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Beauty and misogyny: breast implants, tummy tucks and nose jobs have become socially approved beauty practices in the west, but Sheila Jeffreys argues they are better understood in terms of the United Nations' definiton of harmful cultural and traditional practices.

Article Excerpt
According to United Nations documents such as the 'Fact Sheet on Harmful Traditional Practices', harmful cultural/traditional practices are understood to be damaging to the health of women and girls, to be performed for men's benefit, to create stereotyped roles for the sexes and to be justified by tradition. This concept provides a good lens through which to examine practices that are harmful to women in the west--such as beauty practices. But western practices have not been included in the definition or understood in international feminist politics as harmful in these ways. Indeed there is a pronounced western bias in the selection of practices to fit the category such that only one western practice, violence against women, is included. The implication is that western cultures do not have harmful practices such as female genital mutilation that should cause concern. I argue that western beauty practices from make-up to labiaplasty do fit the criteria and should be included within UN understandings. The great usefulness of this approach is that it does not depend on notions of individual choice; it recognises that the attitudes that underlie harmful cultural practices have coercive power and that they can and should be changed.

Socially Approved Self-Injury

Changing attitudes and practices will not be easy, however, particularly given the normalisation of cosmetic surgery. For example, according to Elizabeth Haiken in her book Venus Envy, between 1982 and 1992, the percentage of people in the US who approved of cosmetic surgery increased by 50 per cent and the percentage who disapproved decreased by 66 per cent. Cosmetic surgery, she says, began at the same time in the US as the phenomenon of beauty pageants and the development of the beauty industry in the 1920s. Haiken points out that cosmetic surgery can be seen as an indication of the failure of feminist attempts to dismantle male domination: 'Cosmetic surgery', she argues, 'has remained a growth industry because, in greater numbers, American women gave up on shaping that entity called "society" and instead turned to the scalpel as the most sensible, effective response to the physical manifestations of age'. Cosmetic surgery, as Haiken points out, was always about putting women into the beauty norms of a sexist and racist society. Women who did not fit American norms had to cut up. Thus by the mid-century, 'Jewish and Italian teenage girls were getting nose jobs as high school graduation presents'.

Breast augmentation, however, is more recent than other types of cosmetic surgery and dates from the early 1960s. This places its origins in the so-called sexual revolution in which men's practice of buying women in prostitution was destigmatised through the ideology of sexual liberalism. The sex industry expanded swiftly in the US through pornography and stripping. Breast augmentation was associated in the beginning with 'topless dancers and Las Vegas showgirls'. The method of enlarging breasts for men's pornographic delight in this early period was silicone injections...

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