“Look! I married you a certain way! I like women who look a certain way! It’s my right to like women who look a certain way and I shouldn’t have to spend the rest of my life not being happy,” Brad exclaimed.

The retort from my friend Jasmine’s husband was a reaction to her staunch refusal to get ‘another set’ less than two months after removing the implants that nearly cost her her life.  For nearly a decade Jasmine endured numerous health complications that Western doctors claimed had nothing to do with her silicone breast implants.

Brad seemed different from her last fiance, which is why Jasmine married him. He seemed open-minded, kind, forgiving, gentle, nurturing, and accepting. When she sprouted a few stray gray hairs in her late twenties he urged her not to pluck them saying he loved her “wisdom hairs.”

Tim, her boyfriend a decade earlier, told her she was perfect and the “girl of his dreams.” Well, almost. She was the girl of his dreams except her breasts were too small and she’d be perfect if they were bigger. In fact he’d marry her if she’d consider breast enlargement surgery. Within a week Jasmine, then 18 years old in 1990, found herself under the knife. When she woke up the static and lifeless silicone orbs on her chest were much larger than what she had agreed to during the initial consultation. The consultation that came within days of her halfheartedly agreeing to consider them.

Jasmine was genetically tiny and naturally beautiful by today’s standard. Now she embodied the girl on the back of a trucker’s mudflap. Tim’s version of the perfect wife. As promised, they were quickly engaged and twenty-five-year-old Tim, the ‘hot guy’ in town, paraded her around like a trophy–until she had the courage to leave him for being emotionally abusive and controlling.

I met Jasmine a few years after her plastic surgery and we became tight friends. In numerous intimate conversations she confided in me about her implants and Tim, her body image issues, and her distrust of men. These conversations were plagued by a deep sadness and marked by intense insecurity and regret. With her striking eyes and “porn star body,” Jasmine commanded a lot of male attention, attention that she deflected and tried to avoid by dressing in ways that diminished her figure.

I was one of the only people that knew how uncomfortable this attention made her and how much she longed to have her original body back. Shortly after leaving Tim, she began looking into removing the implants. She was repeatedly told by male doctors that she would be ‘disfigured’ and that there was no sound reason to have them removed. That is until they began to break down inside her body and wreak havoc on her immune system.

By the time she began noticing her brittle hair and general dis-ease, Jasmine had developed into a smart, sharp-tongued feminist with a penchant for alternative holistic medicine and healing modalities. Eight years after the initial breast implant surgery, four years after finding her feminist voice, and two years after discovering massive amounts of hair shedding on her clothes and furniture, Jasmine fell off her mountain bike with her chest landing smack down on the handle bars.

She heard an audible tear and immediately knew one of her implants had torn. She went to her doctor and he blew her off, as did the countless doctors after that. They waved her off as an irrational, over emotional, and slightly insane woman. The following year she married Brad and within months of their wedding the symptoms of a ‘crazy’ woman began to increase.

She discovered that:

Studies have shown rupture rates to be 50% to 60% in silicone implants 10-15 years old,^[24] with one study showing a failure rate of 6% per year for the first 5 years, 50% at 10 years, and 70% at 17 years.^[22] Twenty-one percent of women in one study, following implant rupture, had silicone gel migration out of the fibrous capsule of scar tissue that surrounds the breast implant.^[24] These studies utilized MRI, which has been shown to be 74% to 94% sensitive and 85% to 98% specific in detecting implant rupture.

Over the course of the next year:

• Her hair had become so brittle that chunks would fall out, leaving bald spots on her scalp.
• Her face was permanently bloated.
• She developed large cystic acne in her lymph node areas of her armpits, neck, jawline, and the sides of her cheeks.
• Her digestive track became paralyzed and completely shut down. She was unable to defecate for a month. It took three weeks of daily colonic treatments to remove the compacted fecal matter.
• She also began to develop cysts, which turned into tumors around her nipples and across her breasts.

Most Western doctors declared the symptoms as unrelated and, again, chalked up her concerns to the rants of a highly paranoid and overly sensitive drama queen. Jasmine had to diagnose herself through her own research on Dow Corning’s polyurethane-coated silicone breast implants and heal herself (keep herself alive) to the best of her ability by seeking out alternative health care. Her research confirmed the source of her failing health as more and more women spoke out publicly and Dow Corning endured scrutiny for their product.

