Through the unequivocal lyrics of her song, “Scars to Your Beautiful,” Alessia Cara uses the rhetorical appeal of pathos to condemn society’s views of beauty in the form of body image as portrayed by the media. In this song, Cara addresses the ridiculous standards to which young people, especially women, are held. The lyrics of this song speak blatantly to the listener, as Cara criticizes the way that the media glorifies outward beauty as a god in the line, “She craves attention, she praises an image.” She then reinforces the idea that society believes that beauty is worthy of worship by asserting “She prays to be sculpted by the sculptor.” In this line, she is comparing a girl to a sculpture. Sculptors can shape their pieces of art in their exact desired dimensions. Young …show more content…
Cara uses the rhetorical appeal of ethos throughout this song as she is a young woman who was 19 years old when the album was released, and she attended high school and middle school recently, and therefore can relate to the body image issues that many young women struggle with. This song also appeals to kairos as it was released recently in 2015 and the media dominates how we, as a people, perceive many things, including beauty. Alessia Cara’s target audience includes young women, ranging from preteens to women in their upper teens. This is a prime audience for promoting a positive body image because they are often targeted by the media’s image of what a perfect body should look like. The tone of this song is one of an older, more mature woman relating to a younger woman. The more mature woman is trying to convince the younger women that she understands the body image struggles that she is going through by using pathos to make the audience empathize with the younger woman. The more mature voice of the song also encourages the younger woman to embrace her “flaws” and see the beauty in her