BEAUTY

What is real beauty? What makes one person beautiful and another not? Does media influence peoples perception? Who is to say who is and who is not good looking? These are the questions I set out to answer during the 2007 Junior Urban Adventure, and in a sense I did.

My first task was to ask random people in Boston what they thought real beauty was to them, what first attracts them to a person, and I also asked them to rate five pictures of random people on a scale of one through five. I ended up doing this on the first morning in Boston at Copley Center. Seven people were questioned (three females and four males), ages eighteen to twenty-four. Three people said it was a person’s personality that made them stand out, one said it would be interesting features or clothing style, another was attracted to a nice smile. Only one person based their definition of beauty entirely on looks and one was attracted if it was apparent that the person made an effort.

For my pictures I used people form different ethnic groups and two celebrities:
Asian Punk Rocker Johnny Depp Tara Reid White Punk Girl Black Rasta Man
M 24 2 5 5 3 2
F 22 2 4 1 2 2
M 23 3 4 3 2 5
F 20 3 5 2 2 1
F 19 1 5 5 2 1
M 24 3 5 4 2 3
M 18 2 4 4 2 5

It was interesting to see that even the people who said that appearance has nothing to do with beauty were the ones who chose the celebrities as the best looking of the five people. Also, the Rasta Man, and the white and Asian punk girls got the lowest ratings. This leads me to believe that people judge beauty according to ethnicity.

Most celebrities are of the white and black race, and are also considered good looking, and we are not used to seeing people of other races so we do not consider them to be good looking.
However, I can also understand how even if the people who said personality is what makes a person beautiful chose the celebrities as the best looking people, for you cannot judge someone’s character by a photograph.

On the second day we met with Dr. Thompson. She specialized in video games analysis, which on the surface had nothing to do with my topic, but as the interview went on she began to talk about the way women are portrayed in the games. She said that even in games that are rated “G”, there are half naked women. First of all, the games ratings are not very affective since there are no set standards for them. Second, provocative women in videos, on TV, magazines, and in games could have a profound impact on what American’s see as beautiful. It also led to the question: Do more men play certain video games because the women in them are thin and scantily dressed, or are they dressed this way in order to entice more men to play?
Talking to Stella Johnson also opened my eyes to how censored newspapers and magazines are and how they will not publish many photographs because they assume that the public does not want to know what is going on in the world.

Junior Urban Adventure opened my eyes and I learned more than I thought I would by just answering my essential question. Surprisingly, I even got an eye into what I may want to do with my life; photojournalism.

JUA is definitely something I would want to do for my senior leadership project.

By Nicoya