Golden Lotus
This BBC story frames the rise in breast reductions as a liberation story, and in individual cases it clearly is. Women who have spent years in physical pain, groped by strangers, unable to exercise, finally getting relief that's real, and it deserves to be taken seriously. But there is a problem that the artcole does not talk about: women's bodies have never been allowed to just exist. Society decides what they should look like, and then women pay sometimes financially, sometimes physically, always emotionally to comply. This sounds a whole lot like foot binding with better PR.
Foot binding wasn't just cruelty for cruelty's sake. It was a beauty standard that became so thoroughly embedded in a culture that women participated in enforcing it on their daughters, because the cost of non-compliance which was being unmarriageable and being seen as low-class was worse than the pain. The bound foot was called the golden lotus. It was considered elegant. The women who had it were considered more desirable. The procedure was agonizing and permanently deforming, but it was framed, within its cultural context, as something women did for themselves.
While the parallel isn't perfect, but it's closer than we'd like. In the 1990s and 2000s, the dominant beauty ideal demanded large breasts, and the cosmetic surgery industry obliged. Women by the hundreds of thousands got implants. Now the Ozempic era has ushered in a new ideal: smaller, leaner, more "athletic" and the data shows breast enlargements are down 8% while reductions and removals are surging. The same industry that sold women on getting bigger is now profiting from making them smaller again. The body being altered is the same body, the target it needs to pursue has changed.
What never changes is the premise: that the natural body of a woman is always a problem to be solved. The woman who grew up with a body that didn't match the current ideal didn't get that body wrong but was made to feel like she needed to fix some things to make it work. A culture in which the body's acceptability is perpetually contingent on matching a moving aesthetic target isn't offering women freedom beyond choosing which procedure to undergo next. That's what a sophisticated cage looks like.
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Foot binding wasn't just cruelty for cruelty's sake. It was a beauty standard that became so thoroughly embedded in a culture that women participated in enforcing it on their daughters, because the cost of non-compliance which was being unmarriageable and being seen as low-class was worse than the pain. The bound foot was called the golden lotus. It was considered elegant. The women who had it were considered more desirable. The procedure was agonizing and permanently deforming, but it was framed, within its cultural context, as something women did for themselves.
While the parallel isn't perfect, but it's closer than we'd like. In the 1990s and 2000s, the dominant beauty ideal demanded large breasts, and the cosmetic surgery industry obliged. Women by the hundreds of thousands got implants. Now the Ozempic era has ushered in a new ideal: smaller, leaner, more "athletic" and the data shows breast enlargements are down 8% while reductions and removals are surging. The same industry that sold women on getting bigger is now profiting from making them smaller again. The body being altered is the same body, the target it needs to pursue has changed.
What never changes is the premise: that the natural body of a woman is always a problem to be solved. The woman who grew up with a body that didn't match the current ideal didn't get that body wrong but was made to feel like she needed to fix some things to make it work. A culture in which the body's acceptability is perpetually contingent on matching a moving aesthetic target isn't offering women freedom beyond choosing which procedure to undergo next. That's what a sophisticated cage looks like.
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