Body Altering
My rarely-commenting friend, who has been sending me lots and lots of interesting websites and links these days (so many that I can't keep up! (but do appreciate them)), just passed this one on, with an emphasis on this paragraph:
Everywhere you turn, people are engineering their bodies to fit in. Chinese people are lengthening their legs with surgery to raise their status and career prospects. American men are bulking up on steroids to look good in gyms. American women are getting 300,000 breast implants a year. Some are having toes trimmed to fit fashionable shoes. Sexual development, too, is under arrest. The FDA is considering an implant to delay puberty in girls. The number of Americans getting laser hair removal each year has surpassed 1.4 million. Many women are getting "revirgination" surgery to restore their hymens.
Some of these procedures don't surprise me; some of them, such as the toe trimming or leg lengthening procedures I've never even heard of. I'm amazed at the lengths people go to in order to look good or to fit a certain mold. It sure makes getting my eyebrowed threaded seem tame.
I do wonder, however, whether this focus on looks and artifices is new or whether it's merely that our technology is new and we are taking advantage of it. I think of the lengths that geishas went through, and the hobbling that was done to many Japanese women's feet, and the wigs and make-up that royalty has always worn in Europe and the African tribes who lengthen their necks and bore huge holes into their earlobes. They have all been obsessed with appearance for generations - it's nothing new, it just didn't include fancy shmancy surgeries and development-altering medications. As if my opinion of many things regarding humans - things don't really change.
Still, I'll keep getting my eye-brows done and steer clear from that toe-chopping surgery. I have never understood why they made shoes pointy anyway.
posted by Shoshana @ 12:36 PM
7 Comments:
Yep, I agree that people have always desired to mold body-shape, but the technological changes are really giving people dramatically more power to do that.
As to the question of whether people do care more about their appearance today than in the past?
Consider the case of women in Fiji... 20 years ago (as per the native tradition), it was considered a status symbol to carry a little extra weight. Eating disorders were non-existant. Upon the introduction of TV in 1995, things changed dramatically. Within three years, 11% of the teenage girls were anorexic, and 70% thought they were too fat.
Perhaps TV, Movies, and mass media have affected the extent to which we focus on our appearance... perhaps by creating standards that are difficult if not impossible to meet.
LT -
Interesting point. However, I would question whether the case in Fiji proves that the girls became more focused on their appearance or whether the standards of beauty in Fiji were just changed by the existence of television. Maybe previous to the introduction of TV in Fiji, girls put the same emphasis on appearance, however, the methods with which they achieved those standards of beauty just did not include things like anorexia.
Think about it this way...
If a society's standards of beauty are within reach of most people, then they don't need to be *that* focused on their appearance. If a society's standards of beauty are out of reach of most people, then they have to focus a lot more energy towards being seen as beautiful.
But do you think standards of real beauty in any culture are easily obtained? If everyone can be beautiful, then is anyone really? Or does that just make everyone average? With beauty, as with a lot of other things in life, there has to be something that stands out as exceptional that others wish to emulate and desire to obtain, and most of the time, people will put a lot of energy into obtaining it.
avoid pointy toe shoes at all costs. I needed to have painful surgery done, and wear slippers for six months the podiatrist said it was caused by the shoes.. many women though will gladly suffer for fashion..
But do you think standards of real beauty in any culture are easily obtained?
I don't know about "easy", but it may not have the same degree of difficulty everywhere. If you're in a village with 50 girls, you have a 20% chance of being one of the 10 cutest girls around. If you're in a country with millions of people, and the most beautiful are filtered out to be the standards of beauty as actresses or models, it becomes much harder to be seen as one of the most beautiful.
I think of the lengths that geishas went through, and the hobbling that was done to many Japanese women's feet...
Actually, it was done to Chinese women. A friend of mine did a lot of research on foot binding.
And lazer hair-removal doesn't seem so extreme to me. Tons of women do waxing or tweezing, and this is just a more permanent solution.
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