observes, and
I found out, some of us remain a little uncomfortable
with using words like ‘beautiful’ to describe boys or
men.
Greer examines the milestones set in different cultures
that denote the transition from boyhood to
manhood. She says, “Boyhood may be long,
beginning as soon as a male baby is weaned and
not ending until he is permitted to assume the insignia
of manhood, which may be as much as fifteen or
even twenty years later.” The rites of passage may
include shaving of the boy’s head, circumcision
inflicting deep cuts on the forehead, and sending
the boy off from home into schools which may
consider canings and birchings to facilitate this
process. Looking at my army of male beauties, I am
keenly aware that one key factor that influenced
my partner and me in the selection of a school for
‘our boys’, was the fact that the school had banned
caning as a means of turning little boys into
responsible men. Of course, the school, as do many
other schools for boys in this country, do adopt other
forms of strictures and ‘methods’ such as getting
students suspected or found ‘guilty’ of misdemeanors
to kneel for hours. The aim, it appears, is to drive home
the point that the passage of boys to men means
33
strict discipline through physical ‘torture’.
Choice is Power | OPTIONS 2009
Unfortunately, unlike in the examples given by Greer,
we don’t have any paintings or sculptures to illustrate
these rites of passage from our end.
Greer’s book has a long and interesting exploration
of icons of male beauty in western culture, illustrated
through paintings and sculptures from the 6th century
BC to the modern age and through some discussion
 Venus and Cupid, Lorenzo Lotto (c. 1540)

on literary works of writers such as Ben Johnson and that

Horace. Greer notes that the Greek kouroi, erect between the two
male nude youth sculptures, were all likely to be of us parents, we
identified with the Greek God Apollo w ho is may have
associated in western culture w ith physical actually pushed
perfection. The nude young male Apollo has been the boundaries of
adopted and adapted by countless sculptors and conventional wisdom
painters signifying the epitome of western cultural in relation to ‘what is a
vision of male youth and beauty. She brings in girl and what is a boy’.
modern western men such as the young Frank The father’s earrings
34 Sinatra, Elvis Presley and the heavily made-up Boy have also been a
George, who were/are considered icons of beauty. source of inspiration
S 2009

In our household, given that the father of my for the boys as the
Choice is Power | OPTIONS

children is fair skinned, has always had wild long
hair and wears earrings, and I am dark skinned,
have always had short hair and also wear earrings,
as a little boy, one of my sons asked me whether his
father was a girl or a boy. When I asked him why he
asked me that, the boy very seriously said: “Because
Appa has long hair and you have short hair.” When
I heard this argument, I confess I felt quite pleased
one or the other has asked me over the years,
whether they could also pierce their ears. Given
that earrings, bracelets and necklaces were very
much part of the beautifying accoutrement of our
ancient kings, we have told the boys, “after you
leave school,” giving them a few more years in
which to sharpen their own ideas on what might
further enhance their natural beauty!
 Wodaabe tribesman, Niger
Greer traces the emergence of images of Cupid as
the socially acceptable symbol that channels male
sexual desire. This acceptance of the portrayal of a
child armed with a bow and arrow as linked to sexual
desire turns the modern concept of the ‘innocence’
of childhood on its head, as exemplified by the
numerous illustrations of winged and mostly naked
Cupid, blindfolded or otherwise, by the Greeks, the
Italians, the French and the English that are included
in this book. The boy/youth is painted, sculpted or
written of accentuating the softness of his face, the
fullness of his lips; he is permitted to be seen
embracing or embraced by beautiful women,
inevitably older than him.
Reading through this description of little boys
presented as icons of beauty and mischief, reminded
me of an incident when one of my sons, who was
about three at the time, in his little swim shorts at a
pool, was surrounded by a party of adoring strangers
obviously struck by his angelic face, curly hair, soft
lips and long eye lashes. I watched as they cooed,
“Darling, you are SO sweet, what is our name? How
old are you?” My son watched them without a word.
“Why,” gushed one woman, “aren’t you speaking?
Have you lost your tongue? Tell me, what’s your
name, sweetheart?” Suddenly, from out of the pretty
soft lips of the little boy came the words, “Leave me
alone or I will cut your neck.” The adoring party
literally flinched, paled and hurried away from the
‘sweet and lovely’ little babe. I believe the incident
changed their perception of beautiful little boys as
obliging little angels somewhat.
Greer’s beautifully illustrated book, brings out clearly
the difference in the nature of the portrayal of male
and female bodies in mainstream western culture.
The photos used in the book convincingly show that
Elvis Presley
over the years, over centuries of western art, male
beauty has remained focused on the slim, long
limbed curly haired, fair skinned nude young men.
Taking off from where Greer has left the discussion
on beauty, I wonder whether there would be other
productions that might take this exploration of male
beauty further to include other forms or interpretations
of the subject of beautiful boys and men.
Having gone through year after year of the annual
school concert in the all-boys school my children go
to, where different dramas have boys from five years
to sixteen years dressed as boys or girls, men or
women, I have always been struck by how beautiful
boys look dressed as girls, in fact blurring the
differences between our perceptions of boys and
girls. I wonder whether we should proactively push
for a broadening of the narrow demarcations that
confine our sexual identities so that cross dressing
might be acceptable as fashion or otherwise, so that
we can relax when we can say and hear that boys
ARE in fact beautiful, clothed or not.
35
Choice is Power | OPTIONS 2009
 O
Saying
N
O
Oprah Winfrey: world famous talk show host
and business mogul who has appeared every single
year on Time’s list of the 100 World’s Most Influential
People ever since it began. There was a time, a long
time ago, when I did watch the Oprah show with
great admiration. But then I grew up enough to
to Oprah
behaviour are branded and then ‘rescued’, as those
in an enormous amount of debt are told off by Oprah
like they are naughty children. She has made her
millions selling the suffering of others. I have found
her to be vile, shallow and moronic at best, and in
the worst case, offensive and downright politically
realize that she is actually almost completely incorrect.
talentless. She is simply not funny, not smart, not
I was shocked recently to come across an episode
interesting, and not any of the things that it takes to
of the Oprah Winfrey Show, in which she, who claims

O
be mildly worth watching. Even worse, she is self-
to be a modern feminist and is constantly, allegedly
righteous, sanctimonious and all she does is judge
championing the cause of women, brought on
people and judge people and judge people. I have
women and gave them a ‘make over’ in order to
seen one too many episodes of her show where her
make them feel better about themselves.

guests are pressured and harangued with unfair
questions, then made to cry, and subsequently made
to believe that Oprah is always right and has saved
them, and they are ever so grateful to her for
changing their lives.
I cannot understand why Americans put themselves
on her show day after day, to have their self-worth
and self-respect stripped to shreds on national TV.
Basically, her fame and fortune rides on the basic
human instinct we all have which draws us to
another’s tragedy. Not w ith empathy
understanding, but with a morbid fascination that
keeps us hooked onto all the gory details. It’s like our
inability to drive by a car accident without stopping
36 and staring. Better yet, she is on to the fact that deep
Choice is Power | OPTIONS 2009
N
On this episode, they’d gotten together some single
mothers who were on average between 40-50 years
old. These women are working 2, sometimes 3 jobs
at the same time, taking care of 3-4 children and
keeping it all together, entirely on their own. Some
have come out of destructive relationships, some
have even experienced violence and abuse. These
women are heroes. They’re your real-life heroes. Was
their selflessness and their exemplary lifestyles of hard
work and sacrifice for their loved ones the focus of
or
the story? No. It was the fact they looked ten years
older than they actually were.
Oprah proceeds to take these women out of their
ordinary, honest lives, and puts each of them in the

down inside, we love watching someone else’s
calamity unfold in public. We sit glued as couples
discuss their problems, as those with anti-social
Subha Wijesiriwardena
Subha Wijesiriwardena is an actor, dancer and
blogger who lives in Colombo. Currently, she works
for the Galle Literary Festival.
‘truth box’: a transparent yet sound-proof booth
which sits on the middle of a crowded American
street. While they’re standing in there oblivious to the
noise outside, people are encouraged to stop, take
a look, and hazard a guess at the woman’s age.
Passers-by comment on the unkempt nature of each
of the women, in quite harsh and blunt terms, saying
their teeth are bad, their hair is bad, their skin is bad,

