Beauty as capital: Little girls & plastic surgery.
On my ten hour flight from San Francisco to Tokyo I had the luxury of watching a Vice News feature on Japan's plastic surgery industry. Notably, girl-children as young as seven going under the knife for non-essential procedures.
The feature does not pass explicit judgement on their subjects but rather the narrative of it guides the viewer in. A mother and her young daughter have a plastic surgery themed vlogging channel. The mother assures the journalist, Hanako Montgomery, that having a double eyelid surgery will open opportunities for her daughter. She draws back to her own experiences of feeling inadequate and wants to make sure her daughter is confident in her physical appearance. We see another woman who has undergone dozens of plastic surgery procedures due to low self esteem from childhood.
As I watch this documentary I notice the flight attendants on the Japanese airline are presented immaculately. This is a stark juxtaposition to life in the Bay Area: women of the petit bourgeoise and elite economic classes make their rejection of beauty a political statement. In Silicon Valley, beauty is for the birds.
The Vice feature is well presented yet, like the millennial girl bossery anti-beauty philosophy of San Francisco, it does not dare to ask why women use beauty as capital. Or rather why it is a survival strategy for women without much power in society.
Like most reasonable people, I think that permanent body altering of children is probably not a great idea. But what if it wasn't permanent? What if young children could get double eyelids, pinned back ears or higher noses but could change back in adulthood? I'm sure many of us would still insist that would be also, not great.
But why is that? We should teach young women and girls that their value lies whats inside of their heads rather than their physical beauty. That's how the world ought to be.
Allow me to introduce you to reality: the only way this changes is if women seize a good portion of power and resources. Unlikely to happen very soon in Japan or anywhere else. So, women give into beauty standards and encourage their daughters to do the same for the chances of class mobility. While I found this documentary worrying, I also am alarmed by the amount of people in the West who refuse to think critically about the very real reasons women feel pressured to give their daughters plastic surgery and receive it for themselves. Sure, her daughter can’t fully consent to this procedure which is why it’s not a great situation. But - I still view the mother’s decision out of a toxic, misguided, hurt form of love.
Not caring about your physical appearance is a privilege.
This privilege is why wealthy women in places like San Francisco or Portland can afford to deny beauty as an ideology. A repackaged “I’m not like other girls” for West coast yuppies. The woman version of the techie millionaire wearing holey t shirts. Plain and simple wealth signaling. Not nearly as progressive as the participants perceive it to be. Of course there are working class women who reject traditional femininity and beauty all together, they unfortunately are punished for it.
I would like to move to a world where critical thinking is the rule rather than the exception. That’s no judgement on the Vice feature(I love VICE btw), but rather the attitudes that tend to come with this stuff. It’s time women start being kinder to one another, understanding and empathetic of the decisions we make.
As a side note: I noticed the same thing with the flight attendants when I was on an ANA flight to Japan recently. As it turns out that while there is no official age restriction anymore, very few work at a Japanese airline past the age of 30. On my flight back with Lufthansa there were many 40+ flight attendants, Japanese staff included.
Huhm, I hadn't thought of it as a form of privilege, but I suppose it is.
On the other hand - while there has always been a double standard, I would contend the casualization of the work world really got supercharged when Steve Jobs asserted his ability to do the jeans & turtleneck combo, and subsequently basically every founder out here went casual very quickly, and let their staff do the same.
Prior to that - well, there was a 'male' beauty standard too. It was your suit, or khakis/collared shirt, or work uniform, and it's really only in the last 10-20 years that standard has begun changing rapidly.
So in that sense, I feel the rejection of Beauty Queening among the powerful women is what is paving the way for the less powerful to be able to do the same, because they can rightfully go 'It's good enough for <respectable person>, so why isn't it good enough for me?'
But it will be much faster if-when we have much more gender equity