Monday's presentation from the Cosmetics group got me thinking. I am thinking about cosmetics' role in our culture and their effects on all of society, but most importantly, on women. The Cosmetics group did a great job explaining the health hazards of cosmetics, along with the compulsion that women feel to wear makeup because of an impossible beauty ideal created by our culture. I think we can all agree that the media plays a huge role in this because of its pervasiveness into all aspects of our lives; media has become a major component of the "spectacle" that has become our culture. (Do I need citations in blog posts? It's from Debord's Society of the Spectacle) We, as women, absorb these images of manipulated bodily perfection and, hard as we may try, are unable to block them all out without internalizing them. Also, maybe as a result of this internalization or maybe not, a lot of us use and consume cosmetics. The larger question is what to do about it? Should I just stop wearing makeup as a rejection of sexual objectification of women? ...Coloring my hair? ...Wearing clothes that make me look nice? ...Participating in mainstream culture whatsoever?
I ask these questions rhetorically because I think there are other, more effective solutions than we as individual women turning our bodies once again into the battleground. So instead of placing the center of debate on my body and those of other women, I propose putting the central focus on alternative ways of fighting the impossible, male & heterosexually defined, harmful definition of beauty on those who disseminate it at a larger level.
Here are a few cool ways that people have targeted these harmful messages on a larger scale:
1. No Makeup En Masse: This woman decided to go without makeup for a week and gained a huge following of other women who abstained from makeup for a week. More people more power! Combining efforts helps strengthen the cause. Plus, a week is much more doable than trying to swear something off forever.
Girls at a Texas high school have decided to be makeup free every Tuesday.
2. No Photoshop: Photoshopped images are terrible! Well, when the media uses them in place of real people and we see them all the time they are.
This company refuses to use photoshop in its ads and its catalogues.
This is an alternative website to get your funny feminist news and celebrity gossip from that doesn't use photoshop.
Does anyone else have some other ways to effectuate change on a larger level than just not wearing makeup/using cosmetics? Or does anyone see a hole in my reasoning? Other ideas and possibilities are always welcome because this objectification of women has got to stop at point, somehow. 
Thanks for your post Rachel. I agree that the Cosmetics Group brought up some real key issues and tied the connections of how the media is a key factor in a lot of the top issues in today’s society/ culture. I like how you wrote that the images we as women- and men, see are images of manipulated bodily perfection; because it’s so true. The video clips that were shown Monday like Dove touched base on a question you brought up: photo shop and the way images are completely changed to be more “appealing” to viewers. I don’t know where I stand completely on the ways people have chosen to target the messages of beauty and image, but I do understand where these groups and people are trying to put across (I’m sure you do too.) I actually don’t know of any larger scale ways people have targeted the topic of image and beauty, but I do like to prose a question on how you ended your blog. Should the objection of Women stop? Or can it somehow help raise the issue of how in today’s culture the role of beauty has been reversed? You mentioned that the lens on this topic just doesn’t have to be targeted towards women alone, and that is can and is targeted towards other gender(s) too.