etc. etc., and everyone pegs each woman at being
(drum roll) ten years older than she actually is. That’s
the crux of the show.
It is probably important to mention at this point that
these women, although far from being the heavily
made-up, glamorous celebrities that Oprah
sometimes features on her show, are not in any way
even remotely ‘ugly’. They all look perfectly ordinary,
if a little tired. They are not obese, or unhealthy. They
are normal. Real.
OK. You could take them out, buy them some new
clothes, get them a decent hair cut and that would
still be a nice thing to do for these women, most of
whom don’t have the time, or the money to treat
themselves. Give them a cash prize in recognition of
how hard they work. Give them an award on
National TV for being brave women. But no, Oprah,
unsatisfied with the triumphant nature of the story as
it is, goes the extra mile.
Many of them burst into tears, discussing why they
have fallen into such negligence with their physical
appearances. They say that between abusive
relationships, children and keeping a real life in the
real world together, they have ‘forgotten to care for
themselves’. Sounds fair to me.
So, they are taken by Oprah to receive a full
makeover. And this full makeover doesn’t just entail
new clothes and a nice manicure. No, it goes into
all the horribly, intrinsically sexist, petty and mindless
glories of our time, all the things created to make
older women feel as though they need to remain
young forever, to make normal, every-day women
O
feel that they need to look like movie stars. It is all
the stuff that makes money from bringing women
down, and making them feel as though they need
to do it, or else. It is the stuff that was created to make
money by telling women that they simply are not
N
good enough or young enough, or pretty enough:
Botox, plastic surgery, the works.
Oprah treats these women to Botox injections, other
forms of plastic surgery, Lasik treatment, new teeth,
and on top of that, new hair cuts (which includes
colouring, bonding, straightening: all the ways in
which you can end up looking totally unlike yourself),
make up styled by a professional and new clothes,
w hich are more likely than not, completely
uncharacteristic of them.
beauty
O
Then they’re brought on the show, and made to
believe that now because they look better, they’re
supposed to ‘feel’ better about themselves. Now I
don’t doubt that these women did in fact feel a lot
better about themselves after this makeover. I’m
N
certain they gained a lot of self confidence and
became more assured and secure. But this is exactly
the point: the fact that we need to look good to feel
good is an archaic notion that has been stuffed down
the throats of women over centuries. Oprah should
be telling them exactly the opposite; she should be
telling them it’s OK to look a little scruffy because
they work so hard, that it’s OK to not have a haircut
every two weeks because they need to do more
important stuff. Why doesn’t Oprah give them the
right to feel confident anyway? Why doesn’t she
make them feel good about themselves, just as they
are? Why not make the show about how great they
are, which would have undoubtedly made them feel
w orthy and as though what they’re doing is
acknowledged? Why are they not worthy of being
given a pat on the back and put on Oprah without
being completely changed?
It is the ultimate power, having the power to influence
the way people think, the way they feel. A lot of
dangerous people wield that power in today’s world,
and Oprah is topping the list. The American
population is widely touched and affected by her
show. Globally too, she wields a fair amount of power
over the television watching masses. She has the
power to change people’s opinions on issues such
as these, but instead chooses to take the easier, more
superficial way out. She could just as easily say ‘How
you look is unimportant’ and have people believe
that. Instead, she pollutes their minds with silly and
small-minded ideas which to any civilized human
being, are just plain outdated.
I know she is a great philanthropist and I am always
glad when the willing help the needy. But she should
get off TV, or stick to interviewing celebrities. She is 37
just a marketing robot set up to make money and
Choice is Power | OPTIONS 2009
influence millions of people to buy stuff that they
don’t need and do stuff that they don’t need to do
and to feel things that they don’t need to be made
to feel.
One can only hope that next time someone is asked
to parade their story in front of the world on Oprah,
they have what it takes to say ‘No, thank you’.
 What
What comes
comes naturally
naturally
T here was a time when I thought I had as the
adage of my life what Hiratsuka Raicho espoused
in 1911: “The new woman today seeks neither beauty
nor virtue. She is simply crying out for strength. The
strength to create this still unknown kingdom.”
Then a mishap occurred which resulted in my facial
disfigurement. Adage forgotten, my instant reflex
was to go into hiding. I was not strong enough to
stand by my inner convictions, lost my sense of self-
worth and became a victim of social dictates. It
shows how much importance we attach to our
‘facades’.
Now, a few years later, slowly becoming ‘passable’
in appearance, I am cautiously peering out to see
in which way I can resurface in life. Certainly not as
a firebrand like Hiratsuka but made more subdued
and knowledgeable by my experience.
But beauty is a subject I still explore: within myself
and with others.
Upeksha Thabrew is the youthful activist and co-
ordinator of the Sri Lankan lesbian women’s support
group (wsg), which is now completing its tenth year.
“In the lesbian community, problems of beauty arise
because of differing individual attitudes and low
levels of gender awareness,” says Upeksha, holding
out her own self, decked in shirt and slacks and
sporting a short hair cut, as an example. “I may have
a butch look, but when I go to a party, I like to put
on a little lipstick because I acknowledge myself as
a woman.” Butch lesbians do not fancy make-up
and do not like to dress in feminine attire. But in
workplaces that have a dress code, they are forced
38
to discard jeans and short blouses and wear a saree.
Choice is Power | OPTIONS 2009
Says Upeksha: “It is not good to force dress norms on
people. What matters is the quality of a person. If
you have an understanding manager, such
problems can be resolved easily.”
Jayanthi Liyanage
Jayanthi Liyanage is a young journalist passionate
about the independence of women.
In the lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgendered
communities, masculine females go as butch,
feminine males go as queens and cross-dressing
females as drag kings and cross-dressing males as
drag queens. Feminine females are seen as femme.
A couple can be made up of a butch lesbian and a
femme lesbian and also of two butch lesbians or two
femme lesbians; but there is an expectation that a
couple is generally a butch and a femme.
k.p., another activist and member of wsg, promoting
the slim and long-haired femme look says that the
local lesbians are caught in the conflict of what the
lesbian community expects from them to look like
and what the outside broader community expects
from them. “What society expects from us is
conventional gender norms,” she says, “while in a
local lesbian gathering, lesbians are usually divided
into gender norms of either butch or femme. Sri
Lankan lesbians need to understand gender better.”
k.p. too is concerned about the need to keep
appearances at work: “In a place of informal work
ethics, the problem is minimized, but in a workplace
of strong hierarchies as in a bank, one has to
compromise with a uniform or the enforced dress
code. The women’s movement has campaigned
for the right to wear what one likes. In an open-
minded society, one can dress the way one wants.”
“Other than that, what the lesbian community thinks
of beauty issues is similar to that of mainstream
society,” says k.p., “yet due to the conflict of
expectations I mentioned earlier, if we are whistled
at or sexual innuendoes thrown at us in the workplace
or on the road, we are more conscious of harassment
than mainstream women.”
How do we stop feeling victimised by such issues and
become strategic diplomats of appearance and
personality for our w ell-being and personal
advancement? Perhaps the following mainstream
views from some women professionals carry a clue
or two which can be integrated into our outlook for
the future. Already ensconsed in the bipolarism of
gender, their bone of contention of beauty lies in
other areas. My hair and I
Hana Ibrahim, former editor of the Sunday Standard,
sums up her experience: “There is much more to a
woman than her beauty, though people may often
judge her initially on how she looks. In the media
world, what matters most is a woman’s intelligence,
her integrity and her ability. Of course, personal My hair and I
grooming matters. But looking fashionable isn’t what Have come to terms with each other
a female journalist should strive for. At the end of the We have a few minor skirmishes
day, she isn’t judged by how she looks, but by her But no longer a war of attrition.
work. Beauty alone wouldn’t get her the due I let it live
recognition as a journalist, nor would she get far in All over
her profession, if a pretty face and a good body was
my body
all she had to go by.”
It grows fruitfully on my legs, my arms
Carol Aloysius, Senior Sub Editor of the Nation and In soft humid armpits
veteran journalist, says that for people of her age, And on round fleshy thighs.
which is the sixties, beauty is a feature that comes In places it grows finely and faintly
from one’s inner being. “If you have inner beauty, In others thick and dark
your face glows and you radiate warmth and grow And we are at peace together
old gracefully.” Mostly.
But it still remembers the dark ages
Chameeliya Niroshi Ramanayake belongs to the new When it was torn off the face of its earth
generation of beauticians, educated in beauty With hotwax
culture as an acedemic discipline. “The challenge Or poisoned and dissolved away
for young beauticians like us is that we need to be With strange creams
educated about skin care, hair care, the latest trends Or viciously sliced in half
and the scientific aspects of beauty matters,” says With a razor.
Chameeliya. “Everybody has some imperfection Everything but genocide
and I see nothing wrong about consulting a With an electric needle.
beautician about improving your appearance. Why?
Whatever category you belong to, you’ve got an Because it was black and visisble
advantage if you are attractive.” Chameeliya sees And therefore ugly
her career progressing in the coming years: “I think,
and useless
as a beautician, I will have a very good future.”
But not all of it was terrorized
Where do all these points of view place me in the Some of it as grown long displayed loved
gender dillemma? Not withstanding tremendous Hypocrisy
pressure on me to cultivate a butch or a femme look, We discussed it
strongly protesting, I have moved tow ards Now we live and let live
somewhere midway to achieve a mix of the Mostly . . .
39
masculine and the feminine ends of the gender
Choice is Power | OPTIONS 2009

continuum. I think it is high time people understood

that gender cannot be just black or white, that there
are grey areas in the manner that individuals think of
their own selves. In other words, what comes Shabnam
naturally, is what you manifest naturally.
 New Homely
Doll to Improve
Self-Image of
Young Girls
EL SEGUNDO, CA—Executives at Mattel Inc. held a
press conference Monday to unveil the toy
company’s latest product, Plain Pamela, a homely
doll designed to boost the confidence of girls aged
7 to 12.
The pale, unsightly plaything, which has a plastic torso
scaled to the proportions of a 5-foot-4, 179-pound
woman in her mid-30s, is being touted as the first toy
expressly intended to raise the sense of physical and
emotional self-worth in preteen females.
“While we still value our classic Barbie franchise, we
understand the need for dolls that offer an alternative
body image,” Mattel CEO Robert Eckert said. “And
that’s why we’ve created Plain Pamela. She’s drab,
she’s dumpy, she’s nothing to write home about, and
she’s going to make the girls of America feel like
beauty queens.”
Added Eckert, “Relatively speaking.”
Mattel, which has been criticized in the past for
promoting unrealistic standards of beauty, claimed
that the new doll would not only improve the self-
esteem of growing girls, but would also give them
someone to feel superior to for hours on end.
Modestly priced at $7.99, each Plain Pamela doll
comes prepackaged with a variety of unflattering
and ill-fitting blouses to drape over her shapeless
torso, as well as a packet of paste-on psoriasis spots
to apply along her arms and back.
40
Mattel designers have also included a button at the
Choice is Power | OPTIONS 2009
base of the doll’s pudgy neck that randomly plays
one of 24 preprogrammed phrases, including “I wish
I was pretty like you,” “That’s okay, you go out and
have fun without me,” and “Ugh.”
“Kids today want toys that are highly customizable,”
Eckert said. “Which is why every Plain Pamela comes
with four interchangeable hairstyles: Just-Woke-Up,
Too-Long, Too-Short, and What’s-the-Point-of-Even-
Trying-Anymore-It’s-Not-Like-It’s-Going-to-Make-a-
Difference. Girls are going to love deciding which of
Pamela’s hairdos makes them look prettier by
comparison.”
“Plus, each doll comes with a variety of fun, ego-
enhancing features that will allow girls to feel better
about themselves as they help Pamela fit into her
size-14 doll pants or wipe refillable ‘tears’ from her
swollen face,” Eckert added. “This is a huge leap
forward in body-positive toys.”
Mattel plans in the future to sell a number of playsets
for the doll, including the Plain Pamela Cramped
Studio Apartment, complete with special Dinner-for-
One Kitchenette and Depressing Stack of Old People
Magazines.
If Plain Pamela catches on with kids, company
officials said, she may soon be joined by an entire
line of fun, psychologically reassuring friends. Already
in the works for the fall are Lil’-Too-Drunk Linda, whose
debilitating dependence on alcohol will make any
girl feel better about her own unstable home life,
and Plain Pamela’s Sympathetic Gay Friend, Craig.
Medical consultants for Mattel have confirmed that
the poorly postured and overly awkward doll can
effectively serve as an image-enhancing device for
children.
“Preliminary tests have shown that as little as one hour
of playtime with Plain Pamela can make even the
frumpiest, least self-assured young girl feel remarkably
positive about her own physical attributes,” Mattel
child psychologist Dr. Martin Janosch said. “Which, if
you’ve seen the Plain Pamela doll, is not entirely
surprising.”
Added Dr. Janosch, “She’s not exactly easy on the
eye.”
Mattel also announced that it w ould begin
production next year on Timorous Tim, a fey, cowardly
action figure designed to boost the confidence of
shy young boys.
Reprinted with permission of THE ONION
Copyright © 2009, by ONION, INC
www.theonion.com
cleansers, toners, foundation, blush, face
powder, lipstick, lip gloss, eyeliner, eye lip liner,
shadow, eyebrow pencil and mascara.But the
list doesn’t end there, nail polish, nail polish
remover, manicures, pedicures, fake fingernails,
fake eyelashes and then, face cream, neck
cream, eye cream,
Beauty is in the
thigh cream, root
cream, day cream, night cream, cold cream,
wrinkle remover , makeup remover, hand
eye of the
lotions, body lotions, bath oils, bath beads, anal beerholder
A shower gels, bubble baths, scented
beads, s a photographer, I often come across those perfect, take the whole skin off and create a false

baths, perfumes, colognes, toilet water, astringents,

who say “please don’t take pictures of me, I’m not
beautiful”. This usually means one of two things. It
skin by matching the colour and adding a fake
texture to get that perfect ceramic looking skin.

