Beauty, they say varies or differs in various cultures and societies. Each country and culture have its definition of beauty. Our preoccupation with beauty is an international obsession, but how we define beauty across the globe could not be more different. Health, fitness, and social expectations are consistent in standards of beauty across cultures. Although different cultures have their ideas about what and who is considered beautiful. People go through pain, just to fit in the society in which they find themselves. The criteria for which some countries can ascertain if someone is beautiful is intriguing to know. The concept of beauty has been hard to find in times past and even in recent times. Many say, beauty comes from within and it lies in the eyes of the beholder.
It is very intriguing to unravel the diverse concepts of beauty according to different societies, beliefs, and cultures. It is very amazing to know how the environment and our belief systems go a long to influence certain decisions. But the issue is, is it about society or it is about the members of society?
In Myanmar and Thailand, women receive a brass spiral all around their neck, and every year, someone will add one or two rings to the females until they are adults; these rings puts pressure on the shoulders to make them drop and eventually stretches the neck, with the belief that the longer your neck, the more beautiful you are.
Another tribe is also the Mursi an ethnic group in Africa, that permits a form of status for the women, accentuated by the extent of the deformation with the earlobes covered with colorful pearls, others in Mursi also use lip dilators, which is a measure that a child has become a woman. The two lower front teeth are removed to make dilation possible, they engrave the lip and insert clay into the wood to make the lip broaden.
This is pain! This is done to empower the girls in society. Empowerment should not be painful. Do you have to go through pain before you can be empowered? Women without these brass spirals and lip dilators in these societies are disregarded. I believe we can still empower women without subjecting them to such suffering and tragedy.
Abena,
ReplyDeleteThank you so much for your post! The connection of beauty standards and physical discomfort for women is common across cultures, although the examples you highlight are extreme examples.
In many ways, this post prompts me to think about other controversial practices still common around the world -- foot binding, genital mutilation, etc. As a western student/scholar, one of the personal tensions I wrestle with derives from these topics: when do we respect personal choices/cultural traditions and when do we delimit the cases of human rights violations. Your post points to such a poignant point on this query: "I believe we can still empower women without subjecting them to such suffering and tragedy." The emphasis on pain or physical discomfort serves as an excellent barometer for measuring when interventions may be needed, or when norms need to shift.
The idea of beauty standards has historically come down to discomfort. Speaking for the western/U.S. context, the thinness or slender ideal perpetuated in the 1990's in particular led to severe restriction of caloric intake (the myth that 1200 calories is sufficient for grown women, when indeed, this is the caloric need of a toddler), and even as this norm has shifted, the ideal has not become easier to achieve, but merely a new form of discipline for the body. As discussed in class, western norms tend to permeate other countries and cultures over time and exposure. From the dominance of western media, other norms of suffering have arrived -- I think about skin bleaching, or other forms of privileging lighter skin, both in the U.S. and around the world, due to the prevalence of western ideals (though this is not the case everywhere).
Once again, I appreciate the thoughts forwarded in your post, and I see the intersections in course conversations with this topic (as proposed, and as expected) with masculinity, gendered expectations for women, patriarchy, and tradition/western influence. Thanks so much for sharing!
Thank you Abbina for bringing this important topic for discussion. I believe this topic is very relevant and important to many women in Asian countries; women have always been subject to judgment and beauty standards. Growing up in Cambodia I saw many women have gone through surgeries following what society considers to be more beautiful which could put women at risk. I agreed with Jenny that due to western media influence related to beauty for women and I believe whatever society it is would not should never be forced and socially pressure risking themselves; while men do not necessarily need to face such issues.
ReplyDeleteAbena! Incredibly interesting post and something that I have not only studied/discussed throughout all the anthropology and gender study courses over the course of my education but a subject that I personally have always been fascinated by and genuinely love learning about how it occurs in different forms in every culture across the globe. I go back and forth in my mind with my own values and biases and never can quite come to an answer whether these painful forms of beauty standards and alterations that women do globally are forms of oppression and conformity or empowerment and expression. And to be honest I don't think i'll ever have a straight answer. We see these women in Myanmar with brass rings around their necks entombing their neck and forcing it to lengthen. We see the Mursi removing teeth so they my imbed lip dilators and piercing their ears with large masses of pearls until they are forcibly deformed. We see upper-class women in China (up until the end of the 19th century), bind their feet as children to break their foot bones in order to resize their feet in order to be desirable for marriage, all while causing them to become mostly immobile for the rest of their lives. And finally, we see women in the United States leading the world in costly cosmetic alternations that range from little procedures such as botox or lip fillers to larger surgery breast augmentation, liposuction, nose reshaping, tummy tucks, to even vaginal reconstructive surgery. All surgeries done to fit an ideal beauty standard and seen as a form of empowerment and expression for the upper class, but is also instead a form of pain that is merely furthering oppression and conformity?
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