The Significance of Connotation

We’ve all been there.

When you sit on the bus and you glance up, and behold—the most attractive person you’ve ever seen. With chiseled features, perfect hair, and a suave demeanor, it almost seems as if they’d been Photoshopped, and copy-pasted from your Instagram feed and into real life. Yet, even with the person sitting right in front of you on that worn down, gum-tacked bus, you don’t dare to even make eye contact, even less to approach them. Sometimes even the evil voice in the back of your mind asks, why can’t I look like that?

Keira Knightley

Why do we do this?

The most common answers we get when we ask said question is because of psychology; as if the term can completely reconcile why you and I, who are classified as average-looking people, could fully encapsulate why the human being with a model-body and an easy smile is not as seen as approachable as the rest of us.

Hannah Quinlivan

It may be true that they’re deemed in our eyes as more attractive because of what science has told us: a put-together look, with symmetrical features, and nice hair, but we’re missing the point of how we’re managing to put every single person we label as attractive on a pedestal. However, this is a matter of social construct, simply restricted to our society in real time—based on research, ancient Latin-America civilizations used to sacrifice the beautiful, but that’s not what we’re going to focus on in this post—we tend to regard those who look more aesthetically appealing to the eye with more attention. Whether this is in the form of respect or resentment, is entirely subjective. Either way, we expect them to be more successful than we think ourselves to be, and for various reasons.

Jessica Clements

This is where we have to ask, where do we get these expectations?

This is not only pertinent to our own society, but also to the construct of our society throughout history that allows us to see the world through this certain kind of lens. We can define the term social construct as a set of ideologies instilled by a society in order to understand certain phenomena. Holistically, this sounds like a whole-hearted attempt to try to understand the backgrounds and values upheld by societies of different customs and ideologies.

Ciara

However, throughout history, there have been faint stabbing allusions to race, and racial conflation. In these situations, the customs that have been brought up as the societal norm has been used to the advantage of the creator. This way, the one in power has the ability to establish an order that creates a dominating hierarchy—with themselves at the top. In colonial America, white colonialists brought up the norm that they were superior to black and indigenous slaves. Whether it be for moral issue of separating families or selling people like cargo, backed by emphasis in the Christian Bible about the pains of childbirth, or the attempt to protect fragile masculinity (because women weren’t offered much of a say to how society in colonial America was run, either), the construct was put into place, and executed for over centuries. These instilled lines of inequality were often passed down because they were simply what was seen as mainstream practice. However, we are often aware that although something was of practice, that it didn’t necessarily mean that it was morally and ethically correct or fair.

Gemma Chan

This is why, sadly, the standard of beauty even today is often held up with people of certain characteristics. With the lack of diversity on the subject, this leads many people to believe that there is only one way to be seen as beautiful. We often take note the similarities of these characterized "beautiful people" who grace our magazine covers and movie screens: much of the characteristics of these people are often Eurocentric. What this means, through physical definition, are that these people sport fair-skin, and defined facial structure (including a long nose, pouty lips, almond eyes, pronounced jawline and cheekbones, etc.) and features. Because the media gears the general public to regard beauty in a certain, specific way, we often filter our standards of "beautiful" to the way mainstream media has generated us to think. However, from the pictures that we have embedded in this blog post, we see that this is far from the truth.

Dina Denoire

Throughout the history of documented beauty in European cultures, it is often portrayed that those with fair skin and light eyes are deemed as beautiful. Similarly, in many Asian cultures, the standard of beauty requires an individual to have fair, clear skin to be considered as beautiful. Although there is historical context linked to this (those of darker skin tend to be characterized as laborers who tanned from overexposure from labor in the sun), it is not right to characterize beauty based solely on physical features, because of the possible underlying connotations that can be established.

The connotation I'm referring to above is the ability to establish power and superiority over certain groups. These ideologies have established differences in a group of people, and therefore distinguish one subset of people to be characterized as a dominating force, and the other as the subordinate. For example, Europeans' ideologies of beauty have led several groups to justify slavery and hate crime because of one's physical appearance.

Zendaya

Sexual assault and harassment does not plague only the physically beautiful; it unfortunately affects 1 in every 5 women and 1 in every 71 men in one's entire lifetime, and is even more harrowing when 65% of all sexual assaults go unreported. With the rise of media and technology in our day and age, it is important that we bring pertinence to this issue. Unfortunately, many of these cases (whether forcibly, etc.) go unreported. Throughout history, many of these acts have been excused because of the color of one's skin; for example, in our previous lectures in Humanities Core, we have discussed how a man was much more likely to be convicted of rape if he was a black man.

Grace Elizabeth

Similarly, the enslaved blacks and indigenous people during colonial America couldn’t change the color of their skin, nor the position they held in society. However, after generations of subjugation, their reactions to the issue were extraordinarily different from what we observe now. So why, with the situation being somewhat alike, in the sense that each individual was naturally born with said characteristics, and would be unable to change it unless one set up an appointment with a local cosmetologist, did one group wish to change, while the other did not? What was different?

Beyonce

It’s the connotation being asserted with said characteristics that validate whether or not a specific trait is desirable. This is where we approach dangerous territory. In one way, we can see this as a revolutionary way to boost everyone’s confidence—what better way to establish tolerance, then, by instilling norms that welcome and encouraging the potential of an individual? Unfortunately, utopias, although ideal, are not probable; we have seen these through multiple patterns over the span of history. Even today, with the rise of social media, there are individuals who are exploited by another’s successes. From body shaming to the countless other double-standards instilled in our society, there never seems to be a middle-ground, win-win situation.

Bianca Lawson

We have stereotypes because we are conditioned to group people. This is not revolutionary; on the contrary, this divides groups of people, by instilling that there are differences that lead to power structure changes. This leads to the creation of double standards in men and women, race, age, gender, class, etc. Physical attractiveness counts only as a small, superficial factor in comparison to the rest of these issues. On the whole, the instillation of these standards in society has a harrowing impact on every individual, at one point or another.

Priyanka Chopra

This is the appropriate (and needed) time to ask, how we can act to solve this problem, as it threatens to denigrate our identities and our histories?

It’s easier said than done when we hear an enthusiastic activist advocate for more tolerance to certain groups in our society. As avid as a devotee that single individual or organization may be, societal constructs are often formulated by those who deem themselves as “superior.” And until we can erase and overthrow the intuitive hierarchy that dominates over our actions and decisions throughout history to this day, we will continue our lives under the oppression of the dominant paradigm.