Beauty Demands

In a just published  paper  I consider what beauty would look like if we changed the lens and looked at beauty not as a collection of individual choices, but as a public health concern. Would changing the lens transform how we regard the harms of beauty and the extent to which we think we should intervene to address such harms? Changing the lens from individual choice to public health has been decisive in a number of debates. The classic example is attitudes to smoking. Whether or not to smoke was once regarded a matter of individual freedom and choice. The dominant view was that adults who know the risks should be left to make their own decisions. In an era where stop smoking campaigns are routinely promoted by States, health professionals and NGOs, and it is even regarded as acceptable to shame pregnant women for smoking, the notion that this is an individual choice which should not be intervened with is long gone. Sometimes intervention is justified on the grounds of 'harms

My morning read often includes posts from the Business of Fashion @BoF. Today I was fascinated and saddened to read their latest piece The Dawn of Designer Botox , which discusses the normalisation of #injectables (#Botox and #dermalfillers) for #millennials. It begins “As Botox and dermal fillers become a more normalised part of millennial beauty regimes, injectables could be become a multi-billion dollar opportunity for established luxury players”. Over the past few years, demand for non-surgical cosmetic procedures, largely driven by celebrity culture and social media, has increased rapidly in the UK and the USA right across the lifespan. An in-house doctor @HarveyNichols explains how women in their 20s are having cosmetic procedures in their lunchbreaks as a preventative measure. Another doctor suggest they are an extension of other routine ‘beauty’ procedures. Describing cosmetic interventions as ‘routine’ normalises a phenomenon which is not in the least bit normal.    Th

The vulva is a fraught and evolving site that is calling out for dedicated study by feminists. We need to analyse, broaden, and deepen cultural representations and discussions around vulvas. The vulva is enjoying a zeitgeist. Fur cup, yoni, cunt, front bottom, hoo-ha, pussy , va-jay-jay, camel toe, muff, map of Tassie, vagina. After hearing the sound recording of the now President of the Unites States advising men to ‘grab em by the pussy’ women rose up in fury to march against gendered violence as well as against the President himself. Global newscasts showed crowds in cities across the world dotted with homemade signs featuring the word vulva and images of vulvas (most were pink, an omission of note: see https://amydame.ca/2017/05/09/not-all-pussies-are-pink-not-all-women-have-pussies/ ). Alongside my sisterly anger the nerd in me felt happy that, at last, people were using correct terminology: instead of ‘vagina’ we were hearing ‘vulva’: the proper general descriptor for labia m

Beauty pageants, long a target of feminist critique, are sites where femininity is defined, packaged, evaluated, and standardized, along with Western “virtues” such as individualism, whiteness, and patriotism. They are regarded as culturally conservative and hegemonizing events from which non-white women, women with disabilities, and even non-Christians have historically been overtly or tacitly excluded (Gardner 2009). So when the first openly transgender person, a young trans woman named Jenna Talackova, was admitted as a contestant in the 2012 Miss Universe Canada pageant after a public appeal, a number of currents immediately collided. Trans people have suffered more violence and marginalization at the hands of Western society than just about any group that pageants excluded; today, trans rights are widely regarded as the vanguard of progressive causes, anticipated in some ways by gay and lesbian rights, albeit in uneasy alliance with feminism (e.g., Enke 2012). Transwomen in pa

A new health and fitness trend has recently swept social media. Images, text and videos labelled #Fitspiration - a literal amalgamation of the words fitness and inspiration – are ostensibly designed to inspire fitness among those who create, share and view them. As of 9th October 2017, over 13 million images labelled as #fitspiration had been posted to popular image-focused social media site Instagram. This figure has risen dramatically from the 1.8 million images that had been posted in January 2014, when my colleague Nova Deighton-Smith and I first became interested in it. Though the promotion of physical fitness is universally acknowledged as a positive and worthwhile pursuit, as a means of enhancing our physical and psychological health, concerns have been raised about the potentially problematic nature of #fitspiration content, especially in relation to body image. The question is posed: Is #fitspiration more harmful than helpful? At the heart of #Fitspiration criticism, lie co

Against a backdrop that increasingly seems to demand bodily perfection, my scars have the potential to speak of how far I am from meeting social ideals. Yet, they remind me daily of the fragility and preciousness of a life I have fought to live, and of that I am proud. For every 1000 babies that are born, eight will have a heart condition. This is the most common birth anomaly. 90% of these babies will now survive into adulthood compared with just 20% in the 1940s. There is now an estimated 250,000 adults born with a heart condition living in the UK. We can thank advances in modern medicine for the growing population of adults living with a heart condition from birth. This is a heterogeneous group including people with a wide variety of different cardiac conditions of varying complexity. Currently there is no cure for more complex congenital heart disease (CHD), with treatment and lifelong monitoring required. Survivors can live with uncertainty about how long they will live along

I am an anthropologist and have studied cosmetic surgery practices in Tehran, Iran, named as the “nose job capital of the world” (CBS, 2005). Hardly surprisingly, there are intriguing contradictions and paradoxes in regard to perceptions towards and practices on the body, beauty, and cosmetic surgery among people including Islamic jurists, plastic surgeons and also official authorities. The recent news about the ban on “ugly” teachers from teaching – as worded by Western media (e.g. Euronews, 2017) convinced me to write this post:   The increasing demand for cosmetic surgery in Iran is peculiar in terms of its contextual dynamics, which have been reflected in the Western media with a tone of surprise; how could this be happening in an Islamic state whose leaders are anti-West? Seeing Iran listed among the countries with the highest number of cosmetic surgeries together with other “Western” or “Latin-American” countries wherein public bodily display is allowed, and/or is seen as