Beauty Is The Beast?
Why are the Western cultural assumptions of beauty viewed as key tools to getting the word out about your cause?
The following quote is from the girl pictured above, (click to read the full article):
Go along with what exactly? In another part of the article, she implies that she dreams of winning the Ms. Tibet Beauty Contest to increase awareness about Tibet’s situation. I’m assuming a simple press release or documentary just would not suffice. It’s the same thing that I don’t understand about the PETA people when they send out nude models for street demonstrations or print ads.
Trust me, I’m not asking that Asian beauties be represented to account for equality. In fact, I’m asking AA Christians to stick up for the subtle aesthetics that we’re stereotyped for because I believe the Asian pre-condition has been one of subconscious misogyny (yeah, I said that) and subjugation of women and these Western notions of beauty wound the psyche of Asian / Asian American women even more than other people groups. Here’s one study abstract that supports that notion.
When Asian Americans are showing a significantly lower self-esteem (as in this study), and the fact that Asians worldwide are being “marketed” broadly in terms of beauty, AA churches need to respond in constructive ways to affirm and help young women find that their identity in Christ supports a wholesome definition of beauty, not Western, not evolving culture, not Asian subjugation, but one that is indeed beautiful, broken and beautiful (shameless, unrelated plug for my wife’s favorite artist, Mark Schultz).
The time is now…
Being Asian and beautiful…do we as Asian American Christians know how to make our women feel this way? Are we confused about what this means as well?
David Park
djchuang
annabananalee
cuttingtruth
mezuzah
daniel so
what you suggest is a political and social agenda that may be frightening for many, especially given the immigrant desire to blend in and not stick out. I find it interesting that although Black people have horrible statistics in just about every category, they tend to think of themselves as beautiful, and for the most part simply don’t care about mainstream (i.e. white) beauty standards. It was not always so. Blacks were not always able or willing to “say it loud; I’m Black and I’m proud” as the James Brown song states it. What was needed on the heels of the social and political revolution of the sixties was a cultural revolution that affirmed Black beauty and cultural (sometimes erroneously and to our detriment). The church was part of this shift and even encouraged it as many churches adopted more culturally appropriate models of worship than what had previously been tolerated. In essence, we learned to stop aping white people and learned, by God’s grace, to love who God had made us to be. It is this revolution that needs to happen in the asian church