Does anyone have any creative ideas for a presentation?

Anyone ideas for a class presentation on beauty or cultural standards of beauty?

• I need to do a presentation on something regarding beauty, focusing more on how different cultures view beauty and I don't want it to be totally boring. It needs to be about 25 minutes long and I need a way to involve the audience so they don't die of boredom!!

• Answer:

  Cultures consider different things to be beautiful in it's own context like the Renaissance women who would pluck their hair in order to have higher foreheads, neck stretching practiced in places like Burma and Thailand, intentional scarring, and you could even bring it into modern context and take apart the constructs of tattooing and its vast popularity and purpose. I think Mac's idea of looking at the past for paintings, sculptures, or simple illustrations would be a very interesting route to take. I would advise you to take tall of those options into account in their own cultural context, but I think something needs to be said for homogeneity of beauty across cultures. I know you said you want to see "how different cultures view beauty", so this might just be a side note to consider: the beauty of symmetry. I've been very intrigued by the idea that the human perception has come to perceive asymmetries as unnatural. For example, an individual with an apparent physical deformity would be less likely to be considered stereotypically beautiful. An article to consider - "Symmetry, sexual dimorphism in facial proportions and male facial attractiveness" by I.S. Penton-Voak et al. You can download a pdf. file of the article if you just put the title into google. Here are two more sites with the same approach to a general view of beauty. http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/node/1670 http://www.jyi.org/volumes/volume6/issue6/features/feng.html The final question I would advise you to consider is the cultural and biological importance of beauty. Like jonmcn49 said, sometimes there are just such innate perceptions of what is beautiful that it's unnatural to think beauty is purely a cultural construction. what does that say about our biology? To give you an idea of what I mean, I refer back to the idea of evolution's primary goal of allowing an individual to have offspring. There have been plenty of studies on mate selection and it seems that reproductive success (how likely this individual is to assist in all things related to offspring survival and development) is one of, if not THE most important factor in selecting a mate. So then, what can we say about the genes of an individual with a genetic deformity (who may be less symmetrical)? How are they perceived by the opposite gender? What implications can we make about that individual's reproductive success? It's always so difficult to talk about these kinds of things in a manner that doesn't offend somebody, so be very careful about the way you phrase things if you chose to work with this idea. Also, I hope I haven't offended anybody by what I've said. It's not my intention to generalize people, their lives, or their misfortunes. I'm just giving insight to a social issue that many people believe may have a biological framework under which it functions. Of course, the most obvious approach to involving your audience is to pass around a number of photocopies of women and men that could be considered stereotypically attractive and unattractive. If you don't have the means to do so, try projecting images and simply having a show of hands to see how homogeneous beauty is among people. you might want to test this out before you do it in class. In your discussion, talk about the specific individuals in your pictures. I feel that talking about individuals is far more interesting than talking about a general theory.