In Northern China JIan Feng recently sued his ex-wife for having a baby that he claimed to be disturbingly ugly. Feng was so repulsed by the child’s look and lack of resemblance to him, or his ex-wife, that he was sure that his ex-wife was guilty of an affair during their marriage. Due to this accusation Feng’s ex-wife was forced to come clean about some $100,000 of plastic surgery she had undergone in South Korea, accounting for the child’s peculiar looks deeming that the baby simply took after his mother’s actual natural face, the Huffington Post reported.
The reaction; the man claimed that he married his wife under ‘false pretenses’ claiming to be deceived to believe his wife was beautiful when she really was not. To many people’s surprise and even displeasure, the judge ruled in the Jian Feng’s favor awarding him to $120,000.
This is a story that has been sweeping global news and the internet alike uncontrollably. And while many people view the absurdity of such a trivial and juvenile case making it into China’s judicial system in the first place to be simply ridiculous, this case raises a disturbing statement about the world.
The stigma regarding the standard of beauty, that we commonly pin to America alone, proves to be a global phenomenon.
Since when has it become practical for beauty (or lack of beauty for that matter) to be deemed in a court room? What happened to ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’? The fact that a judge can primarily back up the assertion that an infant is in fact ugly, and then hold that as means for financial settlement shows the fatal error in basic human regard for one another.
We have completely devalued the depth of a person in return for the superfluous worship of the external visage of a person. We see time and time again that beauty is being defined on an aggregate scale forming a superficial makeup of society that tears apart the way we view ourselves and others. The beast of socially constructed (or construed should I say) standards of beauty are unfortunately held as precedent in societies globally. And as fatalistic as this may sound, not only is the media supporting this harmful doctrine, but now the judicial system is as well.