Despite her list of growing health problems, many doctors encouraged her to leave them in precisely because Dow Corning was under current pressure to remove silicone from the market. Their reasoning? Silicone implants feel better than saline implants and if she were to remove her silicone implants and replace them with saline she would look and feel less desirable.

Eventually, she found a doctor that not only agreed to remove her implants, but told her that if she didn’t have them removed she wouldn’t live to see her next birthday. After long discussions with her husband, her mother, and myself, she scheduled a removal date. I took off a week from graduate school, borrowed some money from a friend, and flew five hours to be with her.

Shortly after they were removed, Jasmine regained mental clarity, felt less scattered, her body became stronger, and she felt generally relieved. And that’s when Brad dropped the bomb on her.

“When do you think you’ll be ready to replace these with the next pair with saline implants?

At this point, Dow Corning’s silicone implants were off the market (only to be reintroduced in 2006, a decision that was deemed “sound” mere days ago). Jasmine made it clear that she had no intention of replacing them. She reminded Brad that he had been supportive of her decision to remove them and that he had taken vows to love her in sickness and in health. That’s when he retorted with his right to be with a large-breasted woman, like the one he originally married. Jasmine’s feelings of rejection and fear were confounded when they divorced a year later following Brad’s affair with a buxom hostess at work. She was mortified and depressed.

Not only did Jasmine’s marriage fail, she began to notice a shift in attention from men–attention that shifted away from herself and to women now younger than she with fuller bust lines. Despite the initial pressure into getting breast implants, her regret over getting implants and the fact that they nearly ended her life, she confided in me that there were several occasions in which she contemplated getting that next pair.

Jasmine’s story reveals many things. First and foremost, it demonstrates the incredible pressure girls and women feel to embody an unrealistic and dangerous beauty ideal. It also exposes the mental and emotional health risks and the incredible and painful risks women are willing to take in order to embody an ideal of perfection. Because in the end, as bell hooks proclaims in Communion: The Female Search for Love, being beautiful is about being loved. Girls and women understand from an early age that we’re primarily valued by the way we look and that if we can achieve this oppressive beauty ideal, we’ll be rewarded. In the words of hooks, girls and women strive to “make [themselves] over, to become someone worthy of love.”

Like more and more women, Jasmine became aware of the damaging fallout caused from pursuing a society’s singular beauty ideal. Her awareness was shaped by her personal experience as well as from her feminist consciousness, which was informed by the continued efforts of the feminist movement. But as hooks points out, awareness is not enough.

To solve the problem of body self-hatred, we have to critique sexist thinking, militantly oppose it, and simultaneously create new ways of seeing ourselves.

Editor’s Note: Last week the FDA stated in a report that breast implants are safe but will fail within 10 years. Here’s an excerpt from the report:

The longer a woman has silicone gel-filled breast implants, the more likely she is to experience complications. One in 5 patients who received implants for breast augmentation will need them removed within 10 years of implantation. For patients who received implants for breast reconstruction, as many as 1 in 2 will require removal 10 years after implantation. The most frequently observed complications and outcomes are capsular contracture (hardening of the area around the implant), reoperation (additional surgeries) and implant removal. Other common complications include implant rupture, wrinkling, asymmetry, scarring, pain, and infection.

Originally posted at Adios Barbie. Cross-posted at Elephant Journal.

“Kid, you’ll move mountains!
So…be your name Buxbaum or Bixby or Bray or Mordecai Ale Van Allen O’Shea,

You’re off to Great Places!
Today is your day!
Your mountain is waiting.
So…get on your way!” – Dr. Seuss

