because it implies that women are supposed to be beautiful regardless and that it is reasonable to demand that all women conform to a standard of attractiveness so long as that standard is deemed “reasonable”
Like what’s important is that women are considered worthless when they don’t live up to certain standards of physical attractiveness, not how “reasonable” or “attainable” those standards are. Having the standards at all is the problem
The concept of a single ideal of beauty is evil.
I repeat, the concept of ideal beauty is evil.
I feel like what people do to meet beauty standards is relevant most of all in how it indicates the internal damage they do, after all how much pain must that standard have caused to make a woman coat herself in carcinogenic chemicals, or subject herself to surgical intervention. I mean like, I’m incredibly impulsive, have no self preservation instinct, am a masochist and will do nearly anything people tell me is bad for me that seems like it might be fun or get me some kind of attention, including communism and a lot of unprotected sex, so my getting cosmetic surgery is just a function of my essentially unbearable innate personality, but for people who never ate half a cup of dirt or did a week of preparation to picked to get topless on stage with a mid-level famous rock band in the hopes of getting someone to pay attention to them, what must it indicate?
But like do you ever wonder where you fall within them, because like you know your evaluation is flawed A: Because you’ve never seen yourself in three dimensions, and B: because of cultural messages fucking with your self perception in directions both positive and negative
and it’s just like I’d like to know where my place in that fucked up hierarchy is.
As a culture we have some contradictory attitudes towards plastic surgery. Actually our attitudes towards plastic surgery are almost universally negative. We think it’s it’s unnatural, it looks gross, it’s immoral, and it’s so so so sad that women feel the need to do this to themselves. Celebrity gossip mills love nothing more than a botched plastic surgery story, and adore running lists of “plastic surgery disasters” that inevitably take a finger wagging, morality fable tone
On the other hand as a society we love to pick women’s bodies apart, and have nothing but scorn for any woman who isn’t “beautiful”, creating a demand for the very thing we denigrate. We talk about women’s “imperfections” as if they were a list of code violations on a condemned building. We talk about who can and cannot wear red lipstick, white pants, bangs, a low cut top, blue eyeshadow or a bikini. We talk about who “needs” foundation, and why we need to hide our wrinkles, but that doesn’t mean we’re comfortable with artifice, we talk about who looks to fake, too orange, too slutty. We talk about keeping makeup tasteful, natural looking, effortless. Celebrity gossip mills love an “aging badly” or “worst beach bodies” or “celebs without makeup” story just as much as plastic surgery disasters, or makeup malfunctions.
To me there is a damned if you do, damned if you don’t quality to all of this. We talk about how we as a society don’t value natural beauty enough, how women ruin their natural beauty trying to look better, and isn’t that sad?, and how isn’t it lovely that so and so is naturally beautiful and hasn’t felt the need to get plastic surgery?
It seems the only acceptable plastic surgery, the only plastic surgery that doesn’t lead to such intense media handwringing, mockery and outright horror is plastic surgery that looks “natural.” If it looks “natural” we either graciously pretend nothing happened or are oh so pleased for the person. Though even then, if the secret is revealed suddenly it’s back to shock and horror and “isn’t it so sad.” and “I was never fooled for a second.”
The problem isn’t that we value artificial beauty over natural. We value natural (or at least the appearance of naturalness) plenty. The problem is that we value a woman’s’ appearance over every other quality she has. If a woman isn’t beautiful, everything else she’s done or said is discredited, worthless.
As feminists we tend to be critical of the culture of plastic surgery, of the fact that women worth is so defined by their appearance that many women who can’t afford to go to a board certified plastic surgeon die every year from black market procedures and many more suffer horrific injuries.
However, all too often this turns into just another version of the “bad plastic surgery freakshow”. We shame women who’ve gotten cosmetic procedures, and perpetuate the idea that “natural beauty” is valuable while “artificial beauty” is not, while not questioning the basic premise that women should be beautiful.
Frankly, it reminds me of how makeup was treated in the Victorian era. Artifice was seen as tasteless, immoral and demeaning to the purity and virtues that were supposed to belong to good submissive women. Women decried it as tasteless and only for women of little virtue and men were said to detest the stuff (which most of them did, a man who caught his wife or daughter wearing makeup was often violently angry) and yet somehow mysteriously despite society’s staunch pro-natural, anti-artifice stance when it came to beauty women wore the stuff because the Victorians being an even more shittily patriarchal society than today believed a woman’s chief value was her beauty, but then as today didn’t want to be “fooled by womanly trickery” and so women wore it and many women died due to unsafe formulae used by the unregulated industry. Similarly, in the 50s and 60s women’s hairdos required rollers and yet allowing your husband to ever see you wearing rolles was unthinkable. Beauty guides during times of most intense patriarchy routinely feature tips about maintaining the illusion that it’s all completely natural.
