A Woman's Beauty Susan Sontag Analysis

In A Woman’s Beauty: Put Down or Power Source?, Susan Sontag elaborates on the internal hardships women face due to societal gender roles that have existed for millenniums. She poses a series of historical and modern day contradictions to highlight the absurdities of these rigid gender roles and the way we think about the role of women. While her message is meant to appeal to all women, she risks alienating many who may feel as if beauty is something they truly don’t want to give up.

In the beginning of her essay, Sontag uses logos when she gives a historical account explaining how for the Ancient Greeks, “beauty was a virtue”; something necessary to be thought of as a “whole” person. She gives an example about a well-known historical figure: “The well-born young Athenians who gathered around Socrates found it quite paradoxical that their hero was so intelligent, so brave, so honorable, so seductive - and so ugly.”
She describes how, “A beautiful woman, we say in English. But a handsome man”. This shows the readers how limited our definitions have become. You can be either/or, but not both. They should recognize this as problematic. Sontag does this mainly by using the word “but” to start the next sentence. “A beautiful woman” evokes a sense of free flowing elegance while the word “but” is a sharp contrast; a shift from a mellifluous tone to a more concrete one. It also implies that this is an either-or situation. If Sontag had chosen to say “And” instead, it would sound like less of an issue (“A beautiful woman, we say in English. And a handsome man”). The way she chooses to say “But” instead makes it sound more problematic. There are unspoken standards of what word gets used to describe a man or woman’s attractiveness. This shows just how rigid and confining gender roles have become, which supports Sontag’s message that this is a big problem for