qwertyu858: bloglikeanegyptian:www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/a9555312/teenage-plasti
qwertyu858: bloglikeanegyptian:http://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/a9555312/teenage-plastic-surgery-feminism/ Lewallen wrote a paper about the effects of Instagram on social comparison, and discovered a distinct relationship between perusing photos online, getting insecure about one’s looks, and then fantasizing about changing one’s appearance. But she told me that women have always done this; Instagram, by virtue of proliferating millions of such images for free, simply affords greater opportunity than ever for such comparisons.In other words, ladies suffer for fashion. We have for a long time—and our desire to self-improve, often at our own peril, predated our logging onto social media. Roman women smeared arsenic on their faces to smooth fine lines. During the Victorian era, dressmakers mixed arsenic with copper to create vibrant, emerald green, which was on-trend at the time, and women who wore the green died horrible deaths—vomiting green, seeing green and eventually turning green before they perished. Today, women in the Kayan Lahwi tribe, called “giraffe women” by tourists, still wear brass coils stacked so high on their necks that it eventually becomes impossible for them to remove the coils, or they will die (because their necks are so long and weak), but no one blames the masochistic tradition on giraffes. Imagine staring up at one of them and saying, “Kylie Jenner did this to you.”When I asked Gabi and Niki (via email, through their publicist) whether the reported rise in young people seeking out cosmetic procedures shocked them, they responded abstractly, and in unison: “[Instagram] can make people want to get work done and it can also help to empower women.” I heard this over and over again in my conversations with young Instagram users who’d undergone cosmetic surgery—that, sure, selfies and Instagram enhanced the desire to get cosmetic procedures, but selfies and Instagram and cosmetic procedures were also “empowering,” because… Well, nobody could quite explain that part to me. The word “empowering” seemed, more than anything, like a way to deflect questions and shut down the conversation about cosmetic work altogetherUltimately I reached out to around 40 young, social media influencers rumored to have gotten “work done,” but Gabi and Niki were the only ones to even respond once they heard what the article was about. And although a few more young, non-celebrities agreed to speak to me, most requested pseudonyms. Yet they all used the word “empowerment” at one point or another—and in a way, that word, when used to discuss and justify cosmetic work, began to feel more insidious and potentially dangerous to me than the ways in which social media had influenced their choices. They’d paid to have their lips plumped or their noses shaved down for the same reasons that Victorians had died wearing green. Yet they couldn’t admit a very simple, girlish truth: that they care—deeply—about what other people think.Whether or not she was famous, every girl I spoke with about her cosmetic surgery responded like a well-prepped celebrity, hitting all the trendy talking points like body positivity and feminism, terms that have become at once fashionable and meaningless. Everyone admitted that social media probably played a part in her decision to get cosmetic procedures. Everyone admitted that being on Instagram often made her feel insecure. But no one would admit to getting cosmetic surgery because of that insecurity—because that’s off brand. Insecurity isn’t marketable—it doesn’t jive with our stylized version of feminism—and most of all, it isn’t pretty. You can dress up plastic surgery however you want—you can give it feminist injections—but we do it because we doubt ourselves. -- source link