moisturizers, emulsions, exfoliants, peels, scrubs,

either translates to “I’m-good-looking-but-I-want-to-
put-up-a-small-fuss-otherwise-I-will-look-too-easy”, or
But wait, how was this not-so perfect look achieved?
Cleansers, toners, foundation, blush, face powder,

depilatories, body wraps, facial masks,

to “please-don’t-take-pictures-of-me-because-I-
lipstick, lip gloss, lip liner, eyeliner, eye shadow,
look-absolutely-horrid-and-i-know-it”. A bit of work is
eyebrow pencil and mascara.But the list doesn’t end

shampoos,
needed on both parties to take pictures, where the
there. Add to it nail polish, nail polish remover,
conditioners, bleaches, dyes,
photographer gets the highest praise they can get –
manicures, pedicures, fake fingernails, fake eyelashes

falls,
“Wow, those pictures look really nice! You must have

rinses, tints, perms, straighteners, wigs,

and then, face cream, neck cream, eye cream, thigh
a really good camera, no?”
cream, root cream, day cream, night cream, cold
The former group requires only a bit of charming to cream, wrinkle remover, makeup remover, hand

rats, extensions, combs, barrettes, bobby pins,

make them agree to let you take pictures, and since lotions, body lotions, bath oils, bath beads, anal
they are okay-looking to start with, the pictures usually beads, shower gels, bubble baths, scented baths,

hairpins, hairnets, hair curlers, scrunchies,

come out okay. You can’t make a ham sandwich perfumes, colognes, toilet water, astringents,
with tofu, now can you? moisturizers, emulsions, exfoliants, peels, scrubs,
depilatories, body wraps, facial masks, shampoos,

ribbons, bows, debacles, headbands streaking,

The second group also requires a bit of persuading, conditioners, bleaches, dyes, rinses, tints, perms,
but usually a bit more than the first. But this is where

frosting,
straighteners, wigs, falls, rats, extensions, combs,

teasing, spraying, moussing, blow

the similarities end. After the pictures are taken, the barrettes, bobby pins, hairpins, hairnets, hair curlers, 41
process of editing them by smoothing out laugh lines
Choice is Power | OPTIONS 2009

scrunchies, ribbons, bows, debacles, headbands,

layering,
(no longer referred to as crow’s feet, or even wrinkles), and if you’re feeling kinky, then a couple of fluffy

drying, cutting, curling, eyelash

cleaning out the skin tone, removing beauty spots
(no longer referred to as moles or birthmarks), and
handcuffs and some whips.

curling, eyebrow plucking, armpit shaving,

taking off the blackheads starts. Battle scars on your But wait, a combination of streaking, frosting, teasing,
face sustained from a dagger? No problem. The Spot spraying, moussing, blow drying, cutting, layering,

leg shaving, crotch shaving, crotch waxing,

Healing Brush Tool can take care of that, and no curling, eyelash curling, eyebrow plucking, armpit
questions will be asked. When the skin looks near shaving, leg shaving, crotch shaving, crotch waxing,

leg waxing, eyebrow waxing

buffet of slips, half-slips, camisoles, thongs,
beauty
panties, pantyhose, stockings, half hose, knee-highs,
anklets, socks, leg warmers, garter belts,
girdles, corsets, training bras, padded bras, sports
leg waxing, eyebrow waxing and only God knows
what else is done to make women prettier.
rings and (optional,of course) nipple, nose and labia

bras, nursing bras, push-up bras, strapless bras,

rings. And let’s not even begin to talk about shoes.

It’s simple for men. We men have shirts,T-shirts, pants Oh, God! Sorry girls! I take it back. But at least let’s

Wonderbras, bustiers, teddies, petticoats, body

and jeans. Women have invented variations of these, keep it brief: tennis shoes, sandals, open-toes, peep-
but we really don’t care. As long as we’re not toes, slingbacks, mules, wedgies, thongs (again, but
bothered by the elements, and as long as our privates of a different kind), flats, half-heels and high heels.

stockings are covered with blouses, sweaters, jerseys,

are not showing, we’re happy. Come to think of it, High heels that damage a woman’s feet, ankles and
even if our privates are showing we still don’t really knees, but make her, ahem, “figure” stand out.

pullovers, halter tops, miniskirts, maxiskirts,

care.
Because come on folks, at the end of the day, it’s
But women, oh boy. A diverse buffet of slips, half- inner beauty that matters. We’re not petty, sexist or

culottes, capris, shorts, short shorts, hot pants,

slips, camisoles, thongs, panties, pantyhose, stockings, superficial. We’re just men.
half hose, knee-highs, anklets, socks, leg warmers,

formal gowns, bridal gowns, evening gowns,

garter belts, girdles, corsets, training bras, padded
bras, sports bras, nursing bras, push-up bras, strapless
bras, Wonderbras, bustiers, teddies, petticoats,
street dresses, sundresses, cocktail dresses,
peignoirs, negligees, nightgowns, shorties, muumuus,
body stockings are covered with blouses, sweaters,
FACT: Interestingly, some folks doing a research found
that some women are more comfortable stripping
in front of men, because whilst women tend to judge
rate and compare, men are simply grateful. Men are
simple like that.

housedresses, housecoats, winter coats, fall

jerseys, pullovers, halter tops, miniskirts, maxiskirts,
PPS - Some content was stolen from the performance
slacks, suits, sunsuits, business suits, pants suits, culottes,
titled “When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops” by the

coats, spring coats, hats and scarves, pins,

capris, shorts, short shorts, hot pants, formal gowns,
late, great, George Carlin. He was not one who was
bridal gowns, evening gow ns, street dresses,
keen on copyright, or political correctness for that
sundresses, cocktail dresses, housedresses,
matter, but we thank and acknowledge him. We

necklaces, pendants, medallions, lockets, bracelets,

housecoats, winter coats, fall coats, spring coats, hats
would have loved to have said may he rest in peace,
and scarves, and then, because the selection is
but being the atheist he was, he would not have

ankle bracelets, earrings, wedding rings,

simply not enough, are accessorized with brooches,
liked that.
pins, necklaces, pendants, medallions, lockets,

engagement rings, friendship rings, thumb

bracelets, ankle bracelets, earrings, wedding rings,
The Original Godaya
engagement rings, friendship rings, thumb rings, toe

rings, toe rings and nipple, nose and labia rings.

42 “ Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and

it may be necessary from time to time
to give a stupid or misinformed
Choice is Power | OPTIONS 2009

”
beholder a black eye.

Miss. Piggy
 W
hen there is a lull in my life (not often enough
unfortunately) I like to live vicariously, pouring over
glossy Women’s/Fashion magazines. Magazines
where the enticingly glamorous, ‘perfectly formed’
women seem so beautiful and remote. I find browsing
through them therapeutic and soothing. The
magazines are so far removed from my reality and
so impossibly ‘other’ that I am beamed ‘Star Trek’-
like into a different dimension, a wonderfully perfect
and  escapist alternative where worrying about
wood-boring insects and tax returns pale into
insignificance.
The fashion magazines have an emotional and
personal draw that is irresistible. Although the Italian
and French ones are probably more stylish, the British
magazines somehow have a certain quirky originality
and a sense of humour that appeals, as well as the
added bonus of morsels for the mind. Indian Vogue
is also available closer to home but I somehow find
it ‘too close’ and rooted in a world too full of social
inequality.
I am not the most likely follower of fashions, trends
and the beauty routines (I do try from time to time
but don’t quite seem able to summon up the
required commitment). However, I can flick through
the fashion magazines time and time again. Be it the
fabulously expensive, impossibly high heels, the
severely tailored erotically charged suits, the cutting
edge sculptural designs, floaty butterfly effects, pouty
lush blush lips or the lusciously stunning models,
adorned in finery spread alluringly across the glossy
pages of the magazine. It’s all gloriously seductive.
Even the so called ‘ordinary’ larger women from the
‘Dove’ ads are fetchingly voluptuous. No sign of any
flab.
I, along with lots of other women my age, know
chapter and verse on how we should be happy with
our bodies, not worry too much about weight, getting
flabby etc., etc., and generally, I don’t worry or obsess
about calories (maybe I should). However, call it
46
conditioning but the sight of a woman with a firm
Choice is Power | OPTIONS 2009
toned body does make me sigh... If they are older
and bigger than a size 12 or 14  it makes me feel
quite upbeat (yeah! I know that it’s possible!).
Menika van der Poorten
Menika is a freelance photographer
and arts administrator.
beauty
in the making
I am not addicted enough to go buy the magazines,
but fortunately I have nieces and friends who are,
and on occasion send me Vogue, Red, Marie Claire
and other such goodies. It’s the remoteness of ever
looking like the sexy Agnes Deyn, owning Jimmy
Choos, Issey Miyake or Ghost that makes the
experience special.
This fashion fantasia is made possible by incredibly
talented teams of stylists, make-up artists,
photographers, writers and designers, people whose
hard work and artifice contrive to make it all look
effortlessly ravishing. Whilst I marvel and delight at
the beauty of design and content I am also struck by
the contradictions; how much actual artifice is
involved in the ‘making of beauty’ and how I suspend
my skepticism. Somehow my critical faculties go
mushy in the face of all this sensual glamour.
Frequently, ‘looking good’ in contemporary urban
culture, (Paris, London, Delhi or Colombo) requires
subjecting oneself to being mauled by vicious looking
instruments. Instruments that look like they were
designed to be more at home in a torture chamber.
Am I exaggerating? I fear not.
Why do some women seek this out on a regular basis?
Is it ‘the no pain no gain’ concept at work, or perhaps
the ‘pain and pleasure’ principle? Let’s face it,
having your face, skin and hair tormented, pulled and
scraped by someone wielding lethal looking
implements can be quite enjoyable if it is combined
with the promise and pleasure of being pampered,
massaged, manicured, pedicured and having ‘me’
time. The added assurance that one will emerge
chrysalis like, transformed (albeit temporarily) into a
beautiful ‘suranganaviyak’ is perhaps worth it?
Having dipped my toe in it I can say that the world of
beauty treatments has its temptations but surely there
must be less painful ways of ‘looking beautiful’? The
tried and tested method of bathing in asses’ milk
sounds good to me.
 WEAK FOR BEAUTY
I asked S how much appearance matters to him.
In men, and amongst men. I asked him if he notices
when he is in the presence of a good looking man
as I do when I am in the presence of a beautiful
woman. How does it make you feel? I know how I
feel. I would be lying if I said that I didn’t bristle for a
second before I began to admire. I would be lying if
I said I didn’t notice.
I am often weak for beauty. Animate or not. I am
weak for a smooth symmetrical glass, as much as I
am weak for a gnarly cactus. I know that there is an
invisible line between ordinary and beautiful. I know
it exists. I know the difference. I know beauty. I
bought a piece of embroidered fabric on a recent
trip. It has three columns of tulips on it. I knew instantly
what made it more beautiful than the other 20 pieces
of fabric I saw that were similar and yet not as
wonderful. My tulips were far superior. They ranged
from apricot to a deep pink without me once
questioning the choice of colours. They live on a
piece of dull gold silk. The tulips themselves aren’t
perfect. In fact, I’m sure one is wonky. They are
beautiful because I know why. I can imagine their
birth, the dusty harsh plain where they were made,
and the hands that made them and a hundred
others with a genetic memory for their shape. I am
not a romantic. But I am a purist for authenticity.
Which is why my tulips are more beautiful.
S said, No. He never notices. He is lying. He is weak
for beauty too, although he may spend less time
thinking of it than I would. Perhaps it’s because he is
around children so much – he is a teacher. A study
once said that it is symmetry that holds a baby’s
gaze. He knows that beauty makes us weak. And
fickle.
I am a connoisseur of faces, with a particular
specialty in mouths and ears. As a child, I categorized
people’s teeth as a hobby. I knew instinctively the
Samyuktha Varma
Samyuktha lives in Battaramulla in a house with bright
green walls and her cat, Cookie. She is no longer
with S but that’s okay.
combinations of things that made them beautiful or
not – alignment, colour, shape. Of course, not all my
categories had to do with those formal elements
because we all know that a person’s lips have a lot
to do with what makes their teeth attractive. Every
person I met was instantly boxed – the vampire kind
(protruding canines), the even-with-overbite (makes
pouting lip), the cute but crooked kind (I was always
jealous of these), and the piano keys (long and
yellow, not always even). Ears have an equally
special place. It’s harder to be specific about them,
so I’ll say one thing. Ears are so vulnerable – they are
so small (even when they are big) and so fragile. I
often wonder why they were put on the outside of
our bodies, all by themselves, and I fear for their safety
on all human beings.
S finally concedes. He says, Yes. I do notice. I know
when I am in the presence of an attractive man. But
here’s something interesting… Let me put it this way:
I have never known a man to dislike another man
for being good looking. He raises his
eyebrows waiting for my reaction.
He is saying that he has known
women to dislike other women
purely based on their appearance.
I’m not going to get into that one.
I had a friend in university who I
couldn’t stop looking at. A woman
from Jamaica. She had the longest,
meanest, most sculpted body I had
ever seen. A sprinter’s body. I had
never seen anything like it, having grown up around
soft bellied, round-breasted, wide-hipped softness.
I’m pretty sure I wanted to be friends with her
because of how she looked. And to top it all her face
was sweet like a little girl. In fact it hadn’t changed
47
one bit from when she was a child – I know because
Choice is Power | OPTIONS 2009
I saw the photos. I have a weakness for tall lean girls.
S bought a painting once when we were on holiday.
He loves it, I don’t. I cannot figure it out. He is
extremely indecisive by nature, but when he saw this
painting he knew it was his. I cannot see it, I just
cannot see it. It’s an abstract, it’s got a black cross
hatch that emerges out of a blacky, bluey, hazy
 beauty

