Years ago, and well into my seventh month of pregnancy in New York City, it occurred to me one day that, as I would be unable to run from a fast predator, I was lucky not to run into an urban panther. These weekly blogs will consider women's lives from the perspective of one who is now older.
Americans, I think, are presented with a stingy, unimaginative view of women’s beauty. Despite what is real in our experience, we have a conventional wisdom of accepted beauty that applies to very few women. You’d have thought that the cliche of Barbie doll would have died of old age by now; instead it’s been resuscitated after surgical augmentation.
The current manifestations of the ideal woman are frightening: women so skinny their vertebrae form a prominent profile and their breastbones protrude; hipless stick figures with out-of-proportion breasts glued on. What is called beautiful now is the image seen by a camera, not the human eye.
Faces injected with toxin and made into masks, shiny and unable to move; mouths stretched by face lifts, gashes with fat implanted to form strangely plumped lips. From my perspective of years, this ideal is clearly ugly, even hideous. But what about the young girls and women, those only beginning to experience life? How do they fare under this burden of monstrosity posed as beauty?
It seems the only sin worse than being a woman with an unaltered body is being an aging woman. It is becoming too difficult to watch what happens to our actresses as they grow older. Once curvy with youth, they become stringy and strained as they stay thin for the camera. And one after another, they emerge from surgical “tune-ups,” looking stunned, their once-beautiful faces strangely changed, and occasionally quite damaged.
The situation is beyond declaring the emperor has no clothes; we need to say that the empress is being deformed. She was not born that way, but was made so by insufficient nutrition, liposuction, face lifts, breast implants. What is so wrong with a woman’s body that it must be obliterated in this way?
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