Men as a whole, do not like plastic surgery, google men’s opinons on it and you’ll find men resoundingly think it’s wrong, represents insecurity, and a whole bunch of other shit. Similarly read [this post http://wehuntedthemammoth.com/2013/01/29/mgtower-wearing-makeup-turns-women-into-darth-vader/ ] about an MRA’s rant about makeup and you’ll get a general look into how angry men are about artifice as a whole. So, if men hate plastic surgery and makeup why do so many women feel they have to wear makeup or get plastic surgery? Well it all comes back to that whole beauty thing. As long as we have a single standard of beauty, and as long as we treat women’s value as entirely based on how well they fit that standard, no matter how much we insist that natural beauty is superior, and that artifice is just awful, women who’ve had the misfortune to not meet that standard naturally will try to meet that standard because we have the standard so intensely ingrained in our society, and as long as we have the whole “only natural is good” thing, those same women will do everything they can to hide what they’ve done, to make it look natural.
Patriarchy wants women to fit the beauty standard it’s laid out perfectly, but it doesn’t want to know how much labor is involved, and would frankly prefer if women couldn’t alter their appearances at all, so that they could be evaluated like livestock. They don’t want women doing what in the patriarchal mind is the equivalent of sticking ginger up a horse’s ass to make it look lively and thus valuable. When we continue to uphold natural beauty as a value (and when we say natural beauty we mean a very narrow kind, let’s be honest) while trashing artifice, what we’re actually saying is “I think there should be a hierarchy of value based on genetic traits that largely affect appearance” and if that doesn’t sound fucking eugenics-y as hell to you, well then, you might want to look in the mirror to check to see if you’re actually Karl Pearson.
So this brings me to drastic plastic surgery, to the stuff that looks unnatural, and is blatant in its unnaturalness. That stuff breaks the illusion, and if done intentionally revels in doing so. Amanda Lepore is stunning and frequently appears on lists of “plastic surgery disasters” and yet her appearance is intentional. She looks the way she does on purpose and is pleased with her appearance. Frankly, I think she looks stunning, her appearance is a work of art, an act of self expression rather than any desire to conform to stock beauty standards. Most drastic plastic surgery has some relation to current beauty standards but has gone on to the other side of them, revealing the artifice, treating plastic surgery as a means of body modification rather than something used to “fix” a perceived flaw and yet for some reason women who’ve had plastic surgery (especially plastic surgery that doesn’t appear natural) are considered “acceptable targets” by nearly everyone, feminists included. Now how the fuck is that okay? Even if you believe that the only reason anyone would ever get cosmetic surgery is because of body shame induced by the patriarchy, how is it okay to participate insulting a woman’s body when you claim that you’re trying to stop women feeling the need to alter their bodies to be more attractive.
When I hear a self described feminist describe a woman who’s had plastic surgery as fake, disgusting, scary or any of the other nasty words we use for women who’ve had the audacity to go under the knife for aesthetic reasons I am frankly ashamed. How is it we retain this blind spot in our ideology of body acceptance? What do we want a woman who’s had plastic surgery to do, go back under the knife to reverse what was done to suit our aesthetic whims? Aren’t we supposed to be against people getting themselves cut open to please others?
Even if a woman’s reasons for surgery are based in self loathing isn’t it victim blaming to attack her and not the culture? Also at this point haven’t we accepted that things like makeup can have nothing to do with self hatred and everything to do with self love and self expression? So why can’t plastic surgery? Why do we still discredit women’s voices based on what they look like? A woman’s appearance whether it is the result of genetics, plastic surgery or anything else should not be up for discussion every time that woman speaks. Male feminists choices about their appearance never call their devotion to feminism into question, but women’s choices are so fraught that I’ve seen like three “I’m a feminist and I got breast implants and here’s my lengthy justification for why it was okay for me to do that” articles on here, and what I hate about that is that those women’s appearances should not be up for discussion. If she had gotten six breast implants placed randomly at various points on her body, her appearance should still not call her politics into question. I’ve had my breasts done, my lips and nasolabial lines injected with fillers and botox in my forehead. I also have piercings in my nipples, ears and my nose, tattoos, unnaturally colored hair, and very very long acrylic nails and I’m not even close to finished
I’m not striving for beauty (at least not in the traditional sense), I’m striving for self expression, I’m striving for something monstrous and weird and honestly I kind of fucking hate the concept of beauty. I am sick of beauty being something I’m supposed to feel rather than being a subjective evaluation of my appearance. I see so many women saying “I feel beautiful when I’ve just succeeded in getting a promotion” or “I felt beautiful when I held my child for the first time” or “I felt beautiful when I succeeded in climbing mount Kilimanjaro and looked down across the landscape beneath me” and it’s fucking shitty because the only word women can use to describe feeling triumphant, valuable, valid, worthy or just fucking good is beautiful, as if beauty is a prerequisite for all of these other good things. It shouldn’t take feeling or being beautiful to feel worthy. Have we really internalized the idea to be valuable one must be beautiful so deeply that we see it as more useful to tell little girls that “each and every one of you is beautiful” than to tell them “you know what, you don’t need to be beautiful” because they don’t, and because fuck beauty and fuck telling women how they’re supposed to look regardless of what we’re telling them to look like, and fuck attacking a woman’s physical appearance to insult her integrity, worth, or respectability.
Thoughts From The Peacock Angel 