For the specific set of beauty ideal aimed at men, see masculine beauty ideal.
The feminine beauty ideal is a specific set of beauty standards regarding traits that are ingrained in women throughout their lives and from a young age to increase their perceived physical attractiveness. It is experienced by many women in the world, though the traits change over time and vary in country and culture.[1]
The prevailing beauty standard for women is heteronormative,[2] but the extent to which it has influenced lesbian and bisexual women is debated.[3][4] The feminine beauty ideal traits include but are not limited to: female body shape, facial feature, skin tones, height, clothing style, hairstyle and body weight.
With fairy tales, mass media, advertisements, fashion and beauty-centered dolls such as Barbie dolls playing a prominent role in women's lives, it adds to the pressure to conform to the feminine beauty ideal starting from a young age. Handling the pressure to conform to a certain definition of "beautiful" can have psychological effects on an individual, such as depression, eating disorders, body dysmorphia and low self-esteem that can start from an adolescent age and continue into adulthood.
^Spade, Joan Z; Valentine, Catherine (Kay) G (2010). The Kaleidoscope of Gender: Prisms, Patterns and Possibilities (3rd ed.). SAGE Publications, Inc. ISBN 978-1412979061.
^Everitt, J.G. (2017). Lesson Plans: The Institutional Demands of Becoming a Teacher. Book collections on Project MUSE. Rutgers University Press. p. 16. ISBN 978-0-8135-8829-2. Retrieved 2023-09-05. p.16: Elements of femininity as an institutional myth include heteronormative beauty standards for women, as well as sexual purity, passiveness, emotional responsiveness and intuition, and intimate capacities for nurturing.
^Lyons, E.; Coyle, A. (2016). Analysing Qualitative Data in Psychology. SAGE Publications. p. 307. ISBN 978-1-4739-3393-4. Retrieved 2023-09-05. p.307: Two authors have speculated on how such ideals affect lesbian and bisexual women. First, lesbians and possibly bisexual may be 'protected' from mainstream emphasis on thinness and from subsequent body dissastisfaction because LGB communities reject heteronormative ideals and are more accepting of diverse body sizes (Brown, 1987). An alternative perspective states that because lesbian and bisexual women are raised and live in mainstream society (with its emphasis on thinness and heteronormative femininity), they will internalize these beauty ideals and experience body dissatisfaction in the same way as heterosexual women.
^Carter, C. (2021). Who's Coming Out to Play: Disruption and Disorientation in Queer Community Sports. McGill-Queen's University Press. p. 23. ISBN 978-0-2280-0642-8. Retrieved 2023-09-05. p.23: Some theorists have proposed that lesbian women have more positive body image due to the seeming protection that queer community provides and strong historical ties with feminist fat activism (Cogan 1999; Ojerholm and Rothblum 1999; Bergeron and Sean 1998; Striegel-Moore, et al. 1990), while others argue that lesbians (trans women and genderqueer individuals are rarely mentioned in body image literature thus far), as women, are socialized in relation to the heteronormative feminine bodily ideal similarly to straight cis women (Kelly 2007; Cogan 1999).
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