After class discussion last week, I found the question “who defines beauty” very interesting. To be honest, I do not know for sure who defines beauty, but I know people have different definition of “beauty” in each culture and each generation.
In ancient China, different dynasties have very different definitions on how a beauty should look like. In Annals of Spring and Autumn, because the king loved women who have small waist, many female starve themselves in order to get the attention of the king and therefore the definition of beauty in that generation is women who have small waist. In Tang Dynasty, people believe that fleshy women have stronger ability to give birth to boys (sons are considered better than daughters at that time), and therefore people generally think that chubby women are beautiful. Also, women who looked sick were also considered to be pretty in many dynasties because men would feel like they have the obligations to protect these women.
According to the Chinese history, it seems like the definitions of beauty is largely decided by men; women then have to adjust their diet in order to satisfy the standard. Even though it seems like even nowadays some women try hard to meet the standard of beauty that is defined by some men (for example, a boyfriend asks his girlfriend to go on diet), but since societies today is very different from ancient China and we are no longer ruled by any emperor directly, I believe that women today have more rights to decide how they would want to be like.
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