Graduation gifts used to include things like jewelry, a hi-tech gadget, a trip abroad, or maybe even a new car if that’s in the budget.  These days, the question is, new breasts or a nose job, and which one is more appropriate as a graduation gift. When I was growing up, I was relentlessly teased, called every anti-Semitic name imaginable and even dreamed of having my nose reshaped into something less Jewish and more American. At the time, “Ethnic Rhinoplasty” wasn’t in vogue, and my delusional dream quickly lost its luster. A lot has changed over the years—these days it’s common to surgically refine or remove one’s ethnicity with plastic surgery. In some cultures, it’s even considered a rite of passage. The desire for teens to alter their looks isn’t new, though: In 2005, the NY Times wrote about the surge in Botox treatments among young adults. At that time, according to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery (ASAPS),

People from ages 19 to 34 had 427,368 botox procedures; 100,793 laser resurfacing treatments; 128,779 injections of hyaluronic acid (Restylane or Hylaform); 29,160 eyelid surgeries; and 1,094 face-lifts.

Though recent studies show a drop in procedures, there is a still a desire to be wrinkle-free in an effort to defy the inevitability of aging. In fact, a new survey by ASAPS shows “more than half of all Americans regardless of income approve of plastic surgery.” As disturbing as it is, this trend of parents giving their grads the gift of surgical “enhancement,” is really part and parcel to this growing shift toward homogenization.

Certainly, for some teens, plastic surgery can be positively life-changing. For example: a child who’s subject to excessive teasing because of an severely misshapen ears may positively benefit from otoplasty; a burn victim can return to relative normalcy with appropriate plastic surgery; a breast reduction can allow a young girl to exercise without neck and back pain. On the other hand, what lies beyond what’s necessary for some is the skewed perceptions of beauty and perceived normalcy inadvertently thrust upon teens through social and mainstream media.  The innate dissatisfaction with how we look contributes to how we meet the world. To really illustrate this, we can look at the recent uproar that came about when a mother defended her decision to give her 8-year-old daughter Botox injections. Makes you wonder: What 8-year-old has wrinkles? Better yet, what 8-year-old is even aware of wrinkles?

Now, according to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery (ASAPS):

Statistics gathered over the last several years indicate a decrease in the overall number of cosmetic (aesthetic) surgeries of teenagers (those 18 and younger) having cosmetic surgery, with nonsurgical procedures including laser hair removal and chemical peels being the most popular in 2010.

These statistics are both good and bad. I mean, the fact that less invasive surgeries are on the decline is certainly positive, but I am concerned about the remaining high numbers of girls seeking these procedures.  We know teens are up against extraordinary pressure to look and be a certain way–some of it is normal adolescence–but when parents start giving their kids gift certificates for a new nose or new breasts, the lesson becomes less about self-esteem and more about trying to attain the pop-culture paradigm of perfection.

If we start by parenting our children with this idea that they aren’t enough, we end up sowing the seeds of self-hatred and dissatisfaction. Instead of laying a foundation of confidence and positive self-esteem, we end up paving a rocky road to negative behaviors, which inevitably contribute to disordered eating and eating disorders alike. This is a wonderful opportunity to look at what messages we are trying to give our kids. Growing up is tough; let’s not contribute to the social tyranny by fanning the fires of social awkwardness.

Bottom line? There are far more appropriate gifts for your teen than going under anesthesia and accumulating scars, no matter how small they are.

Originally posted at Visions Teen and revised for Feminist Fatale.

Image courtesy of Sarit Photography

The Wisdom of Bryan Kest and The Beauty Myth

This post is the first post in an ongoing series, The Wisdom of Bryan Kest. This series seeks to chronicle what I have learned in my yoga practice with Bryan Kest since 1997.

We’ve been told that “pretty” is the magical elixir for everything that ails us. If we’re pretty we’re bound to be happier than people who aren’t pretty. If we’re pretty, we’ll never be lonely; we’ll have more Facebook friend requests; we’ll go on more dates; we’ll find true love (or just get laid more often);  we’ll be popular. If we’re pretty, we’ll be successful; we’ll get a better job; we’ll get rewarded with countless promotions; our paychecks will be bigger.  In short, “pretty,” something Naomi Wolf refers to as a form of cultural currency in the feminist classic The Beauty Myth, will buy us love, power and influence. And, in the end, “pretty” will make us feel good.

And who doesn’t want to feel good?

