Think about it!!!!!

Read the following article and contribute your thoughts about it.
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Queen of the Universe
By Dave Barry
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It's a Thursday afternoon at the Seville Beach Hotel in Miami Beach, and about a dozen tourists have gathered to watch the Most Beautiful Women in the World emerge from the ladies' room. Here comes Miss Estonia! She's tall and blond and thin! Here comes Miss Venezuela! She's tall and blond and thin, too!
Here comes Miss Croatia, and... my gosh, SHE's tall and blond and thin! Here comes Miss Australia! She's a chunky redhead!
No, of course Miss Australia is also tall and blond and thin. It turns out that a great many of the Most Beautiful Women in the WOrld are tall and blond, and ALL of them are thin, thin,thin. These women make Goldie Hawn look like Dick Butkus.
They also smile a lot-big, radiant, glossy-lipped, perfect- teeth smiles. It seems to be their automatic reaction to every stimulus. As each woman comes out, a tourist asks if he can pose with her for a photograph; each one smiles and says yes. They're not only the Most Beautiful Women in the World; they're nice! One by one, they stand next to the tourist, towering over him, radiating at the camera. Then they turn gracefully and walk past the two police officers on guard-the officers try not to stare- into the hotel ballroom. There, they resume rehearsing for the big night, eight days from now, when one of them-in front of a worldwide audience estimated at 600 million people, plus Donald Trump- will be crowned Miss Universe. The Most Beautiful of ALl!!!

When you think about it, "beauty" is a weird concept.

Take noses. A nose is basically a lump of flesh with air holes in it. It enables you to breathe and smell; it also helps protect your eyes. That's what it's for. Yet for some reason, we have decided, as a culture, that if these flesh lumps have a certain shape- despite the fact that they may perform the same biological functions just as well, or even better- are deemed ugly. The same is true for eyes, eye brows, ears, mouths, hair, teeth, necks, chins, shoulders, arms, hands, stomachs, thighs, calves, feet and all the other observable body parts. For many of us, how well these body parts do their job is secondary; what matters is how closelythe parts come to being whatever arbitrary shape and size is considered, in our culture, to be beautiful. We obsess aobut this; we agonize endlessly. We spend billions of dollars trying to change ourselves. WE dye our hair and pluck our eyebrows and religiously smear our faces with expensive products designed to make us look less like ourselves, and more the "ideal". We pay surgeons to slice into us, to remove or rearrange perfectly goodl flesh. We eat, God help us, rice cakes.

Why do we care so much about appearance? Is it some kind of mass psychosis? Or is it natural? Do other species do the same thing? If a male squid is clinging to an undersea rock, and two female squids swim past , does the male look at them and decide which one is more beautiful? DOes he notice the shapes of their beaks, the way the undersea light glints from their skin slime, the size of the suckers on their tentacles; and does he think to himself, in some squid way, " Well, the one on the left is ugly, but the one on the right is a BABE"?
We may not know what squids think about beauty, but there is no question what popular Western culture thinks about it. Watch any TV show; open any magazine; go to any movie. You can't avoid the obvious conclusion: Popular Western culture thinks beauty is a very, very big deal. Especially feminine beauty. THis is one of the two big reasons why I'm glad I'm a man (the other one is that I will never be called upon to have an entire human being pass through one of my bodily orfices)
Men definitely get more slack in the beauty department. A man can be bald, or carry a fea dozen extra pounds, or have bad skin or a big nose, and still be considered attractive. Granted, there's a definite" beauty" standard for males: the square-jawed male models with rippling abdominals; Tom Cruise; and of course John F. Kennedy Jr. These mmen are considered beautiful, and regular men cannot hope to look like them. But regular men cannot hope to look like them. But regular men CAN look at, say, Tom Hanks, or Sean Connery without his wig, or Al Pacino-who is a Registered *** Object-and say :" Hey, I don't look That different"
Regular women can't look at female romantic-lead movie stars, or super models, and say this. More and more, it seems, the women who are certified as beautiful as look less and less like the vast majority of women. It is not enough for a woman to have the right cheekbones, the right eyes, the right mouth, the right nose and flawless skin: Beautiful women, it has been decided, must also be extraordinarily tall, and they must have no more body fat than a Bic pen. If you don't meet these criteria, then....sorry! You're the ugly squid!
The Miss Universe Pageant, like most pageants, does not formally call itself a "beauty" pageant. You hear virtually no overt talk from pageant officials about physical appearance; you hear a LOT of talk about qualities such as personality, poise, talent, integrity and "inner beauty". I'm not saying that those qualities are totally irrelevant to winning a pageant; I'm just saying that if you have all of those qualities, plus a Nobel Prize, but you also happen to have a big nose, or wide hips, or a sagging butt, or the tiniest hint of cellulite, you have no more chance of becoming Miss Universe than I do.
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1/ Do you agree with Barry about beauty? Why or why not?
2/The author mentions the fact that plastic surgery is one option that many people take in order to achieve " ideal beauty". What do you think of the practice of plastic surgery? Can you think of any circumstances in which it would be necessary?



It's not wealth one asks for, but just enough to preserve one's dignity, to work unhampered,to be generous, to be independent

your post is too long to read ...anyway, if i make any mistakes in my reply, please correct it .. i'm just a beginner in studying English...
1/ Do you agree with Barry about beauty? Why or why not?
uhm... its sound likes beauty women in this world must tall and blond and thin. In this case, how about the other women with dark hair - red hair ? Are they beautiful ? Yes, they are also very beautiful. " lot-big, radiant, glossy-lipped, perfect- teeth " , it is not enough to show that they are beautiful ... i know that, almost men, they dream of such girls - but, in fact, we are still attracted by the others ... Those girls here, were just showing their form, their beauty, we don't know about their real face under their make-up ... So, I don't agree with Barry.
2/The author mentions the fact that plastic surgery is one option that many people take in order to achieve " ideal beauty". What do you think of the practice of plastic surgery?
Plastic surgery is just one of the popular solution to achieve "beauty " . - Nowadays, not only women need this one, but also, men also go to the Beauty Salon.... ... Good or Bad depends on how you like it - if it succeeds - ah, it's good ... ... if not -> it becomes oposit ideal.
yep, i think we do care so much about appearance. But Is it not a kind of mass psychosis... the truth that, we believe the more beautiful we are - the more chances we have....
make it easy