Unrealistic Beauty Standards as Groundless Opinions

SUNDAY WEEKLY ZOOM - 12:30 PM EDT - Ancient Text Study: De Rerum Natura by Lucretius -- Read the post for our December 7, 2025 meeting -- or find out how to attend.

 

    For any women out there, here is a YouTube which reflects a good understanding regarding groundless opinions (which comes up in the Letter to Menoeceus) which are neither natural nor necessary. This presents some practical ideas about common unrealistic beauty standards, which apply to all women no matter what race or nationality.

    VS 64 The esteem of others is outside our control; we must attend instead to healing ourselves.

    "And those simple gifts, like other objects equally trivial — bread, oil, wine,
    milk — had regained for him, by their use in such religious service, that poetic,
    and as it were moral significance, which surely belongs to all the means of our
    daily life, could we but break through the veil of our familiarity with things by
    no means vulgar in themselves." -Marius the Epicurean

    “Women are the only exploited group in history to have been idealized into powerlessness.” Erica Jong

    (I never really read her prose – e.g. her novel Fear of Flying – but I have her book of selected poems, Becoming Light, into which I delve for inspiration now and then. “I guess the thing that I'm most proud of is that I kept on writing poetry. I understand that poetry is sort of the source of everything I do. It's the source of my creativity.” Erica Jong)

    "We must try to make the end of the journey better than the beginning, as long as we are journeying; but when we come to the end, we must be happy and content." (Vatican Saying 48)

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