The media juggernaut that actively shapes our 21st century cultural environment sells us this promise and perpetuates this myth beginning in childhood. The assault continues as we move through adolescence and adulthood, meeting our gaze at every turn through fashion, television, film, music,  and advertising. These images and messages are practically inescapable, even in yoga publications, and the peddled products entice us using sleek, sculpted models and celebrities in computer retouched photos.  Advertising is specifically designed to appeal to our emotions and shape desire thereby constructing cultural values, identities and lifestyles in order to sell a gamut of products and services from beer, luxury cars and designer shoes to yoga mats, DVDs and diet pills. Ultimately, we’re spoon fed streams of unrealistic images in a virtual onslaught that tells women, and increasingly men, that the most valuable thing we can aspire to be is, well, pretty.

And the tantalizing promises of a better, prettier, you are absolutely everywhere. The idea that we can simply “turn off” or “ignore” these messages is narrow in scope and short sighted. Unless you’re living under a rock-wait, make that a hermetically sealed bubble- you are affected in one way or another and so are those around you. Unfortunately, we’re being sold a superficial bill of goods that doesn’t give us the complete picture.

As my teacher of 15 years, Bryan Kest of Santa Monica Power Yoga, says time and time again in his jam-packed yoga classes:

“Everybody wants to be pretty because that’s what they’ve been told will make them feel good even though there’s no proof that people who are prettier are healthier and happier. So why don’t we just cut to the chase and go straight to what makes us feel good?”

Kest circumvents the chatter and speaks truth in simple terms accessible to virtually everyone. He is consistently “prodding and poking” his students by exposing the absolute lunacy of our increasingly and ubiquitous media culture . He challenges students, including myself, to confront the demands of our egos. He challenges us to do the work of doing raising our consciousness.  Ultimately, Kest assists us in untangling our psychic, emotional and physical knots.

When we practice yoga, we feel good even if the journey through a particular practice is emotionally and physically arduous  and confronting, as it usually is.  As Kest, who has been practicing yoga for over three decades, says, ” I don’t like yoga. Who likes yoga? But I appreciate yoga and the way it makes me feel.”

There is no denying the sense of mental and physical lightness, openness and freedom one feels after after quieting the mind, gazing inward and moving through the body in a sensitive, conscious and loving way. Yoga is a moving meditation and, as many studies have revealed time and time again, meditation makes you feel good. Competition, a fundamental national value,  that characterizes most of our encounters in the workplace, within our families, among our peers and ourselves is not a part of mature and healthy yoga practice. Essentially, you’re bound to cultivate inner peace and feel fantastic practicing yoga if you’re able to let go.

The only time you probably won’t feel good is if you carry your baggage into your practice, strengthening and honing  external stressors. As Kest says, in his usual elegant Kest fashion, “If you bring your shit into yoga, you turn your yoga into shit.” As with anything else, how you use a tool makes all the difference. After all, you can use a knife to butter your toast or stab someone.

Yoga is a pathway to cultivate self-love allowing us to shift our sense of validation inward, as opposed to the standard practice of measuring one’s worth based on external definitions.  In fact the cultural validation we are encouraged to seek often fans the flames of further discontent since we can never be thin enough, muscular enough, wealthy enough or pretty enough by mainstream standards. Even if we are a waify size-zero, a bulked up mass of muscles, a millionaire or a picture-perfect model, happiness isn’t a guarantee. There are plenty of depressed, disgruntled, unsatisfied “pretty people”  with low self-esteem and we know that a slim body with a pretty face isn’t necessarily a healthy body, mentally or physically. In fact, in my own work as a body image activist, many of the most “beautiful” women I’ve met have had some of the most dysfunctional and unhealthy relationships with their body. Too often this has been marked by eating disorders, disordered eating and dangerous beauty rituals to maintain the outward facade. In the end, there isn’t a direct correlation between being pretty and being happy and/or healthy. Pretty hasn’t delivered and what has been defined as pretty isn’t even real or sustainable.

Remember, Naomi Wolf called it the beauty myth for a reason.

Barbie mural photograph taken by the author at Fred Segal Salon in Santa Monica, CA.

The women of the 1960s and their ‘period bodies’ with normal proportions are rare today, and something to be envied.

