Ideals are supposed to be unattainable for the great many. If everyone could be the smartest, strongest, prettiest, or best, there would be no need for ideals — we'd all just be perfect. But we're not, so ideals exist to show us the peak of humanity and to point our ambition and appreciation toward it.
This is what I always hated about the 90s. It was a decade that made it cool to be a loser. It was the decade of MTV's Beavis and Butt-Head. It was the age of grunge. I'm generationally obliged to like Nirvana, but what a perfectly depressive, suicidal soundtrack to loser culture.
Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth was published in 1990. It took a critical theory-like lens on beauty ideals, and finding it all so awfully oppressive. Because, actually, seeing beautiful, slim people in advertising or media is bad. Because we don't all look like that! And who's even to say what "beauty" is, anyway? It's all just socially constructed!
The final stage of that dead-end argument appeared as an ad here in Copenhagen thirty years later during the 2020 insanity:
I passed it every day biking the boys to school for weeks. Next to other slim, fit Danes also riding their bikes. None of whom resembled the grotesque display of obesity towering over them on their commute from Calvin Klein.
While this campaign was laughably out of place in Copenhagen, it's possible that it brought recognition and representation in some parts of America. But a celebration of ideals it was not.
That's the problem with the whole "representation" narrative. It proposes we're all better off if all we see is a mirror of ourselves, however obese, lazy, ignorant, or incompetent, because at least it won't be "unrealistic". Screw that. The last thing we need is a patronizing message that however little you try, you're perfect just the way you are.
No, the beauty of ideals is that they ask more of us. Ask us to pursue knowledge, fitness, and competence by taking inspiration from the best human specimens.
Thankfully, no amount of post-modern deconstruction or academic theory babble seems capable of suppressing the intrinsic human yearning for excellence forever. The ideals are finally starting to emerge again.
