The Ways Women Have Suffered for "Beauty" Is Mind-Blowing
Female beauty has required unimaginable suffering over the ages
I read a lot, and sometimes, what I read takes me down a scary rabbit hole. Last week, this happened with “Lady Tan’s Circle of Women.”
The book is set in 15th-century China. It starts off with the main character's mother dying a gruesome death from an infection in her bound foot.
The unbelievably cruel practice of foot-binding was meant to make women more desirable and give them the opportunity to marry upper-class men. Of course, I googled it, and it reminded me of all the ways women have been made to suffer for “beauty.”
Foot-binding was a horrifying practice. The Chinese upper class considered tiny feet in women to be the epitome of beauty.
They bound little girl’s feet until they broke and formed what they called “Golden Lotuses.” Crippled 3-inch appendages that women could barely walk on, causing their calves to atrophy.
Why am I telling you about this insane practice? Surely, this is a long-forgotten historical anomaly, right?
Nope, feet binding was banned in China only in 1912 and continued in secret for quite a while. Women with “Lotus” feet were still alive in this millennia. The last factory that made the doll-like shoes for these feet closed in 1999.
NPR magazine conducted an interview with Wang Lifen, an 86-year-old foot-binding survivor, in 2007 — yes, in 2007! Her feet were bound when she was seven years old.
At that time, bound feet were a status symbol, the only way for a woman to marry into money. In Wang’s case, her in-laws had demanded the matchmaker find their son a wife with tiny feet.
In 2015, Amanda Forman made a fascinating documentary about the history of women when she learned about this practice.
At the age of five or six, when the bones are still soft enough to be easily broken, the procedure began:
First, her feet were plunged into hot water and her toenails clipped short. Then the feet were massaged and oiled before all the toes, except the big toes, were broken and bound flat against the sole, making a triangle shape. Next, her arch was strained as the foot was bent double. Finally, the feet were bound in place using a silk strip measuring ten feet long and two inches wide.
This sounds so torturous it’s hard to imagine anyone, no less your own mother or grandmother, doing this to you.
But this isn’t the only example of families subjecting their daughters to cruel and painful measures to make them more “beautiful.”
In Mauritania, girls are fattened for marriage
In Mauritania, girls are fattened to make them beautiful. This practice is called Leblouh. Being severely overweight makes a girl more marriageable.
Marie Claire magazine reported on the desired look that Leblouh is supposed to create:
“The stomach flab should cascade, the thighs should overlap, and the neck should have thick ripples of fat,” says Elhacen. The ultimate sign of beauty, however, is silvery stretch marks on the arms. “Parents will give me a bonus if a girl develops stretch marks.”
Eating a lot and being allowed to be fat may sound fun to us, who live in a society where thinness is the required beauty ideal. Until you realize that teenage girls are segregated in feeding camps and are force-fed up to 16.000 calories of food per day.
When they can no longer or no longer want to eat, they’re beaten by force-feeders like Elhacen, who told Marie-Claire magazine:
“I’m very strict…I beat the girls or tortured them by squeezing a stick between their toes. I isolate them and tell them that thin women are inferior.”
This beauty practice comes with a host of other issues these girls face. They are overfed at 12–14 years because child marriage is rampant, and many suffer health issues for the rest of their lives.
In Malaysia, having a long neck is considered beautiful
The Paudang tribe of Malaysia practices “neck elongation” on its girls and women.
This involves wrapping longer and longer brass coils around the girls’ necks until the shoulders slope and the collar bones cave in, creating the illusion of a long neck.
The coils constantly chafe against the skin and leave bruises on the girls' and women’s necks.
There are so many other examples: In the West, corsets squeezed the internal organs to give women the tiniest of waists. Making it hard to breathe and do anything productive with your life.
Crinolines, the gigantic hoop skirts, killed their wearers if they accidentally caught fire, or injured them by stabbing them with their metal rods.
Poisonous lead makeup, arsenic wafers to give you a glowy complexion, or deadly nightshade to make your pupils bigger. The list is endless.
There was never a limit to the ways women’s lives could be endangered to make them more desirable to men.
Many of these practices seem outdated or have died out, and we might scoff at the idea of women being subjected to such brutal and painful measures to beautify them.
We’re conditioned to self-inflict pain for beauty
But I can’t help but be reminded of how they seem to be replaced by increasingly invasive and painful cosmetic surgery.
Another book I read recently is “If I Had Your Face” by Frances Cha. It follows the journey of a group of young women in South Korea.
Through their life stories, you learn about the traumatic cosmetic surgery that South Korean women undergo in order to conform to the ideal of beauty. Which requires them to have a V-shaped chin, straight eyebrows, double eyelids, a high-bridged pointed nose and plump lips.
Especially the jaw realignment surgery required to create the v-shaped look is dangerous and extremely painful. In the book, the young girl needs nearly a year to recover function in her jaw after the procedure.
In an article by The Atlantic about the K-pop-inspired beauty craze in South Korea, Dr. David A. Koslovsky, a maxillofacial surgeon at Columbia College, says:
It’s a complex, risky procedure. You could have permanent numbness, and there have been cases where people have died from this operation.”
“It’s also extremely painful. The jaws are wired together for six weeks, and it can take six months for the swelling to disappear”
Korean women aren’t the only ones subjecting themselves to more and more invasive and painful surgical procedures.
Brazilian Butts, Tummy Tucks, Mommy Makeovers (a combination of tummy tuck and breast lift) are all extremely painful. And risky. But there is a steady rise in the number of women willing to go through these procedures to be “beautiful.”
A 2022 global survey by the International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery (ISAPS), showed a 41.3% increase in plastic surgeries over the four preceding years.
…a 11.2% overall increase in procedures performed by plastic surgeons in 2022 with more than 14.9 million surgical and 18.8 million non-surgical procedures performed worldwide. The report shows a continuing rise in aesthetic surgery with a 41.3% increase over the last four years. (pdf)
Throughout history, women have been fattened, starved, crippled or disfigured in order to make them more beautiful according to some random beauty ideal.
What these practices all have in common is that they require women to change the way their bodies look.
But they also show that there is no common denominator and that there are so many different arbitrary beauty standards for women.
Apparently, everything can somehow be considered the ideal female form. And it has — fat bodies, thin bodies, tall women, short women, big breasts, small breasts, big butts, no butts, round faces, oval faces — at one point any one of these was the standard.
So why even bother changing anything? We might as well stay how we are. Someone is bound to find us attractive.
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