The fourth season of “Mad Men” starts Sunday, and with it another round of opportunities to both marvel and gasp at how much things have changed since the early 1960s. Much of the genius of the show, of course, lies in its ferocious attention to period details. From the entrenched womanizing and nonstop drinking and smoking (even while pregnant!) to children who play with plastic dry-cleaning bags and family picnics that end with a flourish of litter shaken insouciantly onto the grass, “Mad Men” leaves no antediluvian stone unturned.

That includes body types. Watch some of the commentary features on the DVD editions and you’ll hear the show’s creator, Matt Weiner, refer to “period bodies.” What he means is that just as the show applies painstaking care to finding sofas and kitchen appliances exactly like those you would have seen in that era, it also seeks bodies — particularly female ones — quintessentially of the time. That means no ripped abs or fake breasts, no preternaturally white teeth. (A lot of people wear eyeglasses too — the horror!)

Read the complete article here. Thanks to Diahann for sending this my way.

Artist statement:

An ephemeral drawing is one that is created to be destroyed. It addresses the relationships between medium, subject, and significance.

Liz Acosta is a photographer, writer, artist, cyclist, and activist in Los Angeles. With a degree from the University of Southern California, her work is primarily focused on questions of the body and its relationship to gender, sexuality, and performance. She blogs at www.happyland2007.com and will be joining the Feminist Fatale family as a blogger in the near future.

Barbie is a cultural icon. With her long, silky, blonde hair, perky breasts, cinched waist and mile-high legs Barbie represents mainstream definitions of physical perfection, the paragon of beauty and ideal femininity. Her shiny pink corvette, swanky townhouse, and oodles and oodles of perfectly accessorized outfits indicate her success within the consumer culture machine. Collectively, her physical and material assets (Eurocentric beauty, white-skin and class privilege rolled up into one statuesque doll), represent the collective dream spun by post-WWII advertisers and reinforced by the culture at large.

For more than 50 years, she has not waned in popularity (gained a pound, developed a wrinkle or gray hair) even in the face of mounting criticism.

Despite some of the negative headlines Barbie is still a hit with girls across America and the world.

More than one billion dolls have been sold since her inception, and according to the dolls makers, Mattel, 90% of American girls aged between three and 10 own at least one.

While Barbie is a manufactured fantasy, she remains an emblem of idealized femininity and a key element of gender socialization.

Barbie fan Danielle Scott, 16, said: “Playing with the hair, the brushes, switching outfits. It really just made girls be girls.

“All the characteristics of what to look forward to and what girls really could do…” she said.

While it is true that Barbie has had approximately 125 jobs over the last half-century (jobs that presumably allowed her to purchase her multiple homes, extensive wardrobe etc. etc)., Barbie is not famous for her resume. She is most well-known for her flawless figure and coveted beauty.

She is a beauty icon.

She is a timeless icon that continues to influence young girls perception of ideal beauty, a model to emulate. But with her alien measurements, Caucasian features, ivory skin, blond hair, and unnaturally thin body (I had a vintage Barbie scale fixed at 110 pounds, a weight that would inform my notion of a woman’s ideal weight for most of my adult life), how can anyone possibly measure up?

Evelyn Ticona-Vergaray reports in Barbie’s 50 years of beauty and controversy:

Studies made by the Wellness Resource Center at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee confirmed that a human version with Barbie’s body proportions would only have room for an esophagus or a trachea in her neck, a tibia or a fibula in her legs, and that she would have to crawl to support her top-heavy frame.

Academics from the University of South Australia suggest that chances of finding a woman having Barbie’s body shape is one in 100,000. Moreover, researchers at Finland’s University Central Hospital say if Barbie were a real woman she would lack the 17 to 22 percent of body fat required for a woman to menstruate.

The bottom line is, most girls and women could never and will never look like Barbie although many try(and some try harder than others). As an ambassador of a twisted yet looming beauty norm, its no wonder that Barbie is subject to “torture play.”

Research found in the article “Early adolescents’ experiences with, and views of, ‘Barbie’” revealed a high rate of “torture play” and “anger play” associated with the Barbie doll. Girls admitted to blaming the image of Barbie for their self-consciousness and lack of self esteem due to the simple impossibility of living up to the standards of beauty presented by the plastic doll.