background. Within each square of the tic-tac-toe
frame, some blues, some yellow, some black. Some
look like silly windows, like a child would draw. It’s
gooorgeous, he says. I just don’t see it. He is wrong.
It’s not beautiful. It’s definitely not special. It’s not
only missing its special story it also has nothing to say.
My opinions on beauty have been honed since I was
very young. Every Sunday afternoon my six aunts, all
of whom are beautiful, would get together for a chat
at my grandparents’ house next door. Most
conversations inadvertently turned into discussions
about what is beautiful and what is not. And in
between my mother with her jokes like blunt
instruments, would say things like, “I often tell people
that I got it all wrong and produced a tall handsome
daughter and a short pretty son, ha ha.” My overly
sensitive aunts would laugh nervously and look my
way.
The two eldest aunts are painters - number one paints
in a more classical way, mostly of lovers in the throes
of passion. The women always resemble her in some
way except that they have pneumatic breasts and
very short upper lips. Number two went through a
period of self-portraiture during a time when she had
dyed her short curly hair flaming orange. I would love
to have one of those paintings. She once told me
that a woman wrote her a love letter after seeing
her portraits at one of her gallery exhibitions. It’s not
hard to imagine why. She only wears black, with thin
old silver bangles, silver hoops and has big kohl
rimmed eyes.
What I am more interested in is S’s face as he looks
at me. What makes him beautiful is the humanity in
his eyes. Everyday his eyes need to connect with the
darting, impatient eyes of little children and engage
their curiosity. It would be a very difficult thing to do,
if he wasn’t born with those eyes. Humane in an
almost dopey way. His big nose is a little bit to an
angle, imperfect enough to be a proper Roman. His
lips really smile when he smiles. In fact, the top lip
disappears altogether. But then again, I love him,
what the fuck do I know?

I never paint dreams or nightmares.

I paint my own reality.
Frida Kahlo

Frida Kahlo was born in Mexico

in 1907. She contracted polio at
six, and at 18, suffered serious
48
injuries when the bus in which she
was travelling collided with a
Choice is Power | OPTIONS 2009

trolley car. Although Frida

recovered from her injuries and
eventually regained her ability to
walk, she was plagued by
extreme pain for the remainder
of her life.
 The Tribulations of Beauty

I t’s no easy life, I know. But ugly people never want

to hear about our problems; they arrogantly assume
Female beauty also exposes its possessor to the envy
of her own sex, a withering radiance no sunscreen
their own are greater, that they, whom Nature has can block. In life’s great contest it is every girl for

chosen for her own excellent reasons to neglect, are herself, but a beautiful woman has every other

somehow more deserving of sympathy than we. woman’s hand against her. Indeed, an entire political
Awful bollocks, of course, but since the ill-favoured stance – radical feminism – has been built on the

supply the vast majority of humankind we must tread envy of ugly women for beautiful ones. Elsewhere in

softly lest we incur their wrath. Muffled by the tyranny this magazine you will find the usual feminist diatribes
of the average, we may voice our discontent only against the ‘beauty myth’, explaining how it is socially

to one another, and then in whispers. constructed, patriarchal, oppressive and so forth, that
women who take the trouble to look attractive are
Most of our troubles spring from the fact that beauty, hopeless dupes of the ‘beauty industry’ and that the

to those who do not possess it, is as irresistible as the sisters will never be free till the Barbie idol is smashed

words ‘kick me’ stencilled on a fat boy’s trouser seat. and a statue of Germaine Greer set up in its place.
Thus beautiful women are condemned to spend the Poison-green blether, in a word, distilled from a

best years of their lives repulsing the sexual advances lifetime’s resentment at being passed over by the

of undesirables. At the very least this condemns them boys in favour of that slut over there in the skin-tight
to a life of unending rejection (of others), which jeans. Beautiful people have a name for this kind of

hardens the heart and causes wrinkles to form at the thing: we call it sour grapes.

corners of the eyes from looking askance at one’s

tormentors; but in places where law and order are in Yet the most soul-destroying aspect of beauty is a

abeyance or women are considered the property woman’s discovery that it is not a pleasure to be

of men, the consequences of being beautiful can enjoyed and shared with those she loves but a

be far w orse than mere harassment, greatly tradable asset and a wasting one at that: she must

increasing a woman’s prospects of being raped, use it before she comes to lose it. She may exchange

enslaved or murdered – as often as not by her own it for wealth, security, liqueur chocolates or even love,
49
male relatives. but never for all of these things; and worse, she must
Choice is Power | OPTIONS 2009

Richard Simon
Having published two books and innumerable magazine
articles, Richard Simon is currently pestering the fiction
houses of the world with a collection of short stories, After
Dark. He has no hobbies, only obsessions. These include
the guitar, thinking, and the largely unsuccessful pursuit
of women half his age. Despite numerous epiphanies,
largely pharmacological in origin, he retains a very low
opinion of the human race and is a confirmed elitist.
Unsurprisingly, he is single.
 beauty
pay in advance for goods receivable in the sequel.
If the buyer turns out to be a fool, a gambler, a
philanderer or a wifebeater, so much the worse for
her. Once made, the contract is not easy to dissolve,
especially if there is property or children involved;
and after that it’s back to the meat market. How
many tries does a girl get before time and gravity
put her forever on the shelf?
For a beautiful woman, such calculations are
unavoidable. To succeed in the marketplace she
must be like Stendhal’s bon philosphe: sec, clair, sans
illusion. Stendhal, you may remember, thought a
retired banker the ideal of the type. This may explain
why so many beauties marry bankers or tycoons; it’s
a meeting, amazingly enough, of minds.
So much for the girls, but beautiful men have their
troubles, too. Their beauty is only an asset in the
dullest, most Darwinian sense: it gets them laid, more
often than not by other men’s wives while Hubby’s
away. Of course, getting laid can be a career for
some men – gigolos, rentboys, marital carpetbaggers
who close their eyes and pretend they’re penetrating
a sack of gold instead of the wife of their bosom –
but it’s hardly a respectable one. That is why, contrary
to the case with women, male good looks arouse
not envy but suspicion and contempt in other men.
Beautiful men must prove themselves twice as hard
in the conventional departments of masculine
achievement – art, war, sport, politics, drinking and
the priesthood – before being accorded any respect
whatsoever.
The beautiful, in short, are the victims of a conspiracy.
What better proof could there possibly be of the
reality and importance of beauty? If it were a myth
or frippery nobody would take the trouble to trivialize
50 or persecute it. Yet people do. Ugly people do. Why?
Choice is Power | OPTIONS 2009
Because it threatens them. Because if beautiful
people were allowed free play of their gifts and
talents, the uglies’ goose would be cooked.
What gifts and talents, some might ask. Beautiful
people are stupid, man – haven’t you heard all the
jokes about dumb blondes? Well, yes, I have, but
ugly people made those jokes up. You have to
understand what beauty really is. Anthropologists
have long told us that standards of beauty vary
around the world, but they were looking at the wrong
data; evolutionary psychologists are now showing
us that the characters of male and female beauty
are, within broad parameters of definition, universal.
Beauty and the ability to recognize it are therefore
evolved characteristics. Why did they evolve? What
makes certain human attributes beautiful and others
not? What is the evolutionary purpose of beauty?
Ah well, that’s easy. Beauty is a fitness advertisement.
Not simply for physical fitness – though it advertises
that, too – but evolutionary fitness, the capacity to
win out, for a generation at least, in the endless
Darwinian struggle. Beauty is a proxy marker for
health, fertility, honest reciprocity, intelligence,
parental skills and any number of other traits that
promote survival and reproduction. Beauty is an
advertisement saying ‘I’m a good mate.’
Now you understand that a good mate doesn’t
necessarily mean a good spouse. Marriage is a social
construct (yes, Virginia, they do exist) that has more
to do with property than progeny. A good mate in
the Darwinian sense is one with good genes and an
instinct for parenthood. Good genes are what beauty
advertises. Unsightliness, correspondingly, suggests
poor genes (vulnerability to parasites, predisposition
to degenerative disease, stupidity, behavioural
abnormalities and heaven knows what else), which
is why it shows good sense to avoid making babies
with fugglies. Human beauty is essential to the
operation of a mechanism known to biologists as
Müller’s Ratchet, which helps purge a species of
deleterious genes.
That is why primitive tribes, when first contacted,
comprise none but magnificent specimens of
humanity. Sadly, the rise of civilization subverts the
selective efficacy of beauty. It all began early in the
agricultural revolution, at a time when human beings
were stunted, sickly and short-lived due to disease,

