Assignment Takeaway
Assignment TakeAway IV
This assignment asked the class to find advertisements that compared and contrasted men and women from another country outside the U.S and the U.S. The other country I chose was South Korea. I also chose the direction for the assignment to explore beauty and image standards per each gender and country. I chose this direction because it feels insightful to see what the norms are at face value, surface-level, materialistic and image-wise as a gateway into shallow, everyday, casual interactions and the more complex interactions of societal, workplace hierarchy, media influence and attraction.
I found this picture for Fenty Beauty in my search for advertisements, and I think it depicts how conscious diversity and inclusion is becoming, as we embrace the fact that nothing is a “one size fits all” but it still takes a collective to acknowledge it and exemplify it.
My personal experience with image and beauty as a young black woman in the U.S. has been a brutal and turbulent struggle. From self hatred, to enduring rude and unwarranted comments, wanting to look lighter and have more angular facial features, straight hair, a straighter nose, all to fit into what I’m exposed to everyday and the messages I’m fed. I sincerely thought I had to look more Eurocentric to be accepted in society, including professional workplaces and to desired by men. I sincerely thought that, and deemed myself forever alone because I thought I was undesirable and unlovable. Luckily something amazing happened and I started to radically embrace my dark skin and natural hair in 2013 and has been working on loving myself for myself since.
While looking for images for the assignment and reflecting on how much diversity and inclusion has progressed in media representation, I have seen that we’ve come a long even from my high school years when I went through the worst period of self-image struggles. There are all types of skin colors, facial features, body shapes, hair types, eye colors, hair colors whether it’s a natural color or unnatural color, tattoos and no tattoos, piercings and no piercings, and disabilities being represented by some clothing company, retail company and even in marketing images, stock photos or graphics. It’s refreshing to really take a step back and see the progress while reflecting on hindsight, but there is still a lot of work to do. It’s nice to see that we are headed in a direction of diversity and inclusion with speed and momentum, for women, men, and everyone in-between.