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merlin's picture

Victorias Secret models and Frankenstein..

 I was also thinking about ugliness as a socially constructed reaction. I was recounting the passage when the creature is created and victor says

              "....His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath, his heair was of a lustrous black and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes...." 


it seems as though the ugliness is more derived from the contrast of multiple individual features that Victor incorporated into the creature, for example his bright white teeth against his yellow transparent skin. This made me think again about going back to the whole cosmetic surgery thing. I believe that a lot of people who get a nose job done, for example, usually don't even have a highly unusual nose. many times their noses look just like your nose or my nose. A nose is just a nose! but they seem to become hyper-fucused on this one particular feature almost to the degree of an obsession and come to believe that there is something seriously wrong with it. Now, there are certainly people who have unusual schnozzes! But I believe that there are others who develop an obsession about one feature and forget to look at their bodies holistically. I agree with the notion that the creature is considered ugly because he was made with all of these parts that didn't go together to begin with, and therefore didn't match up properly. Therefore, if we give ourselves a new nose or Veneer our teeth, does that make us in actually more like the creature? maybe. Sometimes we see a person who has had so much elective cosmetic surgery that not only is it obvious, it can be be considered repulsive by others for loooking "unnatural." something about their altered features just doesnt seem to fit together properly. 

         I think that victor is afflicted by a common condition in humans. I think that he has a skewed perception of perfection. I think that there is a victor in all of us. And I think this affliction surfaces whenever we take a look at photoshopped models in a magazine. Here, take a look at these funny examples...

 

 

 

 

 

 

Just plain Weird! look at where her wrists meet her torso, parts of her body were cut out and dissected just like Frankenstein! which makes her shoulders in comparison look disproportionate. 

VS model:       


vs model 2:     Another weird photoshopping, her legs look detached from her body!
EEEW!!

vs model 3:     

^ Complete arm Detachment!!! Also, if you'll notice her right boob looks twice as big as her left boob!! :0!


  vs model 4:            OK, now this is really weird...
found on a cover for Ralph Lauren:


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What has happened is that the photoshopper has tried to give these poor models an unattainable and naturally impossible body type. Some of them look just plain WEIRD! so distorted are their bodies that we could maybe compare them to aliens (I suppose the intergalactic friends of Bryn Mawr's Global Initiative would not approve of this stereotyping however, so I'll compare them to Frankenstein instead). So these models are shorter, tanner Frankensteins! They are unnatural and thus unattractive in Frankenstinian terms. 

 

 

I think that Victor would have made a horrible photoshop editor, maybe even Victorias Secret would have fired him!

 

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