But most of that anger play is played out in private, with little dialogue or social commentary to accompany the cut hair, dismembered appendages and pins shoved through her cheeks. After all, it’s not just Barbie that sets the standard. She is the cultural representation of beauty reinforced throughout the larger culture by family, friends, peers, cartoons, commercials, television shows and films.

My mother never addressed Barbie as an unreal depiction of beauty. In fact, the only times beauty was discussed in my family is when my mother told me I needed to lose weight or my grandmother told me I needed to “suffer to be beautiful.” My critique of beauty came far too late in life, in my early twenties when I stumbled upon feminism’s door step and Hole’s Courtney Love belted out the lyrics to Doll Parts in her torn baby doll dress and smeared lipstick.

I am doll eyes/ Doll mouth, doll legs/ I am doll arms, big veins, dog bait/ Yeah, they really want you, they really want you, they really do/ Yeah, they really want you, they really want you, they really do/ I want to be the girl with the most cake

Despite feminist consciousness and feminist criticism’s of Barbie, Barbie appeals to the daughters of feminist parents and even makes her way into their homes. It’s not too surprising given the fact that gender socialization doesn’t occur in a vacuum. Few parents can effectively combat conflicting values outside the home. But what if a dialogue about limited definitions of femininity and beauty begins early?

Recently my friend, Justine, showed me pictures of her 9-year-old daughter’s anger play that was turned into artistic self-expression and social commentary. Her daughter, a tiny girl with a self-proclaimed “big personality,” requested a Barbie the first time she saw one at a friend’s house at the age of five. Justine, an outspoken, self-assured woman with a personal disdain for Barbie  who also teaches a class to young girls called “Tapping the Body’s Wisdom,” was quick to discuss her feelings about Barbie’s “unrealistic portrayal of feminine beauty,” something not worth “aspiring to.” Mother and daughter discussed beauty and how the image of Barbie made them feel, specifically how Barbie made her daughter feel about herself. Her daughter acknowledged that  she did not look like Barbie. In fact, she acknowledged that no dolls looked like her and, in the end, she consciously acknowledged that she did not want to be that doll. Shortly thereafter, her daughter began to take apart her Barbies (and Bratz dolls) and play with their heads and appendages alone. Justine suggested saving the appendages for a future art project

After several lengthy discussions on beauty and hours of dismembering Barbie and the Bratz, Justine provided her daughter with a canvas to express herself. Her daughter pored through beauty magazines to find words to express her feelings.

The result?

I was moved by her 9-year-old’s ability to take the “smallness” Barbie made her feel, a feeling that too often remains silent and is internalized, and articulate it loudly on canvas. We may have a limited measure of control over the images our daughters are exposed to but we are able to help them cultivate a critical consciousness, use their voice and develop a healthy body image.

The students’ statement about their project:

Today we’re inundated with images of a false reality that concentrate on one ideal form of beauty. Altering images via Photoshop, ultimately exposes us to millions of images are not “real.” Our project takes a look at the dangers of the media, from Photoshopping to white-washing to an emphasis on an unattainable perfection. Collectively, the images in the media do not represent the diversity found in the larger population; not all women are tall, thin, white, heterosexual or young. And in real life, nobody is Photoshopped. Where are representations of “real” women?

The advertising industry sells us images directly aimed women’s mounting insecurities. The for-profit consumer culture exploits these insecurities and rakes in billions of dollars each year. Ultimately, these images dehumanize, hypersexualize and disempower women.

Having struggled with our own body image issues and eating disorders, we know first hand the amount of pressure the media can exert on women and the psychological and physical costs. We wanted to address the serious nature of these issues and focus on the importance of a healthy body image.

Part of our video was inspired by our in-class project, the body collage that covered two walls from floor to ceiling with images of women in the print media. We were shocked to see the onslaught of these homogeneous all at once. This experience inspired our project as well as the Feminist Majority Foundation campaign, “This is what a feminist looks like.” Ultimately, our statement “this is what a real woman looks like” is a reaction to the exclusion of women in the mass media and the erasing of age, race and authenticity as a result of the standard industry practice of altering women that already reflect an incredibly small percentage of the population.

