I recently read an article on Jezebel that I haven't been able to get out of my mind. I hesitate to mention it here because the main topic is very personal, sexual, and not something I would typically discuss here on my blog, but the except below is "safe" enough to share, and if you'd like to read the entire article you may do so here.
"In the 20 years since I started teaching at the college level, the amount of sheer physical hurting that young women are expected to endure in order to meet the contemporary cultural ideal has increased substantially. Women weren't expected to be completely "bare down there" in 1991, nor did high-fashion models seem to be quite as rail-thin as they have become since. Dieting and waxing can be physically painful, but they're also almost mandatory behaviors for young women who want to chase a body ideal. Girls play more sports (and suffer more overuse injuries) than they did two decades ago. They sleep less and are demonstrably more anxious. All of this is particularly true of the brightest and most ambitious.
Success and physical discomfort have never been so explicitly correlated as they are in the lives of young women today. Young women are perhaps more acclimated than their elders to the idea that physical pain is inextricably bound up with happiness – and with winning praise. On the soccer field or in the beauty salon, this generation is expected to prove its toughness as none before, just as this generation of women is expected to enact a more explicit sexiness than we've ever seen." - Hugo Schwyzer is a professor of gender studies and history at Pasadena City College and a nationally-known speaker on sex, relationships, and masculinity. He blogs at his eponymous site and co-authored the autobiography of CarrĂ© Otis, Beauty, Disrupted.
I ask for your input, dear readers. Do you agree with the professor? Are we as women expected to be more sexy than we've ever been in the past? And is there more pain involved than at any other time in history? It's a disturbing thought and brings to mind other ways we have "suffered to be beautiful."
It certainly didn't start in the 20th Century! Thoughts?
Have a Beauty-Full Day,
