Cultivation Theory and the Filipino's Perception of Beauty

Who determines what is beautiful and what is not when there is no written criteria of beauty. Before the Westerners came to the Philippines, the concept of beauty was very different from what it is today. When the Westerners arrived to the islands of the Philippines, the perception of beauty changed. The standard of beauty came from the females that arrived from another race, the Caucasian. Even the saints that Filipinos pray to were fair in color. The Filipinas that were part of international beauty contests were fair in color like Rosa Rosal, Gloria Romero, and Gloria Diaz. Filipinos have the colonial mindset wherein they had that western state of mind. Because Filipinos were and still are exposed to Western culture, their mentality of beauty has changed. Currently, media is the only link and source of the Filipinos to be exposed to the Western culture. Whatever happened to the idea that “Black is beautiful” or “Gandang morena”? Ultimately, the perception of beauty nowadays is influenced by the mentality dictated by the media, which creates a standard of beauty that is fair-skinned and straight haired.

Cultivation theory suggests that media and its content are the prime movers in shaping the audience’s conception of social reality. The content of the media measures beliefs, opinions, attitudes, and or behaviors of the audience. Cultivation theory focuses more on the use of television in creating this social reality, which eventually shapes a normative culture, through the use of television images to represent the “real” world. The two types of television viewers are the heavy viewers and the light viewers. The focus of this theory is on the heavy viewers, the people who watch a lot of television, that are easily influenced to perceive and integrate information to form a general perception that is eventually turned into a social reality. Light viewers on the other hand conceptually have more sources of information than heavy viewers. Television taps all types...