The video is a mosaic of our own stories; our struggles with our own body image, our relationship with our bodies and our message of self-love and acceptance.

This video was created as a final project in Women’s Studies 30: Women and Pop Culture with Melanie Klein at Santa Monica College (this video is also featured at Jezebel). Thanks to students of this fledgling class for their dedication, motivation and hard work. For more posts related to this class, see Body Image: A Personal Story, Young Women Speak Out About “The Curse,” Violence Against Women: The Clothesline Project Video, Student Activism Breaks the Silence Around Violence,  and Social Media and Feminism in the Classroom and Beyond.

I recall an era when feminism’s purview was not limited to banging on about the need for more fat chicks in glossy magazines. While others fight for the right to force-feed Kate Moss, I continue antique fretting over equal pay, domestic violence and federal representation. At 40, I am old and clearly out of step with a movement that demands Size 14 representation.

She continues:

Yes. This just in: heat is hot, water is wet and teenagers are obsessed with their appearance. As such, let’s spend money on developing an industry code of conduct so that we can all enjoy the spectacle of more cottage cheese on Britney’s thighs.

Is it as simple as “teenagers are obsessed with their appearance?” I don’t think so. While the obsession with beauty has long been considered a narcissistic rite of passage among teens, beauty and body image issues are not limited to this demographic. Research shows that eating disorders and the preoccupation with beauty is found younger and younger girls as well as increasingly older women. Disordered eating, eating disorders and an overall obsession with the physical form is not limited to teens as part of a passing trend.

Not only are the consequences of the beauty myth not limited to a specific age group, it is not limited to rich (“bourgeois”), white girls. In fact, the Eurocentric beauty ideal is exported the globe over via the mass media and continues to erase our physical diversity. The global reach of these manufactured and altered images result in more and more  individuals conforming to homogeneous definitions of beauty.

As Brumberg traces in The Body Project: An Intimate History of Young Girls, physical beauty has become the sole measure of the worth of girls and women. This reduction of value and self-identification to the numbers on the scale and shape of one’s figure signals a  sociohistorical shift in the ways in which girls and women are valued. It doesn’t matter if you’re intelligent, independent, competent, charismatic, artistic, or successful unless you’re thin, toned and flawless. In other words, you’ve got to be hot, too.

The pursuit of hotness, as an extension of the battle to achieve the elusive beauty myth, trumps all other facets of  a woman’s character or accomplishments. Even pregnancy and motherhood are not excluded from the pressures of the socially constructed measure of beauty. The MILF, a term made popular by the film American Pie, has become a staple fixture in pop culture.

Naomi Wolf sounded the alarm over twenty years ago with the publication of The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women. As women began making strides thanks to the tireless efforts made during the second wave of feminism during the Women’s Liberation Movement, we began to be bombarded by increasingly unrealistic images of female beauty. This proliferation of our cultural space with skantily clad or nude women has continued and increased. The relentless and one-pointed focus on beauty has resulted in generations of women imposing, what Brumberg calls “internalized control,” on themselves.

Beauty in itself is not the problem. Dominique Millette tackles this debate in a recent post. So, what is the problem and why is it important?

1. The (big, fat) double-standard: As stated earlier, girls and women are judged and valued by the culturally imposed beauty standard. Not only have we been reduced to the shape and size of our body parts, girls and women are rarely represented in media culture unless they conform to these expectations. Girls and women who  slip pass the filter of pop culture and deviate from the beauty norm are rarely seen as attractive, often get make-overs in the process and their characters are defined by their weight or general “ugliness.”  While boys and men have come under corporate attack by companies looking to profit from their insecurities, there continues to be a much broader range of male representation. Graying hair, lines around the eyes, and extra weight around the middle doesn’t automatically exclude a man from being a potential love interest. Personally, I’m sick of seeing average guys with super hot women. I’d also like to see a more diverse representation of women and I doubt I am the only one. Maybe we wouldn’t feel so shitty about ourselves if we saw all sorts of women being represented, women celebrated for more than their physical assets.

2. Cost: To remain even remotely attractive by cultural standards, we must spend a lot of money. After all, “we’re worth it.” Newsweek reported the life-time expenditure to be just under a half a million dollars.

