The Pains One Goes Through for Beauty

Lori Lancaster | October 11, 2005
[hidden by request]

Kris Weberg | October 12, 2005
I always thought that the epicanthic fold was over the nose. Learn something new every day.

But to your main point, I agree that this is a particularly disturbing trend; American and European women have increasingly been turning to surgery to look more like supermodels; but now, it seems as if the proliferation of Western media images -- which, I stress, I wouldn't call anyone's fault, exactly, just the result of historical and economic circumstance -- coupled with the availability of body-modification technology and cosmetic surgery is going to create a world in which the supermodel's body is a luxury item, a brand to be purchased and a status maintained by suffering.

Jackie Mason | October 12, 2005
[hidden by request]

Kris Weberg | October 12, 2005
Well, exactly. The body is now a brand, as I said.

No one sells clothes or makeup anymore -- they sell a type of body and a sort of face that you're supposed to achieve or be modified into so that you can make use of the makeup, the clothes, etc. designed for it and for nothing else.

It's as if your appearance is just the hardware platform, one you have to keep updating, altering, reformatting in order to use the latest stuff.

Scott Hardie | October 16, 2005
Well, no foreign country seems to adore American culture quite like Japan does, so I guess it's no surprise that they want to look like our supermodels even more than we do. But the thing about plastic surgery is that what looks good today looks phony in five years and borderline freakish in ten. It's not like you can just get more surgery to undo the damage done by the previous surgeries; look at what's left of Michael Jackson's nose.

Shopping at Casual Male Big & Tall last week, I couldn't help but notice that the handsome men on the cover and first few pages of the sales catalog were all definitely from the "tall" side of their demographic. And the eternal media whore George Foreman is their spokesman. Apparently they're marketing to different people than me and all the other fat dudes I see shopping there with me. We're not ashamed of ourselves, so why is the company ashamed of us?