Wednesday, July 09, 2008

The Most Beautiful Person in the World.

We have some 6,000,000,000 plus people on Earth speaking some 5000 languages and having just as many, if not more, cultures. All these cultures have different standards of beauty and handsome-ness.
Hollywood and the Press in the US routinely present sexiest men and women alive, but again, they show people who are famous and are in the limelite.They also show people who are handsome by US standards.
There are also world beauty pageants, but again, they show people that have the means, financial and political, to compete.One example comes to mind-I lived in Thailand in the 1990ies, and they chose a Miss Thailand, and everyone was admiring her beauty. She was US-educated and had money for hairdos, and was of the right socio-economic class. However, I saw girls in rice paddies who were far more beautiful than her, but because they were dressed badly, had no money and were tanned and sallied with mud, no one would look at them.
I was in Oman and one Omani person told me that they were shocked that Brad Pitt was chosen by a contest in the US as a paragon of handsomeness. "He is so pale; his skin is sickeningly white, and his hair is like straw- it is so ugly" . To darker Arab people he did not look handsome at all. To Americans, he did.
In many African countries, fat people are seen as attractive.
Asian movie stars would not even get to the first base in Western pageants of any kind.
The Philippines has Mr Philippines contests, but the winners would not score in the US because they would be too short.
Even with nationally acclaimed stars everywhere-once they are on TV, and their personality is shown to the world, then everyone sees how great- looking they are. However, you put them at a gas station pumping gas or sweeping the streets and few would ever notice it.
Anyway, it is impossible to determine who is because it depends on many factors- most importantly the tastes of the culture that does the determining of beauty/hansomeness, individual tastes, etc. With so may people on Earth,it is impossible to choose.
I would instead propose we choose " the Kindest Person in the World" because most people would agree that those who truly care for others and devote their lives to others are the most handsome/beautiful. There are, also, so few of them that such contests would be much easier to carry out.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Oh! goodness I am married to a Filippina lady for 11 months and although she speaks mostly good English I struggle with hers as so many meanings for a word which to me sound the same.

Anonymous said...

Vielen Dank für die Ausführliche Darstellung echt einige gute Topics wieder dabei.
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