Feminist Book Quotes

In fact in the future beyond harmful beauty practices women might not have to concern themselves so often in a day with what their clothes were doing, such as whether they were showing too much breast cleavage or too little toe cleavage. A look in the mirror in the morning could be cursory before they strode or skipped out of the house without caring who looked at them or what they saw. All these things are presently the privileges of men, but they could be gained by women. It should not be a privilege only of men to be barefaced, to walk with both feet on the ground, swinging arms or with hands in capricious pockets that serve instead of handbags, uninterrupted, while ruminating on the day, by the regulatory comments, whistles and stares of men. Indeed some women already live as if they have this freedom and so help to create it for others. The word "dignity" is much used in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UN) and in the international human rights community. It is wroth considering what this word might mean n if it were applied to women's appearance, to clothes, shoes, hair and faces. The physical and mental freedoms that ending the harmful beauty practices offer to women are worth campaigning for.

The problem with recognizing mental distress as a reason for surgery is that the medical profession is just one element of an apparatus that creates the distress in the first place. The very promotion of surgical solutions leads to an expectation that culturally proscribed physical attributes should be excited or altered. Medicine both follows the dictates of culture, as in the creation of artificial hymens or big breasts, and creates those dictates.

It may be because the medical profession can be such an effective handmaiden of male dominance that its activities are likely to escape critical scrutiny and regulation. However, the medical profession can be required to restrict its activities to the creation and maintenance of health, rather than being permitted to expand its role as an arm of the fashion-beauty complex. Regulation would lead, of course, to discussion of whether some cosmetic surgeries are necessary to assuage the mental agony associated with having an imagined physical flaw

The political culture of the 1980s and 1990s was the heyday of rogue capitalism. In support of this, governments deregulated business, reduced the role of states and told citizens they were consumers bearing the power of choice to control their lives. The popular political philosophies of the times reflected these ideas precisely.

The feminist philosopher Sandry Bartky (1990) shows a sensitive awareness of why it can be difficult for women in general to criticize western beauty practices. She explains that women become locked into dependence on what she calls the "fashion-beauty complex" because it instills in them a sense of their own deficiencies, like "the church in previous times" and then "presents itself as the only instrument able, through expiation, to take away the very guilt and shame it has itself produced" (Bartky, 1990, p. 41)

For a culture of resistance to be created women need not only to recognize the harm to their health and status that beauty practices create, but to be prepared to abandon them. There are good reasons why even some feminists seek to justify beauty practices or downplay their significance. They have, like most women, routinely watched what they ate, removed hair from their bodies and faces, worn "feminine" clothing as if it were natural, applied lipstick, for 30 or more years. The simply familiarity of beauty "rituals" might make them hard to identify as causes for concern, despite physical and mental distress that they occasion, and the more and more serious forms that these practices are taking as botox takes over from anti-aging cream, liposuction from panty girdles, and Brazilian waxing is added to the shaving of armpits and legs.

In the west women are supposed to be empowered, possessed of opportunities and choices unimaginable only a generation ago, yet these same women are hobbled by clothing and shoes, maimed by surgery in ways that the feminist generation of the 1970s could not have imagined. Indeed much of the surgery is being conducted precisely on women of that 1970s generation as they discover that the sexual corvee knows no age boundaries. There is no longer a retirement age from this arduous, unpaid labour.

There is, however, a major difference in the way that harmful beauty practices are inscribed in culture and enforced on women in the west. This is the fact that they have been constructed into major industries that make large fortune for transnational corporations and are a significant force in the global economy. The profitability of these practices ot the cosmetics, sex, fashion, advertising and medical industries creates a major obstacle to women's ability to resist and eliminate them. There is so much money in this industries based on commercializing harmful cultural practices that they constitute a massive political force that requires the continuance of women's pain.

As we have seen earlier in this volume definitions of what constitutes the behaviour of Body Dysmorphic Disorder look alarmingly like exaggerated version so f what is culturally required of women in everyday beauty practices - that is, excessive and compulsive checking in mirrors and adjustment of appearance (Phillips, 1998).

In male dominant society women's work is not judged by the same rules that apply to men. To get men's attention women have to sexually objectify themselves. For male intellectuals who love to see women naked and cut up this seems to be effect. Orlan becomes an artist of genius instead of just another self-mutilating women.

Breast implants, for instance, have become a socially accepted aspect of beauty practices in the American culture in the intervening period (Haiken, 1997). This practice is a severe form of mutilation of women's bodies. However, it is a practice that fits the rules of beauty as required under male dominance, and is thus not regarded with horror

It is interesting, Sarah Shaw notes, that women's self-injury provokes social concern in a way that the injury of women by others or by themselves to accommodate the norms of fashion and beauty does not. Self-injury damages women's bodies in ways that men do not necessarily require for their sexual satisfaction and may even find off putting.

Rossi says that the injuries that the shoes cause to women should, "from the woman's standpoint, more realistically be regarded as pleasure wounds or sex scars" (1989,p.150). He is, apparently, privileged to understand the woman's viewpoint and knows that women have willingly engaged in foot deformation to give men and themselves pleasure.

Rossi, too, says that foot fetishism is normal because, "The human species prefers itself a little bent out of natural shape" (Rossi, 1989, p.29). It hardly needs saying that there does not seem to have been a great demand by women for men to be bent out of shape.

Fetishism is mainly the behavior of men, though the sexologists rarely make this plain. They explain that fetishists choose some part of a woman or article of apparel as the focus of their sexual excitement rather than a whole woman.

The young women engaging in these agonized exchanges could be said to be creating a women's culture around beauty practices, but it is a culture of survival designed to enable them to negotiate harmful cultural practices with slightly less pain. The exchanges suggest just how much of young women's attention, time, money and emotional energy are taken up with the practices that demonstrate their difference and enable them to play their part in the sexual curve.

The suggestion that women will not acquire male partners without shaving resembles the reasons given for the carrying out of harmful beauty practices in other cultures, such as female genital mutilation and the reconstructing of hymens; that is, girls have no chance of marrying without them. Though it might be expected that the pressures on young women to have male partners might be less in western cultures where they have more chance of a career that is not that of wife, they are still extreme. Feminine respectability in western culture requires attachment to a male partner.