https://themilitant.com/2020/03/28/a-conspiracy-to-keep-women-from-being-beautiful/
A conspiracy to keep women from being beautiful?
article
BY SETH GALINSKY
Vol. 84/No. 13
April 6, 2020
Author Sesali Bowen provides a justification for the so-called “beauty”
industry in the March 4 New York Times, in the name of opposing what she
calls
the “shaming” of women who use cosmetic surgery.
In “What Women Who Criticize Plastic Surgery Don’t See,” Bowen says that
from makeup and hair weaves to breast augmentation and lipoplasty, many
women
have “found ways to leverage those standards … in order to pass, to
survive and to thrive.” This is especially necessary, she says, for
Black women.
Bowen complains that plastic surgery “has been oversimplified as
unnecessary, self-obsessed and harmful.” She writes off the stories of
women who were
left disfigured or dead as scare tactics to “shame” those who undergo
the surgeon’s knife. They should not have gone to the “black market,”
she says. And
she ignores the fact that cosmetic surgery is a big business, worth some
$20 billion a year.
There is nothing new in Bowen’s argument. In 1954 a sharp debate broke
out in the pages of the Militant, after it published an exposé by Joseph
Hansen
of the cosmetics industry and how it profits off undermining women’s
self-confidence. This debate is available in the book
Cosmetics, Fashions, and the Exploitation of Women
by Evelyn Reed, Joseph Hansen and Mary-Alice Waters.
In the 2010 introduction to the Spanish-language edition of the book,
Waters describes the even greater resources devoted by capitalist
companies since
the 1954 debate to create markets and push the working class to “shop
until you drop” — to “need” everything “from must-have cellphones, to
the latest
model automobiles … [to] an exploding array of ‘cosmetic’ surgeries.”
“The pressure to be ‘fashionable’ — that is to be ‘employable,’ and
attractive to a potential spouse,” Waters writes, “has penetrated even
more deeply
into the working class.” And the ever-changing “beauty” standards are an
integral part of the perpetuation of women’s oppression.
Bowen says women who criticize plastic surgery are “conventionally
attractive with flat stomachs and round derrieres,” and have an ulterior
motive. They
“fear that their pretty privilege — the benefits they get to enjoy for
meeting those standards without the help of a doctor — is at risk. If
beauty became
democratized by more people simply paying surgeons for it, the
proverbial finish line gets pushed further away.” Even more women should
undergo surgery
to even up the competition, she contends.
Similar arguments were presented in the 1954 debate. Militant reader
Louise Manning complained that the exposé of the cosmetics industry by
Hansen was
an affront to the right of working-class women to strive for “some
loveliness and beauty in their lives.” And she added, “The wealthy are
beautiful because
the workers are wretched.”
Hansen responded that you might as well say that “morality is
predominantly monopolized by the wealthy” and that the “wealthy are
moral because the workers
are immoral.”
He concluded that “as for so-called ordinary women, whether housewives
or workers, I think they are beautiful, no matter how toil worn or
seasoned in experience,
for they are the ones who will be in the forefront of the struggle to
build a new and better world.” Hansen pointed out that standards of
beauty and fashion
are class questions that cannot be separated from the history of class
struggle.
Today we are living through an intertwined and deepening capitalist
economic, social and health crisis. Like in previous crises, the ruling
class unleashes
a “culture war” aimed at pushing us to accept their dog-eat-dog values.
Given the harsh reality of the competition for jobs, women often give at
least token recognition to the dictates of the cosmetic and fashion
industries,
Reed notes. But that “doesn’t mean that we must accept these edicts and
compulsions complacently or without protest.”
“The workers in the plants are often obliged to accept speedups, pay
cuts, and attacks on their unions,” Reed says. “But they always and
invariably accept
them under protest, under continuing struggle against them, and in a
constant movement to oppose their needs and will against their exploiters.”
Reed concludes that “the class struggle is a movement of opposition, not
adaptation, and this holds true not only of the workers in the plants,
but of
the women as well, both workers and housewives.” That’s as true today as
it was during the 1954 debate.
article end
list of 4 items
Audio version
Share
Email
Print
list end
IN THIS ISSUE
Front Page Articles
list of 6 items
• Protests, job actions hit bosses’ disdain for safety
• Algeria rulers use pretext of virus outbreak to bar protests
• Help ‘Militant’ win new readers, contribute to $115,000 fund!
• Socialist Workers Party demands government take action now against
economic, social, health crises
• Working people in Cuba set the example for int’l solidarity
• Asarco strikers fight continues against bosses’ union busting
list end
Feature Articles
list of 1 items
• Workers need road forward to battle economic and social crises
list end
Also In This Issue
list of 9 items
• British gov’t debates impact of Huawei deal on US trade bloc
• Workers donate Walmart ‘blood money’ to the SWP
• Larry Quinn: 20-year cadre of the Socialist Workers Party
• Bosses track your ‘happiness’ by spying on your life
• SWP candidate in Calif. backs nurses’ protests for safety gear
• Ohio, Texas use coronavirus to justify ban on abortion
• Kurds honor those slain in Saddam’s Halabja massacre
• A conspiracy to keep women from being beautiful?
• Cuba May Day brigade postponed
list end
On the Picket Line
list of 2 items
• UK: Workers strike over low wages, multitier conditions
• Teachers in Minnesota strike 3 days, demand more hiring
list end
Books of the Month
list of 1 items
• Cuban revolution addresses key questions facing workers
list end
25, 50 and 75 years ago
main region end
© Copyright 2020 The Militant - 306 W. 37th Street, 13th floor - New
York, NY 10018 -
themilitant@xxxxxxx
Cookies
This site uses cookies to improve your experience.
Learn more.
Okay, thanks
--
___
Thomas Paine
“One good schoolmaster is of more use than a hundred priests.”
― Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason
