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You're So Perfect... Except For Your Boobs
“Look! I married you a certain way! I like women who look a certain way! It’s my right to like women who look a certain way and I shouldn’t have to spend the rest of my life not being happy,” Brad exclaimed.
The retort from my friend Jasmine’s husband was a reaction to her staunch refusal to get ‘another set’ less than two months after removing the implants that nearly cost her her life. For nearly a decade Jasmine endured numerous health complications that Western doctors claimed had nothing to do with her silicone breast implants.
(snip)
Jasmine’s story reveals many things. First and foremost, it demonstrates the incredible pressure girls and women feel to embody an unrealistic and dangerous beauty ideal. It also exposes the mental and emotional health risks and the incredible and painful risks women are willing to take in order to embody an ideal of perfection. Because in the end, as Bell Hooks proclaims in Communion: The Female Search for Love, being beautiful is about being loved. Girls and women understand from an early age that we’re primarily valued by the way we look and that if we can achieve this oppressive beauty ideal, we’ll be rewarded. In the words of hooks, girls and women strive to “make [themselves] over, to become someone worthy of love.”
Like more and more women, Jasmine became aware of the damaging fallout caused from pursuing a society’s singular beauty ideal. Her awareness was shaped by her personal experience as well as from her feminist consciousness, which was informed by the continued efforts of the feminist movement. But as Hooks points out, awareness is not enough. "To solve the problem of body self-hatred, we have to critique sexist thinking, militantly oppose it, and simultaneously create new ways of seeing ourselves."
The retort from my friend Jasmine’s husband was a reaction to her staunch refusal to get ‘another set’ less than two months after removing the implants that nearly cost her her life. For nearly a decade Jasmine endured numerous health complications that Western doctors claimed had nothing to do with her silicone breast implants.
(snip)
Jasmine’s story reveals many things. First and foremost, it demonstrates the incredible pressure girls and women feel to embody an unrealistic and dangerous beauty ideal. It also exposes the mental and emotional health risks and the incredible and painful risks women are willing to take in order to embody an ideal of perfection. Because in the end, as Bell Hooks proclaims in Communion: The Female Search for Love, being beautiful is about being loved. Girls and women understand from an early age that we’re primarily valued by the way we look and that if we can achieve this oppressive beauty ideal, we’ll be rewarded. In the words of hooks, girls and women strive to “make [themselves] over, to become someone worthy of love.”
Like more and more women, Jasmine became aware of the damaging fallout caused from pursuing a society’s singular beauty ideal. Her awareness was shaped by her personal experience as well as from her feminist consciousness, which was informed by the continued efforts of the feminist movement. But as Hooks points out, awareness is not enough. "To solve the problem of body self-hatred, we have to critique sexist thinking, militantly oppose it, and simultaneously create new ways of seeing ourselves."
Link to full article: You're So Perfect
P.S. Brad divorced Jasmine and took up with someone more "buxom".
15 replies
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= new reply since forum marked as read
i think that pretty much says it. now.... SOME womens worth is in appearance adn SOME mens worth is in their womans appearance and fortunately a LOT of men and women grow up and reject that contrived bullshit.
it is amazing the number of men that let her down cause it all bottom lined to boobs...
To solve the problem of body self-hatred, we have to critique sexist thinking, militantly oppose it, and simultaneously create new ways of seeing ourselves.
ok. will do.
Militantly.
Militantly.
Militantly.
Can't decide which looks best...
mil·i·tant (ml-tnt)
adj.
1. Fighting or warring.
2. Having a combative character; aggressive, especially in the service of a cause: a militant political activist.