Why You’ll Never Be Beautiful: The Tragic History of Female Beauty [Video]

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It’s hard to be beautiful today, but the sad truth is: it never was much easier. I’ve been always obsessed with what determines beauty, and have always been interested in the interpretations (and misinterpretations) of evolutionary psychology, modern psychology, anthropology and medicine. I never knew however, just how much economics and politics had to do with it, how much health and disease, money and the church affected what we now consider beautiful or ugly. And even more so, just how much our perceived looks can affect our life. I spent months and months researching and reading about this, satisfying all the curiosities I’ve had since being a little girl and confusions I still had on just how and why we treat each other and ourselves the way we do. I really hope this gives some information and help to any younger version of Elizabeth out there.

The second half of the video (timestamped below) is focused mainly on obesity: something I’m also very passionate about as a soon to be (in a few weeks eeeeek) doctor. I think there’s so much gaslighting in modern body positivity and so much that remains unsaid but definitely felt and experienced by people everywhere. It might be a bit of a stronger take – but I hope it makes sense!

I ended up having 135 citations for this video. I worked on it all myself, and this video kind of got out of control from the amount of things I ended up reading and referencing – so reflecting my chaotic mind, I tried my best to keep the citations as clean as possible, but I do apologise if there’s any repetitions or messy links. The full list was too long for the description, so I’ve linked a page below with all the books/links/studies referenced. The easiest thing to do is to look at the number of the citation on the video (the rest of the text might be too small in the end for a phone screen) and refer to the page for an easy copy paste if you want to check them out!

A lot of the historical information was new to me, and I tried my best to find accurate resources and to double and triple check them and go as far back as I could to the original sources – but where there’s mistakes in what I say in the video, I do apologise and welcome the corrections!

For a full list of the citations shown (it might be easier to look at the citation number in the video and reference it here): https://www.elizabethfilips.com/post/citations-why-you-will-never-be-beautiful

To make your life easier:
0:00 Introduction
8:08 The Pre-Industrial Revolution
14:33 The Industrial Revolution
16:08 The Victorian Era
37:18 World War I
39:08 The Roaring 20s
44:10 The Great Depression
46:52 World War II
48:34 The OG Tradwife
54:39 The Soft American
1:00:08 The Obesity Epidemic

WHO AM I: I’m Elizabeth, a medical student, painter and Podcaster in London. I love to think and talk about life, art, medicine, books and meaning. And also how to find the time to do those things. If you’d like to watch me paint and talk about life, I do that on my podcast (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5NsPe2poaBRA0IPdTxJTQA) and if you’d like to read my thoughts and book notes, I have a newsletter you can join (https://go.elizabethfilips.com/newsletter).

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