The combined annual revenue of the “cosmetic, beauty supply and perfume store industry alone amount to approximately $7 billion. Billion! This doesn’t include the diet industry or plastic surgery. Tyra recently aired a segment featuring a woman who has spent $80,000 on “beauty treatments” for her children.

3. Choice and control: There’s been a lot of dialogue on “personal choice” recently. Standards of beauty are informed by various industries, fashion, cosmetic, pharmaceutical etc, and disseminated via the mass media, specifically through advertising. We are subject to thousands and thousands of ads per year, reinforcing  cultural values and norms, including normative images of beauty. When a woman “chooses” plastic surgery, how much choice does she have in a culture that promotes plastic surgery as a means to achieving the culturally imposed beauty standard?

4. Physical and mental health: The artificial and manufactured images of beauty pose physical and mental health risks. The fall-out covers a range of issues: complications and risks associated with plastic surgery [update: read about Carolin Berger's death after 6th breast enlargement surgery, January 2011], smoking as a diet aide, disordered eating and eating disorders [update: anorexic model, Isabelle Caro, dies at 28, December 2010], toxic cosmetics, low self-esteem, depression and shame. The bottom line is the beauty myth is unhealthy and dangerous when consumed in mass quantities.

5. Maintaining other forms of inequality: The beauty myth is classist, ageist and racist. It emphasizes youth and erases authentic representations of age, predominantly features white women or women of color that fit within the Eurocentric mold and is extraordinarily expensive.

Is the beauty myth worth fighting against? Absolutely! Not convinced? Check out  A Girl Like Me, a film that explores the impact of the beauty myth on African American girls and women.

Exploring Beauty is the work of artist Erik Hagen, a US citizen currently transplanted in The Netherlands, an attempt to explore the nature of beauty and expand its cultural definitions. In a collaborative effort with each volunteer model, Hagen pairs the image with the interview in order to bring the essence of each woman to the reader.

In an image-based culture that proliferates streams of homogeneous images reinforcing unrealistic and dangerous images of beauty, these unaltered photos of women are a breath of fresh air, rich and full of life. Not only do Hagen’s images offer diversity and authenticity, the accompanying stories provide depth and character, reminding us that women are not solely defined by their physical appearance.  Hagen’s work allows us to fully experience a woman’s beauty; her mind, body and spirit.

Like many men, in Hagen’s youth, he preferred a beauty standard that reflected the dominant beauty norm, young and thin. As he grew and matured, he came to recognize and appreciate a woman’s character and story as a primary component of holistic beauty. In addition to his growth as a man, his move to Europe continued to expand his boundaries of beauty. Unlike many parts of the United States, Holland’s beauty definitions are broader and fuller.

Engaging in this intimate exploration of beauty, both Hagen and his models have emerged changed, moved by the collaborative experience and their contribution to change prevailing attitudes that have created epidemic levels of low self-esteem and body hate.

Projects that allow us to see what a real woman looks like, are important efforts in combating the manufactured images that tell us that we are defined and valued in narrow, one-dimensional ways.

I laughed, I loved it, and then I watched a commercial break a couple months back – same campaign, one major difference.  This ad utilized the same concept, except the latest ads featured women, all of whom are pretty enough that they could be the “ideal” person, the model that someone imagines themselves as.  Their “ideals” are women who are heavily made-up, and appear to be digitally enhanced.

I think those pictures speak for themselves, yes?

There are two theories that I hold about where Microsoft is coming from with this approach.  Either they are completely unwilling to show an “unattractive,”  overweight woman in their ad because, ew, that’s gross.  Or they deem these women “not worthy enough” and think they’re on the same level of attractiveness as the “regular” men in their ads.  One of the criticisms of the “beauty norm” is the double standard – men are allowed to be unattractive, women aren’t – I’d say that applies here.  The YouTube upload dates on the Windows 7 official page shows they set a precedent with the original ads – Steve, Jack, and Widmark were uploaded late last year, followed by Charline and Crystal in more recent months.  I would have deemed this a successful and funny campaign if they had been equal in their treatment of both genders.  Instead, they just cemented the fact that I’m a Mac.