The East and the West have many different views on beauty standards. Fatima Merissa’s article, Size 6: The Western Women's Harem, discusses the positives and negatives about beauty standards. She illustrates how the East and the West dominated by the beauty standards that take place in society, due to many reasons.
Fatima Merissa is a Moroccan woman, who had driven away from a society where the woman has to cover their faces' out in public, to another society where being a size 6 or bigger is atrocious. Fatima encounters a saleslady at a store, in America, to help her find a skirt in her size. The saleslady refused to help her because Fatima is not in the normal size in America, so therefore the store does not carry that size. Back when she
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In the West, ‘' to be beautiful, women have to appear childish and brainless. When a woman looks mature and self- assertive, or allows her hips to expand, she is condemned as ugly.'' Merissa ties this issue back to her experience with the saleslady because Merissa was not in the ideal beauty standard. The saleslady did not want to help her because she did not meet the beauty standard. She begins by uncovering the reality of how ladies are indicated to look younger, putting a perfect image in one's head. ‘' The Weston man uses images and spotlights to freeze female beauty within an idealized childhood and forces women to perceive again, that normal unfolding of years, as a shameful devaluation. The difference between the East and the West is that any Eastern women can escape her predicament since it is evident to society, while in Western culture, men lessen women. The eastern harem does not attack aging as directly as the western civilization does. She sees that the western women are free in wearing what they please but in reality, women receive plenty of stress from trying to meet the ideal beauty standards that were created by