Is Sunset Beautiful or Not?

It is hard to describe the feeling that I get when I sit on the sand of Santa Monica beach, with bear foot in the sand, and slightly feeling the fading warmth it saved up for a whole day, and look at the sun slowly dissolving into the sea. I could say that the sunset on such an occasion is beautiful. Perhaps, not many people disagree with me that it is in fact beautiful, yet beauty is subjective, as I understand. And what is ugly about beauty is that it might enforce a certain, notion of beauty upon ourselves through various institutions. Such institutions can be government, religion, culture, arts, education, and etcetera . This gets me thinking about our lectures past few weeks: eating disorder, femininity, and media portrayal of such.

Criticizing on the media for actively and harmfully portraying the expected, desirable appearance of women as skinny does not seem to be the right course to get to the bottom of the problem as to how American women are dissatisfied with their own bodies and that such self-contempt causes eating disorder. As the same logic, talking about how voluptuous women are healthier and more attractive than those skinny does not seem to solve anything as well. So I wonder: why aren’t we talking about such a concept as beauty as our enemy?

Beauty ultimately creates ugliness or vice versa. I am not aware of all the talks on beauty, done by the philosophers ever existed, so I cannot firmly say, but isn’t beauty only existent if compared with ugliness because we wouldn’t be able to figure out whether or not something is beautiful if not compared? Say there is an emerald green colored ocean in front of you. If there were no such thing as beauty, then there would be no ugliness about it. If there were neither beauty nor ugliness, then there would just be this ocean as it is with no subjective judgment on its quality. Similarly, being thinner or thicker, if there were no concept as beauty, wouldn’t that person be just thinner or thicker; and there is nothing negative or positive about it?