Post #2. Beauty Is No Longer Natural

Beauty Is No Longer Natural

By: Zeina Jabali

Women today are far too comfortable with altering their appearances; we dye our hair, wax or shave off hair, thread our eyebrows, and paint our nails all to reach the unattainable expectations of what a woman “ought to be”. This desire to reach the unattainable is no longer unique to women across the Globe, now men are taking part in the procedure, according to Laura Miller’s article “Male Body Work”. Both this article and the “Political Economy of Choice” by Rebecca Herzig focus on the desire for a hairless body, and the methods that accompany it.

“Male Body Work” By Laura Miller put a smile on my face because she made me realize that women are not alone in the painful body work game. She makes it clear that men, in Japan, are anxious “over ones ability to attract a wife” (Miller 127) and so they indulge themselves in facials, waxing, and threading. Just as women are striving to look like the women we see in magazines and televisions, men in Japan are aiming to look like celebrities such as Mikazawa Rie and Kimura Takuya. In their efforts to emulate these celebrities, fashions such as the elegant crescent, a style for shaping ones eyebrows, have been born. Further hair altering practices include the total removal of chest hair because women think it is the number one detestable attribute of a man (Miller 134). Although I do not find such artificial lack of hair at all appealing, I am thankful to the Japanese for putting their men through this because now they can understand the mentality and woes of the modern woman. Hopefully this will lead to a worldwide revolution of change in the media and thus modern thought.

Rebecca Herzig explores a similar theme of waxing in her article “The Political Economy of Choice”. She states that the reasons for “total genital depilation” include religious, scientific, artistic, political, and economic (Herzig 254) and that 31.71% of women in the UK have reported removing more than just their bikini line (Herzig 253). Herzig also notes that this procedure is extremely painful and could result in hospitalization, yet even the women who have been to the hospital because of it have returned to the waxing table in a month’s time for another waxing session. This poses a crucial question: do we have the power to stop genital waxing? Herzig and other sociologists argue that we don’t and I agree. If a woman were sporting a “bush” through her bikini bottoms I, and probably the rest of you, would be extremely disgusted.

MissRepresenation looks at the way the media has shaped our views of how a woman ought to look, and explores the results of such an unattainable goal. A teenage girl’s sister regularly cuts herself and other teenage girls force themselves to vomit after a meal, while many have become anorexic and have been force into rehabilitation. We can hypothesize that these effects of misrepresentation in the media to spillover to the male population in Japan creating more unrest within the teenage population worldwide.

            All the pain and time-consuming procedures men and woman put themselves through can be blamed on their desire to reach the unattainable appearance the media puts forth. Men are waxing off their chest hair and threading their eyebrows to find a spouse and emulate celebrities. Women are putting themselves in harms way to follow a set of cultural guidelines put in place by the society in which we live. These efforts by our population are leading to depression, eating disorders, and all round self-esteem issues. A change in the thought process of the media and thus the world population must occur if we are to create a healthy future for the next generations.