Beauty Fieldwork Assignment: Sociology

Charles DeLoach
Beauty Fieldwork Assignment For this project I interviewed my two male roommates, Eli Goodman and Chris Roat as well as my sister Katie DeLoach, and my friend from high school Gabby Gurewitz. I chose my two roommates as interview subjects because they couldn’t be more different. Chris is always really flirty with girls and Eli is generally quitter. Eli is white and Jewish, while Chris is Latino and Christian. Also Eli tends to think much more logically while Chris is much more laid back so I thought it would be interesting to see the contrast in their answers. I chose my sister Katie because she used to be extremely self-conscious but has gotten much more confident throughout college so I was interested to see how this would
Several of his answers were very scientific, mentioning how physical beauty is simply an easy ways for us to tell if a person would have a child with positive features. Eli has taken a sociology class and talked about how he believed looks are more important for women in our society. He expressed how he thought this was wrong and how women are given an unrealistic standard of what they should look like. In the excerpt from Naomi Wolf’s “The Beauty Myth” in which Wolf stats “The more legal and material hindrances women have broken through, the more strictly and heavily and cruelly images of female beauty have come to weigh upon us.” (Naomi Wolf, 179) I bring this up here specifically because of Eli’s awareness of the hardships women face in regards to the standards that are set for them in our culture. Despite his knowledge, his definition of the perfect woman was practically all about stereotypical good looks and failed to mention a single personality trait. The only thing he wanted in his perfect woman that wasn’t physical was for her to also be Jewish. This shows how deeply seeded the affects of culture can sometimes be on the way we think regardless of how much we