https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FPfb7AvlRUtOAsg56lDADaaGB-qhwemc/view?usp=sharing
Creating “The Perfect Woman”: My Process and Reflection
By Louisa Miller-Out
Typing things like “female celebrities with best legs” into my search engine felt like a crime. I even conducted the search for all the body parts in an incognito tab. It was sickening to embody the kind of people who religiously read celebrity gossip articles and gawk at heavily retouched images of women’s body parts all day long, but eventually I gathered intel on the female celebrities that the public appraised most highly for various features like hair, eyes, nose, arms, and hips. I then Photoshopped the “best” body parts in Hollywood together to create what should be the ideal woman, but what instead appears to be some kind of Frankensteinian nightmare. This illustrates the point that beauty and perfection are not synonymous, nor is there “one way” to be beautiful. Instead of striving to conform to one impossible beauty standard, torturing and contorting our bodies and compromising our individuality in the process, we must accept our imperfections and learn to embrace them. Once we are free of the constant mental burden of striving towards unattainable societal prescriptions of beauty, we have so much more bandwidth to accomplish other things. Unfortunately, the authors of the articles I had to read for this project must have still been stuck in that cognitive cycle, as they didn’t seem to have much on their minds besides what bikini Miley Cyrus wore on which day and exactly which new plastic surgery Kim Kardashian was promoting on her Instagram story.
With every new article I clicked on, I found at least one sentence that was jaw-droppingly asinine, profoundly violating, or both. In these poor excuses for journalism, celebrities were treated like zoo animals or collections of parts rather than human beings. I cobbled the worst bits together by general topic to create my mock articles for my satire of a tabloid magazine, which I then created using a Canva template (even plagiarizing someone else’s formatting). I also made the logo for Perfect Magazine in Photoshop using letters cut from real magazine logos. The only edit I made to the text was to replace every celebrity’s name with the pronoun “she” in order to demonstrate that celebrity women are not exempt from the kind of scrutiny that nearly every woman and femme in society faces; they may in fact be more susceptible to it. Furthermore, the criticism celebrities face is often indicative of larger societal expectations. This is a piece about beauty standards, dehumanization, and celebrity obsession, for all of which I have a strong personal disdain.
My text is somewhat original because it was all filtered through my eyes and brain, and I had predetermined ideas of what type of content I would select and curate for this project. I wanted the worst of the worst, and my ideas about what that entailed shaped this text as it came together. I clicked on the most repulsive headlines and copy-pasted the quotes that I found most shocking and upsetting from each article. I also used public opinion to shape my ideas for which celebrity to use for each feature of my “perfect woman” image, but I factored in my own opinions as well–for example, I’m a fan of Zendaya, so I wanted to include her in the project instead of Heidi Klum or another celebrity who the Internet seemed to think had better legs. Can public opinion even be plagiarized? People use polls to make decisions all the time, so I wouldn’t exactly consider that part of the project plagiarism, especially since I didn’t always comply with what I assessed society’s opinion to be.
As for the written component, the individual text chunks are definitely plagiarized–I copy and pasted them without any meaningful changes. However, I rearranged them in ways that did alter their meaning–by compiling text about multiple different celebrity women into topical sections rather than organizing it by celebrity, I offered a bit of subtle commentary on the general treatment of women and celebrities by the tabloid media and society at large. And I did cite my sources rather than attempting to pass off everything as my own; everything is linked on the last page of the mock magazine. I didn’t take a picture of Zendaya in the flesh. But I did the work of selecting it online, removing the background and Photoshopping it together with a lot of other images which I had similarly manipulated. In that way, my original plagiarism is much like my gruesome chimera of a woman–it’s a messy medley wherein it’s extremely difficult to ascertain where originality starts and plagiarism begins.
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