Bint-E-Khalil Sajal, Ali Inayat
Department of Behavioral Sciences, Fatima Jinnah Women University, Rawalpindi, Pakistan.
Department of Public Health & Allied Sciences, Fatima Jinnah Women University, Rawalpindi, Pakistan.
Dialogues Health. 2025 Jun 26;7:100225. doi: 10.1016/j.dialog.2025.100225. eCollection 2025 Dec.
Beauty is not a static or universal phenomenon. However, it is a dynamic ideal shaped by sociocultural patterns and practices. Particulalry, multiple sociocultural patterns prevail regarding how a female body should be maintained, displayed, and evaluated. Media representations, in particular, play a central role in reinforcing and circulating narrow, idealized, and often unattainable beauty standards, contributing to a system in which women are disproportionately subject to stringent aesthetic scrutiny. This phenomenological study explores the sociocultural construction of beauty and its experience as well as internalization among young women in Azad Jammu & Kashmir, Pakistan. We used in-depth interviews to explore and understand how participants perceive the relationship between beauty and nutrition, revealing a deeply embedded tension between individual experience and cultural expectations. While approximately half of the participants defined beauty in terms of physical appearance, the remainder emphasized internal traits such as personality and behavior. Notably, nearly 45 % of respondents believed that beauty is objective rather than subjective, which suggests a limited engagement with internal or emotional dimensions of self-perception, and reflects the powerful influence of external social and cultural standards.
美并非一种静态或普遍的现象。然而，它是一种由社会文化模式和实践塑造的动态理想。特别是，关于女性身体应如何保养、展示和评价，存在多种社会文化模式。尤其是媒体呈现，在强化和传播狭隘、理想化且往往难以企及的美标准方面发挥着核心作用，促成了一个女性遭受过度严格审美审视的体系。这项现象学研究探讨了巴基斯坦阿扎德查谟和克什米尔地区年轻女性中美的社会文化建构及其体验以及内化情况。我们通过深入访谈来探究和理解参与者如何看待美与营养之间的关系，揭示了个人体验与文化期望之间深深的矛盾。虽然约一半的参与者从外貌角度定义美，但其余参与者强调个性和行为等内在特质。值得注意的是，近45%的受访者认为美是客观而非主观的，这表明对自我认知的内在或情感维度的参与有限，也反映了外部社会和文化标准的强大影响。
