How looking beautiful has become a moral imperative in today's world

The demand to be beautiful is increasingly important in today's visual and virtual culture. Rightly or wrongly, being perfect has become an ethical ideal to live by, and according to which we judge ourselves good or bad, a success or a failure. Perfect Me explores the changing nature of the beauty ideal, showing how it is more dominant, more demanding, and more global than ever before.

Heather Widdows argues that our perception of the self is changing. More and more, we locate the self in the body--not just our actual, flawed bodies but our transforming and imagined ones. As this happens, we further embrace the beauty ideal. Nobody is firm enough, thin enough, smooth enough, or buff enough-not without significant effort and cosmetic intervention. And as more demanding practices become the norm, more will be required of us, and the beauty ideal will be harder and harder to resist.

If you have ever felt the urge to "make the best of yourself" or worried that you were "letting yourself go," this book explains why. Perfect Me examines how the beauty ideal has come to define how we see ourselves and others and how we structure our daily practices-and how it enthralls us with promises of the good life that are dubious at best. Perfect Me demonstrates that we must first recognize the ethical nature of the beauty ideal if we are ever to address its harms.

About the Author
Heather Widdows is the John Ferguson Professor of Global Ethics in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Birmingham. Her books include Global Ethics: An Introduction, The Connected Self: The Ethics and Governance of the Genetic Individual, and The Moral Vision of Iris Murdoch.

Reviews
"One of The Atlantic's Best Books of 2018"
"In . . . Perfect Me, Heather Widdows, a philosophy professor at the University of Birmingham, England, convincingly argues that the pressures on women to appear thinner, younger and firmer are stronger than ever."---Amanda Hess, New York Times
"In 1990 . . . Naomi Wolf published The Beauty Myth, her examination-and her indictment-of the way attractiveness functions as both a metaphor for and a mandate over women's lives. The book now has a sequel, of sorts. . . . Perfect Me: Beauty as an Ethical Ideal . . . [is] a scholarly work that is urgently relevant to the current cultural moment."---Meagan Garber, The Atlantic
"Perfect Me, a buzzed-about new book by Heather Widdows, argues women face unprecedented pressure to appear thinner, younger and firmer."---Anne Kingston, Maclean's
"Heather Widdows, in Perfect Me, considers the far-ranging implications of attractiveness rendered in the imperative, giving beauty itself, in the process, the rigorously intellectual treatment it deserves. The book, an academic title with mass-market implications, considers beauty as a construction, racialized and gendered; beauty as a constriction, often punishing and occasionally cruel; and beauty as a goal that remains, for most, persistently out of reach. Perfect Me is a treatise that often reads, fittingly, as an indictment-a book that recognizes all the ways people are taught, still, to judge books by their covers." * The Atlantic *
"A sharp and accessible read."---Regan Penaluna, Guenrica
"Widdows is at her best in her analysis of liberalism's uncritical glorification of choice (and therefore responsibility), which fails to consider social contexts and pressures and so allows for victim blaming when women 'choose' to comply with beauty standards."---M.A. Betz, Choice Reviews
"Widdows deserves high praise for her interdisciplinary work in this book and its combination with philosophical rigor."---Samantha Brennan, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
"Perfect Me is well-worth reading for anyone who is concerned about the importance of beauty in modern life and the imperative to develop critical perspectives for thinking about it. It sets out the questions that we need to be thinking about and does so in a way that makes it clear what is at stake in our search for evermore-perfect bodies."---Kathy Davis, European Journal of Women's Studies
"Heather Widdows['s Perfect Me] gave me language to understand my own thought processes around my body, and that framework freed me from years of accidentally accumulated bullshit thinking. I'm grateful I stumbled onto it. I think of it frequently."---Bri Lee, Sydney Morning Herald



Book Information
ISBN 9780691160078
Author Heather Widdows
Format Hardback
Page Count 368
Imprint Princeton University Press
Publisher Princeton University Press