1 Susan Sontag — "Beauty"

(The essay widely taught under this title is Sontag's "A Woman's Beauty: Put-Down or PowerSource?" 1975.)The argument (in four steps): (1) for the Greeks, beauty was excellence of the whole person — character and body one (kaloskagathos); (2) Christianity split inner worth (character, soul) from outer appearance, debasing the surface; (3) modernity turned women's beauty into their project and currency — a "power source," but one judged by men: "to be considered beautiful is to be judged" — and to be judged is to be subordinated; (4) the doublestandard: men's looks are incidental to their worth; women's are constitutive — hence the beauty industry's "inferior" and relentless power. Language & style: compact, essayistic argumentation — a masterclass of Unit 1's structure (claims, reasons, the turn on "power"). Law & ethics: appearance-based evaluation as a live legal question (hiring, media, harassment); feminist jurisprudence's core diagnosis — norms that constitute subordination while looking like compliments (Jurisprudence Unit 4.2's dominance analysis); the equality clause's enemy inside culture.