A Wild Fish Chase

Little Mary Jane is everything Pecola wants to be. She wants to "eat the eyes, eat Mary Jane" (50), as if that would help her become Mary Jane. As if that would some how give her the love and affection she craves. She pays money to become an ideal she has formed in her head. But society does not help her become the ideal that they so desperately want everyone to be. This is shown through her interaction with the store clerk when she hands the money to him. Instead of taking it from like a normal person "he hesitates, not wanting to touch her hand" (49) simply because she is black and therefore "ugly." This represents society dangling impossible ideals in front of women and men to shame them for being born a certain way.

"Smiling white face" (50)

I tried to figure out how beauty ideals were developed, but I got stuck because they really just do not make any sense. I thought of American beauty standards in the 50's where being skinny meant will driving the men away (Being white to be beautiful is just kind of a given at this point in time). There were advertisements encouraging women to use their products to gain weight. To make matters worse, they said that women should gain weight for men. It encouraged the mentality of constantly having to please others instead of yourself. Consistently pleasing others is impossible, making these standards even more impossible than they were before.  

Skip forward a few decades to the early 2000's, and you have the complete opposite: be skinny, have a thigh gap, lose 20 pounds and you just might get a boyfriend. But this wasn't enough. It had to become a challenge. This was a major trend throughout Asia. While it's great for those who have this body type to be proud of it, the label "challenge" makes it seem like the rest of us have failed, or that it's something that can be obtained with some kind of practice, or that it even matters to have a waist smaller than the width of a sheet of paper.

A4 Paper Challenge

Now society is all about plus sized and curves. At this point I thought I had it some what figured out, but then Vogue drops this: 

What does this even mean? It might as well ask "Are boobs over?" Absolute blasphemy. What happens if it is "over?" Should we just pretend that they're not there? Should we get plastic surgery to "fix" the issue? These standards just keep us on a wild fish (goose) chase (I had to try) that just creates unhappiness and disappointment in something we can't control. So my conclusion is that beauty standards are impossible. There's no reason to be defined by a sheet of paper or some advertisement that says you have to look a certain way to find love. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, not society, so don't let anyone else define it for you.