Women should fight against the standardization of beauty, a process that is being forced upon them by the beauty industry and male criticism, a women's group said on Tuesday.
The Awakening Foundation has announced a contest offering a NT$10,000 prize for a slogan that can present "a new option for Taiwanese women."
"Modern Taiwanese women -- whether young or old -- are under an unprecedented amount of pressure to `look pretty.' At the same time, they are confronted by public criticism by men every day," Awakening Foundation vice president Fan Yun (范雲) said.
Today's ideal of feminine beauty is becoming a set image: slim, light-skinned and chesty. The beauty industry -- which includes beauty salons, plastic surgeons, cosmetics companies and fitness centers -- is responsible for most of the problem, Fan said.
"[The beauty industry] forms an alliance with popular culture and uses products and advertisements as weapons. Its objective ultimately is profit," foundation managing director Hu Shu-wen (
In response to the advertising produced by the beauty industry, the foundation is attempting to stand up to popular commercial slogans like "Perfect is a good idea" and "There are no ugly women but lazy ones" with "Stop dieting and go play" and "Trust me, it's OK if you don't make it."
A male-dominated society and the media cannot be allowed to shy away from their responsibilities, Fan said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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