In an article titled “The price of perfection” the author Marantz Henig gives an overview of the dangerous and mutilating treatments women have undergone in their quest for beauty.
“Over the centuries, women have mauled and manipulated just about every part of their bodies—lips, eyes, ears, waists, skulls, foreheads, feet—that did not fit into the cookie-cutter ideal of a particular era’s fashion. During the Renaissance, well-born European women plucked out hairs, one by one, from their natural hairline all the way back to the crowns of their heads, to give them the high rounded foreheads thought beautiful at the time…
In China right up until World War 2, upper-class girls had their feet bound, crippling them for life but
ensuring the three-or four- inch long feet that were prized as exquisitely feminine. (before it’s demise this practice persisted for more than one thousand years.) “My foot felt very painful at the start,” recalls one woman, whose account was recorded in The Tyranny of Beauty. “The heel of my foot became odiferous and deteriorated. Because of the pain in my foot, my whole body became emaciated. My face color changed and I couldn’t sleep at night.” But this woman put up with the agony, because she was convinced that “no one wanted to marry a woman with big feet.” In Central Africa, the Mangbettu tightly wrapped the heads of female infants in pieces of giraffe hide, to attain the elongated cone-shaped heads that were taken to be a sign of beauty and intelligence. (though that surely couldn’t have been aiding the intelligence of their brain!)
In the Elizabethan age many women, in search of skin that looked like porcelain, whitened their faces using ceruse, a potentially lethal combination of vinegar and lead. Queen Elizabeth herself used ceruse so consistently that it ultimately ate pits into her skin, causing her to pile the paint on in thicker and thicker layers in hopes of camouflaging her growing imperfections. This, in turn, only led to more corrosion, and the Virgin Queen’s face was ultimately so ravaged that she ordered all mirrors banned from the castle. It is said that her servants exploited the ban on mirrors in a wickedly mischievous way: Every morning they painted the Queen’s face white with ceruse, but they painted her nose “a cruel crimson.”
But, one factor has held relatively constant: most cultures, through the centuries, have wanted their women to be slim…
In England in 1665, a health pamphlet entitled “To reduce the body that is too fat to a mean and handsome proportion” noted that one handy technique for losing weight was bloodletting…women, according to this pamphlet, should be bled “largely, twice a year, the right arm in the spring, the left in the autumn”
In the 1930s women actually swallowed tapeworms to lose weight; the opera diva Maria Callas is said to have been one such desperate reducer. ”
Today women are driven more than ever before
Since before Cleopatra’s day, women have been judged by the way they look, and have struggled mightily to make themselves look the way they want to be judged…perhaps Elizabeth I was on to something after all. Maybe the only way for women to get on with things is to banish all mirrors from the castle.”
I could go on and on and tell you of numerous horror stories, but I brought up these examples to show that the pressure for perfection is nothing new!
The temptation to become absorbed with our physical appearance has always existed.
80 years ago girls would compare themselves with the other 10-15 girls in their town. Today women compare themselves to the pictures of the supermodels put on the by the world-wide fashion industry.
Women have always been susceptible to being totally preoccupied with the physical ideal as defined by the culture in which they live.
While authoress Robin Marantz Henig certainly outlines the problem for us…she offers no solution.
Why? Why are we so preoccupied by this quest for physical beauty?