poor nutrition and inbreeding, yet multiplying as
never before. The proliferation of the frightful began
at that time. A few generations of squalid
multiplication and they outnumbered their prettier
cousins. The rot had set in then, although – beautiful
people being so much smarter, stronger, healthier,
sexier, etc. than their ugly cousins – it was millennia
before we could be stripped of our rightful privileges.
Only in the age of democracy, mass media and
equal rights for all could the putsch be fully
accomplished. And it has been. The dictatorship of
the ill-favoured is now universal. The creeps have
inherited the Earth.
Yet Nature is not mocked; evolution proceeds as
before. Technological civilization, that great process
of uglification and reduction to the lowest common
denominator, applies selective pressures of its own,
which shall ultimately prove to be our salvation. For
instance, note how mobile phones, email, the
internet and other technologies of this kind have
changed human intercourse. Nearly all our
communications are mediated now, passed through
some electronic mincer before getting from you to
me or me to you. The distancing of man from his
neighbour, one of the great themes of modern
civilization, is near-complete. We are now so
accustomed to this distance we have ceased to
notice that there are no children on the streets any
more and that most of our conversations are now
held with people who are not physically present to
us. All this, as I say, is to the good.
Our second great hope lies in the explosion of
pornography that followed the rise of the internet
and which is now, together with gambling, the chief
online activity of mankind. It has brought the
depersonalization of sex, another process with a very
long history, nearly to fruition. Soon it will be fully
accomplished. Robot sex dolls, anyone? Virtual
orgies? Prosthetic partners more luscious and
complaisant than anything you dreamed of – fake
sex that’s even better than the real thing? Coming
soon to a website near you.
beauty
Depersonalized, virtual sex will obviously have a
special appeal to the personally unattractive –
people who have trouble finding a real, flesh-and-
blood partner. But it will also appeal (as porn does,
as prossies do) to the lazy, the unthinking and those
willing to settle for second-best. And as it will make
oodles of money for its purveyors, you may be sure
they will market and promote it with all the resources
at their disposal. Soon most human sex will be virtual.
However, a few people will still be getting their rocks
off the old-fashioned way. The beautiful will be
among them, of course, since they will always be in
demand by true connoisseurs. Then there will be
those who prize genuine experiences and
relationships, who are not susceptible to herd instinct
or hucksterism, whose foresight and philanthropic
concern extend some distance beyond their own
front doors – in short, the very best of humanity, the
strongest, smartest, kindest and bravest, the only ones
capable of honour because honour, like beauty and
the peacock’s tail, is a fitness advertisement. While
the loathsome rabble are plugged into the sterile
orifices of their computers, nature’s elite will be
having sex the old-fashioned way – and breeding.
Thus in the reality of natural selection will be found
the seeds of transcendent humanity. In a few
generations ugliness, absent progeny, must die out.
With it shall disappear the obscene global sprawl that
prompted Nietzsche to conceive of mankind as a
kind of terrestrial urticaria. Müller’s Ratchet will begin
clicking over with a vengeance, gently but firmly
eliminating unfit genes, collected within unbeautiful
bodies, from the pool. There need be no genocides,
no holocausts, no campaigns of mass sterilization; the
beautiful need only love one another and wait.
Ugliness will go the way of the dodo and the
diplodocus, and we shall – as Nature always 51
intended – come into our own.
Choice is Power | OPTIONS 2009
 You walk into the room. But you don’t see me. You see tits.
Beeg Brahamin boobs. Pretty Porcelain pears. Irrationallyenhancedwares.
Fancy push-up pairs.
You walkinto the room. But you don’t see me.
You see tits. Some sharp in silicon. Some rude like rambutans.
Some that don’t give a care. Some looking for an affair.
You walk into the room. But you don’t see me. You see tits.
Some in Triumph to raise a hurrah. Some in cross-eyed Wonderbra.
Others in Victoria- crossed with Barbara.
You walk into the room. But you don’t see me.
You see tits.
All tuned and tanned. Some also- rans. Some stoned and sad.
You walk into the room. But you don’t see me.
You see tits.
Underwired and under -stress. Under scrutiny and under threat. From mankind no less.
You walk into the room. But you don’t see me.
You see tits.
You see a parade of chicks.
You see flashes of porn clips.
You see a roomful of tricks.
You walk into the room. But you don’t see me.
You see tits.
You see Arse.
You see an opportunity to show your class.
And be absolutely crass.
You see little bits of lace. A pretty face. But of me – no trace.
You walk into the room.
52 But you don’t see me.
Choice is Power | OPTIONS 2009

