Naomi Wolf writes in the final pages of her book The Beauty Myth:
The terrible truth is that though the marketplace promotes the myth, it would be powerless if women didn’t enforce it against one another. For any one woman to outgrow the myth, she needs the support of many women. The toughest but most necessary change will come not from men or from the media, but from women, in the way we see and behave toward other women.
“Three of the nominated films this year have 26 men and one woman [in featured roles] — ‘Slumdog [Millionaire]‘ and ‘Milk,’ and ‘Frost/Nixon.’ You know, we accept it. It’s not unusual. But we would go nuts if three of the nominated films had 26 women and one man. It would be a very, very unusual thing.
“We’re still not telling everybody’s story in our country and that’s where we are,” she said.
According to news site News.co.au, Australian consumer group Choice sent three women to thirty clinics in the Brisbane and Melbourne areas to investigate cosmetic surgery practices. The women, passing off as prospective patients, would inquire about treatments such as liposuction, breast augmentation and Botox.
The results were quite shocking. The article reports:
Choicespokesman Christopher Zinn said the most remarkable statement to any of the women was that she would have an improved chance of finding a partner if she had her breasts enlarged.
“It’s incredibly surprising that a doctor would say that. Talk about playing to people’s insecurities,” Mr Zinn said.
Most concerning was failure to explain the dangers, such as leakage and scarring.
“Given the known risks and the unwillingness of some cosmetic surgeons to discuss them, there needs to be stronger regulation,” Mr Zinn said.
One of the main reasons why I started working on “The Illusionists” is my disdain for double standards – the fact women are judged first and foremost on their physical appearance, whereas men have it really easy in that department. But more than that, what truly irks me is the physically painful, expensive, torturous things women put themselves through to adhere to alleged “standards of beauty” (corsets in the 1800s, Brazilian bikini waxing today, to cite a couple of examples).
High heels are also on my list of annoying things: I understand that they make women look taller, and that they give the illusion of looking thinner. I get that. But over the long run, they also create many physical problems to the feet and back. And in case of emergency, high heels may be quite dangerous:
Feministing reported, some while back:
Two California women were killed in a freak train accident. Police believe the high heel shoes they were wearing may have hindered their escape from a car stuck on the tracks, the Los Angeles Times reports.”
And the blog also carried this image, taken from The Washington Post:
Sarkozy and Berlusconi aside…
… if high heels were actually acceptable for men, do you think they would put themselves through the torture of wearing 4 inch stilettos in the name of fashion? Mmm… methinks not. I know what you’re thinking: “Men wearing heels? That would be ridiculous!” That is exactly my point. Why do we, as women, have to put up with such ludicrous things as Manolo high heels, that make us walk like ducks?
Jezebel had an interesting piece on heels – they dug up a 1930s article by a male journalist, who suggested women should ”ignore the new trend toward high heels and find a ‘non-barbaric form of footwear.’”
NEVER PERFECT explores the complex journey of a young Vietnamese-American woman’s struggle with popular perceptions of beauty and body image as she fights the stigma of racial self-hatred in her decision to undergo cosmetic surgery.
Some men may view scantily clad women as objects rather than as people, a recent study found. The research, conducted by Princeton psychology professor Susan Fiske, Mina Cikara GS and Stanford psychology professor Jennifer Eberhardt, was performed on 21 undergraduate male students at the University who identified themselves as heterosexual. Fiske’s team used an MRI machine to scan the brains of the students while they viewed a series of photographs of men and women, some of whom were fully clothed and others of whom wore only swimsuits.
The pictures of bikini-clad women activated brain regions associated with objects or “things you manipulate with your hands,” Fiske said. The students also remembered the photos of the half-naked women better than they did any of the others, she added, noting that the subjects remembered the bodies, not the faces, most clearly. Fiske said the results indicated that some men may objectify or dehumanize partially clothed women, though further research is needed to confirm these findings.
[...]
“I think [the study] does relate to the effects of having pornography and sexualized images of women around and in the media because they spill over into how people treat women in general,” Fiske said, adding that these images may dehumanize women and encourage men to see them as objects. “You have to be aware of the effect of these images on people,” Fiske explained. “They’re not neutral. They do have an effect on how people think about other women.”
