I left my programming cave for an excursion to the UCI bookstore. Classes start tomorrow, the temperature is almost in the nineties, and the frats and sororities have set up booths opposite each other in their effort to woo the beautiful and conforming (and to impress each other). I love women, especially beholding them, but I think that I’ve actually become desensitized to this overt display.
In the bookstore, I ran into this disturbing item:
From what I read (ahem…I was only looking at it for the…articles…), the book gives you all sorts of tips on how to retouch digital images of beautiful women to make them look even better–removing blemishes, reshading, virtually tucking here, virtually growing there. There’s even a very disturbing semi-satirical chapter on giving a model the same proportions as a Barbie doll.
I shudder when I think what women are up against: not only does the great marketing/media/fashion industry machine carefully a handful of women to be models for the our consuming, consumptive society, but then they take thousands of pictures of these women (who work full time to look good helped by a team of artists and advisors) under perfect (lighting, weather, clothing, make-up) conditions, and then select the best few. Finally, these few images of penultimate beauty are retouched and crafted to final perfection. How can anyone compete or compare with these images?
Yet this is what women try to do. When I workout on Saturday mornings, about half of the women in the Anteater Rec Center flip through beauty mags, staring at the aforementioned images as they stairstep, bicycle and run on treadmills towards the attainment of the perfect photoshopped body.
And I’m caught up in this, too. I am both victim and conspirator in the global production and consumption of female beauty. I’d like to think that many decades from now, people of the future will look back on this whole phenomenon the way we look at Chinese foot-binding.
Now that I’m back from my little excursion, one woman’s image stands out more than the coeds in their flirty ensembles: a fully-clothed thirty-something healthy-looking woman with the ultimate accessory–a book on molecular quantum mechanics. Now that’s sexy!
4 responses so far ↓
1 old prof // Sep 25, 2004 at 6:55 pm
Another reading program derailed as so many are.
Of course you could claim that this was one of your unlisted oleo of books, an attempt to explain organization in what should be chaos and a sense and apreciation of beauty where evolution should not place it. No I guess not. Thats too easily explained. Some of them do make you think there must be a God though. (I’m told they do. I havn’t looked at any of those pictures myself. I dont even open those files that begin “hi, I’m misty”, for fear that I will get all misty myself)
Its like the “nakedness on campus in hot weather”. I have seen that. It looks like a desperate attempt to compete in a saturated market. But, who knows.
it is rather humiliating when you think of the girls viewed like chattel and marketed to the world.
2 john // Sep 25, 2004 at 10:35 pm
the book in question was a five-minute stand–never left the bookstore aisle (though i did walk out with an adobe illustrator tutorial book, which i plan on swapping with another marathon book). the reading program is still on track! it’s just had a one car switched out for another. :^D
i’m still trying to work this all out: what is healthy admiration for feminine beauty? what is exploitation and/or pornographic?
good point about “competing in a saturated market.” though because so many girls use so many of the same tactics, it tends to be the artistic or quirky-intelligent-looking types that stand out in my mind.
3 j // Sep 26, 2004 at 7:33 am
nice post john.
i was watching oprah the other day (at a friend’s house since we don’t have a tv) and was so surprised at the bags under her eyes and still-chubbiness. though i am so happy for her recent weight loss, i wonder if the glam-glossy cover of O is yet another nod to the machine that makes women feel so inadequate.
as for me, i’ll stick to quantum mechanics. when i first discovered these theories as a sophomore in high school, it was as if the heavens were opened and i had a vision of the sublime chaos & order of the universe. it was so _real_ to me and it made the rest of what was hapening to me socially/physically/emotionally as a teenager seem mundane.
wonder if my dad ever questioned why his copy of “in search of schrodinger’s cat” disappeared when i went to college?
4 john // Sep 26, 2004 at 2:47 pm
Jana, meet me in the bedroom. You should be wearing nothing more than a quantum mechanics text… ;^)
Leave a Comment