words by masii pictures by muhanned cader

 THE CALL OF BEAUTY
T rying to understand the place of Art and Beauty
in human society has been an ongoing task since
ancient times, specially when it is being torn apart
by civil war and societal collapse. Where do we
place that trinity of the artist, the critic and the
audience, and the creative artistic process, with its
outcome of the art object, in a scenario of death,
destruction, disappearances, displacements,
poverty, hunger and injustices of many other kinds?
This question has lurked for years within a personal
unease alw ays felt when enjoying and later
discussing and analyzing paintings, sculptures, novels,
poetry, films and plays which dealt with the Sri Lankan
crisis of the past years. Even when the content of
the art objects are not directly about violence, death
and destruction, but rather about more benign
matters of human life, the unease is there – how to
reconcile my enjoyment of their beauty with the
human crisis just outside my field of vision?
A bold attempt towards a reconciliation is made by
Elanie Scarry. In her book ‘On Beauty and Being Just’
(1999) she argues that beauty continually renews our
search for truth and presses us towards a greater
concern for justice. She casts the spectator and the
creator of the aesthetic object in one mould and
claims that when something is seen as beautiful
“there is an urge to protect it, or act on its behalf”
and that while this attention is “involuntarily given to
the beautiful person or thing; then, this quality of
Robert Crusz
Robert Crusz is Coordinator of TULMEDIA - the Media
Unit of the Tulana Research Centre for Encounter
and Dialogue in Gonawala, Kelaniya.
Review of
ON BEAUTY AND BEING JUST
by Elaine Scarry
Princeton University Press, 1999.
heightened attention is voluntarily extended out to
other persons or things. It is as though beautiful things
have been placed here and there throughout the
world to serve as small wake-up calls to perception,
spurring lapsed alertness back to its most acute level.
Through its beauty, the world continually recommits
us to a rigorous standard of perceptual care: if we
do not search it out, it comes and finds us.” (p 81)
Scarry says that the enduring phenomenon of beauty
pressures us towards ‘distribution’. Even Plato required
us to “move from ‘eros’, in which we are seized by
the beauty of one person, to ‘caritas’, in which our
care is extended to all people.” (ibid) The word
‘fairness’ refers both to loveliness of countenance
and to the ethical requirement of ‘being fair’,
‘playing fair’ and ‘fair distribution’. Scarry’s argument
is that “beautiful things give rise to the notion of
distribution, to a lifesaving reciprocity, to fairness not
just in the sense of loveliness of aspect but in the sense
of ‘a symmetry of everyone’s relation to one
another’.” (p 95)
Beauty and justice seem to share the features of
symmetry, equality and balance. “Even in periods
when a human community is too young to have yet
had time to create justice, as well as in periods when
justice has been taken away, beautiful things ...holds
53
steadily visible the manifest good of equality and
Choice is Power | OPTIONS 2009
balance.” (p97) Using examples from ancient and
 But Scarry argues that beauty
is also ‘radically decentering’.
It is something that is ‘always
deeply somatic’, that ‘happens
to our bodies’.
medieval writings (like St. Augustine’s De Musica for
instance), Scarry shows how there was a conviction
that equality is the heart of beauty, that it is pleasure-
bearing and that equality is the morally highest and
best feature of the world:
“All that is claimed is that the aspiration to
political, social, and economic equality has
already entered the world in the beauty-loving
treatises of the classical and Christian periods, as
has the readiness to recognize it as beautiful if
and when it should arrive in the world.” (p 98)
One can argue that even if the idea of ethical
fairness comes before one’s mind at the moment one
looks on something beautiful, the idea remains
abstract – “Nothing requires us to give up the ground
that would begin to enact such symmetries.” (p111)
But Scarry argues that beauty is also “radically
decentering”. It is something that is “always deeply
somatic”. She quotes Simone Weil who says that
beauty requires us “to give up our imaginary position
as the center... A transformation then takes place at
the very roots of our sensibility, in our immediate
reception of sense impressions and psychological
impressions.” (ibid) Also Iris Murdoch argued that
“anything which alters consciousness in the direction
of unselfishness, objectivity and realism is to be
connected with virtue” and the single best or most
54
“obvious thing in our surroundings which is an
Choice is Power | OPTIONS 2009
occasion for ‘unselfing’ ...is what is popularly called
beauty.” (p112/113)
The fact that beauty causes delight is crucial here
since the person, in being radically de-centred by
beauty, takes delight in “their own lateralness”. This
“delightful lateralness” continues not just in the state
of beholding the beautiful object but also in the state
of creating - “the site of stewardship in which one
acts to protect or perpetuate a fragment of beauty
already in the world or instead to supplement it by
bringing into being a new object.” (p114) Justice
also is dependent on human hands and its existence
depends on the act of creation. Since the time of
Socrates, there has been the ‘duty to justice’
argument – “we have a duty ‘to support’ just
arrangements where they already exist and to help
bring them into being where they are ‘not yet
established’.”(p 115)
The aesthetic enterprise since the eighteenth century
reduced art and beauty to the meaningless, empty
pursuit of ‘disinterested’ pleasure, devoid of any
connection to the real human condition. The art
object became gorged and disfigured by its central
role in the world of wealth and privilege and with its
presence in the marketplace as a vehicle to make
profit or as a valuable treasure in the museum and
art gallery. This grotesque emptiness comes into stark
focus specially in times of civil decline, chaos and
war.
Perhaps there is something in Scarry’s thesis. At least
it gives us hope in the value of the pursuit of art and
beauty. The equality of beauty which compels fair
distribution is widely present to all people at all times.
But justice is not. If Scarry is right, this presence of
aesthetic fairness, this ‘standing before our senses’
calls out insistently to its analogy, ethical fairness, to
be also present. It directs our attention to the absent
partner – justice.
 Beauty is the number 14
and it lasts for 72 hours
I t must have been in 1987 or 1988. The place was
the sports school down Independence Avenue. The
Chess Federation used to organize tournaments
there. Those who finished their games early would
move to an open space which at that time was
adjacent to the artificial hockey turf at the
Racecourse to play softball cricket. It was late
evening and I had finished my game. For some
reason, there was no cricket that day. I stepped out
of the ‘tournament hall’ and was greeted by an
amazing sunset, screaming and dripping through the
trees. A few minutes later I was joined by Ravi
Arulnandi, a promising young chess player from Royal
College.
“Ravi, just look at the sunset!”
“Hmmm,” was his surprisingly disinterested reply.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” I asked.
“I suppose it is,” he remained unconvinced.
He explained a few minutes later: “I see beauty in
other things.”
“Such as?”
“Mathematics,” he offered quite dispassionately.
There are beautiful places, beautiful ornaments,
beautiful paintings, beautiful films and beautiful
women and other beautiful things of course. We are
bombarded with ‘I am beautiful’ or ‘This is beautiful’
claims all the time and are conditioned to subscribe
to certain definitions of ‘beauty’.
The cacophony of the world intrudes. It shapes,
distorts, misdirects, defines and in other ways
determines my tastes. I don’t tear my hair out on this
account. I do try to understand what makes me like
certain things over others, but then again not all the
time. If an object is made up of an elemental mix, it
is also a product of our gaze, crafted, flawed and
scattered though it may be.
Malinda Seneviratne
Malinda Seneviratne is a freelance
writer who can be reached at
malinsene@gmail.com
‘The eyes of the beholder’ then are certainly not
innocent. So ‘beauty’ or our understanding of beauty
is always context-bound; there are no absolute
criteria to separate the beautiful from that which is
not. All this is known. Ravi had a point.
I remember writing an answer to an A/L question.
The year was 1984. The question: ‘Hard Times is a
sunless novel; deliberately so. Comment.’ There was
a ‘beautiful’ line that I had reflected on and I used it
to frame my response. John Keats, in ‘An Ode to a
Grecian Urn’, wrote:
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty – that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
Now I know that it is an incomplete conceptuali-
zation. It is true that the U.S.A. tortures prisoners in
Guantanamo Bay and the U.K. supports this inhuman
practice. It is true that a million people have been
killed in Iraq in search of non-existent weapons of
mass destruction and that half a million are displaced
and over 35,000 civilians have been killed in Pakistan
and Afghanistan because these two countries
cannot find Osama bin Laden. Beautiful? Ugly.
Unless of course one has the privilege of omniscient
gaze and has cultivated the ability to treat all things
with equanimity in which case the understanding of
the eternal verities insulates one from horror. There is
something beautiful in that state of ‘being’ I suppose.
But take the reverse. Think back on all previous ‘love
affairs’ for instance. I am sure there were ‘beautiful’
moments, but would you call it ‘love’ given your 55
current understanding of the word? Isn’t it possible
Choice is Power | OPTIONS 2009
that something w hich w as beautiful w as
simultaneously ‘not true’, that it was an illusion?
Does beauty not exist then, is love impossible? No, it
exists. And yes ‘love’ is possible. As per personal
definitions of these things, which in turn are informed
by experience, reading, culture and other things one
associates with. They change over time, naturally.
 beauty
One can therefore speak of ‘beauty’ in this necessarily
limited sense or not at all.
My wife would never win a Mrs. Sri Lanka contest, but
is a truly beautiful woman and is my Ms. Universe for
many reasons. She tells me that I don’t understand
‘beautiful’ in that none of the women in my life was
pretty. Well, neither am I for that matter. Voltaire
once said, “Give me five minutes to talk away my
face and I will bed the Queen of England.” If Voltaire
got by with words and not face, what’s stopping un-
pretty women from using non-face things or me from
doing the same? It is after all a matter of adjusting
parameters.
It is a matter of parameters getting adjusted, one
could also say. The ugly/beautiful dichotomy is false
and this falsehood becomes apparent in each case
sooner or later. There is a girl I know who laments
that she is ‘ugly’ and frets over the ‘fact’ that no one
would ever want her. I was thinking about this
recently. I find that certain things in certain light and
seen at certain angles with a certain frame of mind
can be inspiringly beautiful whereas in other
conditions they would hardly be noticed.
To me the Ruwanweliseya is beautiful from any angle,
at any time of the day or night. But when I see it or
read about it the first thing that comes to mind is a
verse from Mahagama Sekera’s ‘Prabuddha’.
Prabuddha is at the Ruwanweliseya. It is evening. The
evening star is clear in the sky. Prabuddha walks
around the maluwa until he finds that one spot where
gaze, pinnacle and star intersect. Writes Prabuddha:
‘deepena thama dansina!’ What is more beautiful
now, the artifact, the history symbolized and
embedded in it, the evening star, Sekera’s
exceptional eye and tender gaze or the intersection
of these things? I am not sure, but Sekara’s
juxtaposition was certainly illuminating.
56
Over time it is the less tangible things that have
Choice is Power | OPTIONS 2009
become more fascinating: gaze more than shape of
eye, nature of kiss more than lip-contour, tenderness
of ways more than skin-texture, heart-temples that
resist desecration more than solid, enduring
architectural edifices.
To me, there is no country more beautiful than mine,
no child more beautiful than my children, no
language more nuanced and made for and of music
than Sinhala.
She was 14 and I 26.
She saw me but I, I did not see.
She was later 29 and I 41.
I saw her but she, she did not see.
And so she got to 32
and by then I was 44.
She took us both back to 14
and there we stayed.
Time bends, she taught me.
But only for 72 hours.
It is beautiful that such things can happen, is it not?
To me, ‘beauty’ is a state of grace; something that
allows us to breathe, to dissolve and to shake a
mountain. It is a moment and an eternity; a rose that
is fragranced by the fact that it has a thorn; an
unguent that is also a knife; a waterfall and a storm-
water drain erupting; a heartbeat, an anniversary
card and time’s softening of gaze; a forever-
endearment, a piece of blue in a thunderstorm-sky,
a heart-crayon drawing unpredicted lines on mind-
paper; the fact that city walls can recycle graffiti, that
street-corners and vehicle tyres can piddle on dogs,
and fathers who have the humility to learn from their
daughters. It is about remembering a time through a
song, a fragrance an image that defined some
poignant moment. Intersections that produce fire and
love, juxtapositions which like a flash of lightning
illuminate a city, but only for a fraction of a second.
Things like that.
Yes, it is a state of grace eminently accessible if one
has eye, the ability to direct eye, to employ eye to
draw it from the inevitable clutter in which it is born,
the wisdom and patience to search for that singular
point of vantage that can manufacture lightning and
the heart to bear it all. Beauty then is nothing but a
sunset and an algorithm that drives us crazy and of
course about being 14 for 72 hours. It is something to
be experienced, not written about. For there is nothing
beautiful in this world and there is nothing that is not
beautiful either.
 Goddesses descending
A series of paintings by Anoli Perera

B illboards mark the Colombo cityscape where larger than life-size men and women with their bodies
airbrushed and photo-edited to perfection gaze down on the mere mortals below, offering them a dream, a
fantasy… a glimpse of consumer paradise.

Goddesses descending was inspired by contemporary society’s obsession with the human body. Perpetuated
by market mechanisms, the constantly projected images of men and women through the media, along with
the products they advertise, offer not only the fantasy of the product but also a whole ‘situation’, a setting for
that product. The men and women beautifully moulded and glamorized are an intrinsic part of this ‘fantasy
setting’. That fantasy does not only sell the fantasies of Victoria’s Secret underwear or J’Adore perfume but
also sells the fantasy of the body that such products can be worn upon. The allure of these fantasies are
heightened by a sexual and sensual play within the ‘dream setting’ with overtly masculinized and feminized
images. The ever expanding beauty culture industry with mushrooming of salons offer a gamut of pleasures
(and pains) from a simple blow-dry to complete makeovers that promise transformation of personalities that 57
Choice is Power | OPTIONS 2009

is supposed to usher in a new lease of life. The beauty products compete with each other offering eternal
youth – defying nature at every moment of one’s life.

Anoli Perera
Anoli Perera is a visual artists, art writer and curator. She is also a
founding member of Theertha International Artists Collective, a
progressive visual artists' collective in Sri Lanka. During her over
15 years of art practice she has shown her work extensively within
Sri Lanka and abroad. Since 2006 she has been a member of
the Peer Panel of Arts Network Asia, a grant giving organization
for the arts in Asia, based in Singapore.
 58
Choice is Power | OPTIONS 2009
Corrugated iron clad shards cut deep veins
The baby sighed and said
As fragments of its words, scattered
Plaster on the wall shattered
And time still ran.

Deep, unspeakable love

Momentary haze, a glint radiates
The smile.

The red papaya is best eaten before tomorrow

Vendors thronged to see to her, knowing
The unripe fruit would last longer
Than unborn
Desire.
On beauty
I will kill today she said within
Love has little measure of sanity
I remember beauty.

And even less room for compassion

It was when I first saw my son. Not in the open, but as
an ultrasound generated blob of indeterminable
Lie.
parts projected on a monitor. There was nothing
extraordinary about the image – its resolution was
Still.
poor and though we loved what we saw, neither
my partner nor I really knew what we were looking
Gently, carefully, lovingly cried the fresh skin
at. It was the most beautiful image I have seen.
As it entered outside
Seeing warm sinews of earth and fire
But I have also wondered, can violence be beautiful?
Melting into a ball
The idea of Eelam, seen as emancipation and
Of love.
empowerment is beautiful to many, but cannot be
separated from its expression through bloody and
They say the air ripples through the hair
heinous acts of terrorism. That said, can terrorism itself
Softly at first
be beautiful? What, for example, goes through the
Then it sucks you
mind of a suicide bomber? Are they thoughts of
Instantly attractive, insatiable
hate? Or love and forgiveness? Do memories of things
A thousand hands flying, groping, reaching
past flit by in a flash, or is the trigger animated by the
Limbs to disconnect
hope of an afterlife to come? Is there regret, or a
Life.
quiet calm? In that split second of death, is life more
beautiful, more than just ordinary? I’m interested in
Her soul, fresh
this interplay of violence and beauty, a strange
Was sold at Rs.10 a kilo
juxtaposition but surprisingly and sadly only too
common. I wrote the poem above, Life at the Pola, 59
A bargain
on the day of an LTTE suicide attack close to home.
Choice is Power | OPTIONS 2009

I am told.
Sanjana Hattotuwa
Sanjana Hattotuwa is the founding Editor of
Groundviews, www.groundviews.org, and finds
beauty in good literature, Sri Lanka and the strangest
places.
Tellingly, I’ve forgotten when this was, so inured are
we to bloody violence on a daily basis. But is the
depiction of violence, and the act of violence itself,
sometimes beautiful? It is easy to find examples in
the arts and literature. The cover page of Time
magazine on 27 October 1947 had a graphic image
of Kali in the form of India disembowelling herself, a
symbol and metaphor for the egregious human
 beauty
suffering during India’s partition that year. Kali in Hindu
mythology is never a settled image. Being the
goddess of death and destruction, but also the
creator of worlds, there is both beauty and bloody
violence inextricably entwined the symbolism of Kali,
suggesting that the two not just exist cheek in jowl,
but also need each other. Raphael’s Transfiguration,
with expansive, ethereal blue clouds surrounding a
resplendent and risen Jesus is beautiful. Our
appreciation of Van Gogh’s Wheatfield with Crows
is different when we first see it as a painting, and
then again when we discover that it was his last
before he killed himself. We see anew the brush
strokes, colours and style – knowledge of the painter’s
violent end accentuates the beauty of his last work.
It is much the same with literature. Lasantha
Wickremetunge’s posthumous editorial in the Sunday
Leader earlier this year gains its power from the nature
of Lasantha’s death. A beautiful expression caught
a macabre act and the bloody violence that framed
it. We did not want this editorial, but we are enriched
by it. Artaud’s theatre of cruelty is viscerally
compelling drama. Beckett’s plays, and Pinter,
violently unsettles the mind – yet their essential, style,
form and content is beautiful. Sri Lankan Tamil artist
Thamotharampillai Shanaathanan’s paintings depict
High Security Zones in the North and East. They are a
cartography of violence, maps of shame. They are
beautiful, and as such, unsettling. Art depicting war,
soldiers are saviours and liberators, of guns, tanks and
weaponry in public places, the urban graffiti of a
militarised society seeing, but not observing, the
violence around them. But is there not beauty here
too? Propaganda is extremely telegenic today. The
beautifully rendered tri-lingual Api Wenuwen Api
media campaign is a triumph of compelling design
over disturbing and essentially violent leitmotifs. But
the beauty of violence is in our homes as well. The
Sony Playstation 3 can render bloody violence that
60 can be rewound, replayed and viewed in slow
motion. In fact, the best selling games for most game
Choice is Power | OPTIONS 2009
consoles are as essentially violent as their virtual
environment is beautiful. We live in a world so bloody
and violent, that our appreciation of beauty is
invariably influenced, contained and defined as a
result.
So what is beauty?
Is it akin to Wordworth’s Lucy, someone or something
hidden from the public gaze, unique and beautiful
as a result? Is it the everyday, a routine, a street corner
– the familiar? Is it enmeshed with a feeling of inner
peace, such as we experience at the Kiri Vehera in
Kataragama at sunset, when zephyr and dusk
coalesce, creating a perfect calm within? Is it the
extermination of one’s enemy – a beautiful kill? Is it
Keira Knightly or your neighbourhood barista, Keanu
Reaves or your father? Is it innocence, or cynicism?
Is it in mathematics, through the visualisation of
complex algorithms? Or is the Hubble Telescope, our
greatest artist, reminding us of a universe too vast to
grasp, too beautiful to ignore?
Ultimately, it is personal, but not always peaceful and
non-violent. A place, object, person, act, process or
instance that is beautiful can range from murder to
marriage. There is no morality to beauty, no ethics,
no religion. Beauty cares little for who you are. It
can uplift spirits. It can squash tyrants. It can kill angels.
And it can strengthen demons. Across the board, all
w ho experience beauty find in it a state
contentment. A pause. Temporary satiation.
Reflection. Desire.
I lost someone beautiful last year. I went out for coffee
and over a beautiful Arabica blend, she walked
away from me. From all we shared together. There
was no pause, no hesitation. Kali had come alive
and lay waste to my world, but I slowly understand
now in the company of someone also very beautiful,
that Kali also creates worlds.
I was asked to write an essay on beauty. I may have
failed. Many others will speak of what they find. See.
Hear. Experience. Touch. Feel. Or what they have
received, or the beauty of anonymous giving. I can
only speak of beauty I have experienced. And it is
abundant. It is ephemeral. And even when we think
we are not, or cannot find it, beauty is not far away.
To live in violence is to appreciate beauty more.
 Everyone wants to be Helen of Troy,
everyone wants to launch a thousand ships,
no one thinks of the treachery of the Trojan Horse.

Wanni Everyone wants to be a Cleopatra and make

the Caesars and the Mark Antonys of the world

Woman rave over their beauty, don’t they remember

death and the poisonous asp?

There are mind compendiums of legends

handed down from oral memory
from generation to generation,
memories gestating within the compressed
encyclopaedias of our perfidious fictions
where the true self might first be destroyed
before the delicate silken threads are unwound
after the brutal death plunge submerges the
cocoon within the seething cauldron,
the caterpillar perish to feed our vanity.

Wrote a learned critique once on a new

interpretation of Bluebeard, those patriarchal
disguises that were meant to subjugate women,
recount the tale of Beauty and the Beast
that powerful sexual symbol of the bestial
animal that awaits transformation by some
chaste and beautiful female, remember
the fairy tale of the arrogant princess
who had to marry a swineherd to swallow
her pride, once again, a prince in disguise,
ah, and then again the pond in the royal
Jean Arasanayagam
gardens, the golden ball, the princess and the frog 61
Jean Arasanayagam is a Sri Lankan writer
Choice is Power | OPTIONS 2009

born to a Dutch Burgher family. She prince and the metamorphosis into the ideal male.
graduated from the University of Ceylon
and the University of Strathclyde, Scotland.
A novelist, short story writer, poet, playwright
We swallowed them, all those fairy tales,
and artist she is the author of thirty books.
Her wide ranging themes include identity, believed in those magical fantasies
inheritance, ethnicity, war and violence,
displacement, migration, journeys, allowed ourselves to be duped by thinly
pilgrimages, relationships and gender. She
has had her work translated into several veiled allusions as to what was beauty,
languages and won many local and
international awards for her writing. what was femininity, our own self-compromise.
 It’s a strange mystique this whole concept
of beauty, skin-deep as the old saying goes,
that’s to console those whom the world thinks
do not possess those special virtues and graces
to help in the eternal act of procreation
from its primordial beginnings.
No one discerns the malformed inner being,
the dysfunctional spirit, no one penetrates
the flawless surface of that veneer compounded
of artifice and duplicity, youthful portraits never
age although epochs and eras are long past,
Nefertiti in her muralled beauty rescued from the
tomb and all those idealized Pre-Raphaelite
women in Rossetti paintings who surpass
even the ideal in their unreality.
King Corphetua loved the beggar maid
beauty concealed in rags and tatters.
It strikes me that saints and celestial
beings never gaze at mirror images.
To me there’s beauty in the unlikeliest
people, instinct in the unadorned body
not weighted down with gold and heirloomed
jewellery whose tradition markers, the heresies
of our deluded faith in outward rituals,
galleries of women in their procession through
history, each thinking herself an unsurpassed
masterpiece, skins bearing a patina of
powdered pearls, sandalwood or even creams
62 from turtle oils, that Turkish women loved.
Choice is Power | OPTIONS 2009
There’s pure, pure beauty in the Giaconda smile
and in the face of Christ’s mother
in the Agony of the Pieta that neither
paint nor marble can conceal.
There’s beauty in the wrinkles etched
on the face of the old and in the faint
glimmer of light in those faded eyes,
opalescent, tentatively emanating from
within the depths of a looking darkness.
All that goes back to memory, myth, legend,
glimpses and encounters of that lightning flash
revelatory of our own lives, our self-created
sagas, pilgrimages, journeys to shrines, in
Holy Places, on the streets and public highways
where the lost and forgotten ones congregate.
And yet, I have discovered it, beauty,
Will never let it go, transfixed in my mind,
the face of that unknown woman in the Wanni,
resting among the hordes of the displaced, her face,
as calm, as open as a newly awakened lotus
emerging from the mud and slime of some
pond or wewa, her dark eyes, wide, gazing
at an unknown world, a lost horizon.
Bereft of all possessions, finds this temporary
resting place, still holding on to life while
mask-like visages wracked with pain and fear
form the backdrop of ghostly visages.
Her expression reflects no despair,
creates around her an aureole akin to
the radiant gold that ancient painters used
surrounding the head of Christ and the saints,
her beauty to all others invisible except to me
touched by its radiance.
Beauty
What beauty in camps?

I sit in my favourite chair

Listening to Beethoven’s last sonata,
silent breezes
In time.
To the music.
my world creates a sonata

The other shatters all possibility of one.

Guarded, malnourished;
the beauty of rescue: possible?
loudspeakers are silent.
Waiting for a pass, a nod,
family member to utter their name,
to go back home
to farm, toil, feed the earth
feel the breeze of their own
sonatas.

Beethoven calms me,

my children, near.
one dressed. pretty.
ready for her first ‘mixed’ party.
The smaller cuddles her father,
Night air brings comfort,
Smells of food. dinnertime
Civilized.
Red wine.

Nourishment.
No death here. 63 63
just beauty
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Choice is Power | OPTIONS 2009

and dignity.

Nazreen Philips
June 2009
 This meeting was arranged by a mutual friend. It’s
nothing too out of the ordinary, simply one of those
occasional consequences of having Facebook in
your life and friends flung too far. A date is set; they
plan to share a meal, split a bottle of shiraz.

But he’s late and she’s cold. You don’t leave a tropics
girl brewed of Scots-Irish irascibility outside on a wet
night in January anywhere in Europe, then expect
her to think of the Dalai Lama in a field of tulips, or
chatty squirrels at a tea party. Everybody knows this.

Three
She starts to imagine this slick haired guy approaching
her using an iPhone, with super-sized self-importance
gleaned in part from its purchase alone, distracted
by a business week still in play.

beautiful So it’s interesting to her that she picks this stranger

from the crowd at a distance, just because he’s

things
coming for her. It’s body language, yes, but there’s
something in there that is subtler than that too. She
knows it’s him as soon as she sees him. He’s wearing
a beanie, a North Face jacket and a beard.

She thinks:
“About time, dude. I mean Jesus, Mary and Joseph,
I thought French men were great women.”

T
“Why are you staring at me with that ‘I’m confused’
expression? Of course it’s me you’re looking for. I
hey meet at a bus stop in Paris. The
mean everyone else here is…male.”
shelter isn’t wide enough to keep the “Are you really still looking at me like that? O
rain off her legs, and the seat barely god…are you drunk? Okay, look, I’m just going to
wide enough to keep her ass off the call out to you first so we can get this happening…”
ground. Her coat hood is up and she’s
But he opens his mouth and turns her name into a
pressed blocks of small fist so firmly two-syllable song.
against her pockets’ seams that they
And she immediately wonders if she’ll fall in love with
will never again support a Nokia.
a scruffy, beardy French man who’s late all the time.
Aiming for zen she observes the waves
of tight-mouthed commuters. ~~~
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Choice is Power | OPTIONS 2009

It’s 10.30pm and I pull west out of tiny Bedourie, the

last community outpost before you encounter
Australia’s Simpson Desert. I’m listening to the national
broadcaster in the cab of a Toyota Landcruiser. I’m
not sure where I’m going. It doesn’t matter too much:
Tuppy McIntosh I just need to map out quadrants for a flora and fauna

Tuppy McIntosh was born in Queensland, Australia,

and works as a communications consultant. She
enjoys laughing, making stories and bobbing about
in water. She currently lives in her head.

survey some place at least 80kms inside the desert’s
boundary.
Once I pull off from the paved road, the vegetation
thins and I push on past saltbush gullies and crow-
sacked ‘roo carcasses for over an hour. When I begin
to wonder why I’m not stopping, I stop, the sand’s
crunch gradually becoming audible under the
slowing radials and a calmer engine. Swing open
the door and leap; boot soles come down flat.
The 4WD spotlights are built for outback reach, yet
their strong light hits nothing but cold black air, cutting
yellow funnels to nowhere. The radio casts a small
protective cocoon of sound over me, and I stand
next to the vehicle like a calf with its mother. I don’t
move. It’s just me. With the slow inevitability and
power of a long-haul train, I realise that I’m scared.
Here I am.
I make myself go the trayback and heave out a
canvas-covered swag. I make myself look for a flat
clear spot on which to lay it out; but everywhere is a
flat clear spot. Because here I am, in the actual
middle of nowhere. I make myself stop looking for a
spot and place the swag down, kneel, unbuckle tie-
straps and unroll. When I finish, I make myself think
about the limited battery life of the vehicle, and how
I really do hope to start it in the morning. I reach inside
the cab and switch off the lights. Oh. Right. Here I
am. I make myself turn off the radio.
Stars take over. They gradually explode overhead,
unveiling that universal dawn directly above us. I drop
on the swag as they colonise territory, quickly taking
it all. Lying back, a new and deep pressure on my
chest seems to connect my body directly into the
ground, and a strong awareness of my breathing
strips it of any automation. I begin to earn my oxygen.
A roar steadily approaches: now I give up breathing
altogether. I listen hard for a full minute before I realise
it’s the sound of blood pumping through my head.
What can I do? I give in to base unknowns, and let
the desert floor cradle me while I pull for air.
beauty
That night I am claimed by an ancient land. Frail,
tiny, flawed, all dust under the sun, yes; but these are
not things that keep my heart punching out its prize-
fight, kilning its core acknowledgements. Palms in the
dirt, eyes to the sky, unbound in stillness: for one clean
night I know what is to be both ancient and present.
I am of this earth. I am of this sky. As this ground is true
and living, I am true and living. As this land is beautiful,
I am beautiful. I am not afraid.
When the day calls the desert gently from somewhere
over the Pacific Ocean, just a thought remains to
greet the sun. Here I am.
~~~
He’s not naked. It’s just arms and legs really. But this
is as much skin of his that she’s seen to date and
she’s not planning to blink. She’s in Japanese sitting
position on the edge of a bed, a sylph incarnate in
human observation. He is standing so steadily before
her it’s as though he grew up from the floor, his curled
fingers vine-like and resting by stripy boxers. He has a
Ghostbusters t-shirt on underneath his jumper; she can
see some chest hair from its neck line.
He is talking to her but she’s watching him so closely
that it’s hard to keep track of actual words. Like some
pop culture demographer she wonders what has
made him like this. She’s occupied by his hand
gathering a thought from his hair, the comfortable
nature in his shoulders that leaves his chest open
wide, and all the easy expressions that make matey
conspirators with the straight lines of his face.
He has bow legs, and an upper lip that, in rest, lifts
slightly to one side in a bemused snarl. He shows few
of the physical hallmarks of a billboard model, a TV
doctor, a player, an adventurer or being fantastically
rich, except for in the way he is meeting her gaze. 65
Choice is Power | OPTIONS 2009
He’s just a guy in his underwear.
He is the most beautiful man she has ever seen.
 Analysing
Susan Sontag’s
An argument about beauty
I n 2002, the Pope, responding to allegations of
sexual misconduct by clerics with minors, compared
the church to a work of art; and these repugnant
acts to mere blemishes one might overlook on a
canvas of great beauty. Susan Sontag responded
with an essay titled An argument about beauty 1 in
which, unsurprisingly, she treats this duplicity with
the disdain it deserves. She then expresses her own
ideas on beauty, approaching the subject through a
variety of contexts.
Sontag writes of beauty as a cultural concept,
grounded very much in people’s experiences:
“Thinking about the history of beauty means focusing
on its deployment in the hands of specific
communities.” However, she does not deal with the
spectrum of beauty from differing cultures, especially
in relation to art and feminine beauty.  In contrast, the Pope raises the concept of beauty
66
Choice is Power | OPTIONS 2009
Indira KG
IndiraKG is an IT and change management
specialist. Educated at Visakha Vidyalaya
Colombo, she made her career as a librarian.
After emigrating to Australia she obtained an
Applied Science degree in Information and a
Master’s degree in Information and Change
Management. She practices and teaches yoga
at weekends and believes that beauty comes
from within.
Susan Sontag, 1933 - 2004
Impermanence and Spirituality
Sontag uses only one non-Western example, that of
the Japanese annual cherry blossom viewing. This
formalised ritual, very much centring on the
Japanese sense of beauty, is fraught with both
blossom and the acknow ledgement of
impermanence, which surely must come from the
Buddhist perspective.
Central to Buddhism is the inevitable nature of
change and the sadness it brings; and the
consequent need, through the shedding of
attachment and desire, to reach Nirvana. Sontag
explores this keenly elegiac nature of beauty in its
most evanescent form, which the Japanese find
stirring.
to one of incorruptibility, says Sontag, to a blend of
the intellectual and spiritual, comparing this integrity
to the nature of the Catholic Church. The church is
thus distanced from a ‘day-to-day beauty’, removing
beauty from ordinary people’s lives and experiences
to a place which they cannot reach unless they are
capable of being uplifted to intellectual and spiritual
heights. It seems the Pope here is willing to leave his
flock behind. 

Beauty and Taste
“It is not surprising that John Paul II, and the preserve-
and-conserve institution for which he speaks, feels
as comfortable with beauty as with the idea of
good,” says Sontag. She sees it as inevitable then
that Beauty would be a notion to be discredited as
a conservative standard by the ‘makers and
proclaimers of the new’.
Sontag quotes Gertrude Stein as saying that to call a
work of art beautiful means it is dead. Beautiful has
come to mean ‘merely’ beautiful: there is no more
vapid or philistine compliment. Oscar Wilde’s disdain
for things conventionally deemed beautiful is drawn
on by Sontag, when he described a sunset as
‘interesting’. Sontag proposes that ‘interesting’ art is
not necessarily liked or considered beautiful. It is art
that people felt they ought to like. “Or that they liked
it, sort of, even if it wasn’t beautiful... Or they might
describe something as interesting to avoid the
banality of calling it beautiful.”
‘Taste’ was brought in as a register of beauty, and
people of taste developed connoisseurship to
interpret its rarefied forms. This discrimination, Sontag
says, brought its own communal restrictions. Taste was
created in ‘inner-circles’ which remain ‘unapologetic
about station, class, hierarchy and a right to exclude’.
She makes the point that, “Today good taste seems
even more retrograde an idea than beauty. Austere,
difficult, ‘modernist’ art and literature have come to
seem old-fashioned, a conspiracy of snobs.”
Gender   As one observes art (beauty that is made) or one’s
Expanding the arena of what might be considered
‘beautiful’ to include the ‘interesting’, says Sontag,
gives commerce a larger domain for operation. The
boring, understood as an absence, suggests the need
for an antidote. What is offered by the market is an
empty affirmation, an inconclusive experience of
reality.
Sontag touches on the corporeal definition of
physical beauty but does not analyse to any great
length an issue which has now developed into a
social problem in Western and Westernized societies:
the conception of a woman’s ideal body shape has
led to psycho-social ills such as bulimia and anorexia
nervosa evidenced in very public, iconic persons.
beauty
Many children growing up in the West have to deal
with the very real challenge of air-brushed beauties
on magazine covers.
Sontag draws on the ambivalence that beauty can
trigger because of the “age-old denigration of the
feminine”: “For if women are worshipped because
they are beautiful they are condescended to
because of their preoccupation with making or
keeping themselves beautiful.” She suspects that,
misogyny too might underlie the urge to metaphorize
beauty, thereby promoting it out of the realm of the
‘merely’ feminine, the unserious, the specious. Sontag
points out that, “To be concerned with one’s own
beauty is to risk the charge of narcissism and frivolity.
Consider all the beauty synonyms, starting with the
‘lovely’, the merely ‘pretty’, which cry out for virile
transportation.”
Aesthetic vs Beauty  
Where does beauty stand in relation to the aesthetic,
which Tolstoy and Kierkegaard insist is itself a quasi-
moral project? Sontag contends that irresistibly
enthrallingly beauty has, since the time of Plato, been
posited as flowing from the nature of beauty itself.
She sees the tendency to make beauty yet again a
binary concept (as inner and outer or higher and
lower beauty) as an imposition of moral and
consequently ethical judgements.  
While the idealisation of beauty may be considered
a consolation, it may not always console, says
Sontag, as subjugation is very much part of beauty.
lover (beauty that is human), either has the capacity
to conjure up the fantasy of possession, leading
inevitably to torment.
Nature and Nurture
67
Pure beauty is rooted in disinterest, says Sontag, as it
Choice is Power | OPTIONS 2009
rises from the beauty of nature; distant, overarching
and unpossessable. She illustrates this with a quote
from a letter written by a German soldier on the
Russian front in the winter of 1942: ‘I was all alone
beneath an enormous starred sky, and I can
remember a tear running down my frozen cheek, a
tear neither of pain nor joy but of emotion created
by intense experience.’ Sontag concludes: “Unlike
 beauty
beauty, often fragile and impermanent, the capacity
to be overwhelmed by the beautiful is astonishingly
sturdy and survives amidst the harshest distractions.
Even war, even the prospect of certain death, cannot
expunge it.”
Sontag concludes that beauty is central to an
individual’s life and their energies, affinities and
admirations; to consider that any other could take
its place would be ludicrous. It would be hard to
disagree with this. Her view is that, “The wisdom that
results from a deep, lifelong engagement with the
aesthetic cannot be duplicated by any other kind
of seriousness.” A human’s lifelong striving for
definitions of beauty and goodness in her view, results
in a fuller humanity and virtue. To many, this stance
would appear unassailable.
68
Choice is Power | OPTIONS 2009
Possibly my first encounter with beauty would have
been as an infant as my mother bent over me and I
began to recognise that fountainhead of nurture and
nourishment, kindling within me a wonderful sense
of  being loved and loving. No matter which
standards, norms or tastes dominate the
surroundings, initially at least, a mother is the most
beautiful reality to a child. My father, dedicating his
book on the flowers of Sri Lanka, to his parents
‘...who first named the flowers for me’, associated
beauty with human relationships.
Humans spend all their lives searching for beauty,
whether in art, nature or relationships. It is the
strongest driving force, as is evident in the daily
news.
1. Sontag, Susan(2002) An argument about beauty. [In Daedalus. Fall.
pp.21-26]
Sharni Jayawardena