Louis Theroux, a British-American journalist, travels to L.A., California, to document the world of plastic surgery and the patients (male and female) and doctors who inhabit it in Under the Knife. (Free to watch at the link. NSFW.) He visits doctor’s offices, operating rooms, and the homes of patients. He even undergoes a procedure himself and is frank regarding how he feels about this all the way through the process.
Theroux has crafted the documentary with an open mind. He is tactfully inquisitive. When he believes someone’s altered feature(s) look better or worse post-surgery, he conveys this. He peppers the lighter dialogue with meaningful questions about identity and self-esteem. He asks powerful questions to the patients and doctors, but the gentle delivery seems to elicit honest and very telling answers.
Warning: Nudity and surgical procedures. NSFW (not safe for work)….depending on where you work.
Huggies has come out with jean diapers (shall we call them jiapers?), an interesting product to discuss itself, but it is the commercial for the product that is the topic of this post.
As the handsome, suave baby walks down the street wearing a button-up white shirt and a denim diaper, he is oggled by women near by. Not in a “what a cute baby” sort of way, but in a come-hither sort of way. His swagger is oddly adult-like and masculine. What saves the ad from complete weirdness, in my view, is the corny, over-the-top music and voiceover paired with clever lines like “My diaper is full. Full of chic.”
Perhaps also rescuing it from the gutter is that the baby is portrayed as though he is a celebrity or that the adults are staring at his amazing fashion find — “jiapers” — in awe and wondering where they can get some in their size. Lace Depends, anyone?
Maybe it’s cliche to say this, but if that baby were a girl and those women were men, I’m confident that this commercial would never have aired. Or, moreover, even been pitched at all. What, then, makes it okay to use a baby boy, and his looks and image, in a sexualized way? Thoughts?
Part of me thinks the commercial is cute and fun (though the product is utterly ridiculous) and part of me thinks it’s inappropriate. Either way, the Huggies ad seems successful in the sense that it has certainly garnered attention, which is exactly its mission.
I guess I’m just putty in the hands of the ad guy or gal who pitched this.
In the last of the Newsweek articles from their beauty feature, Beauty Is Defined, And Not By You, Raina Kelley takes an indifferent stance on beauty. Her message: stop worrying about beauty because it is out of reach; focus instead on developing a successful career, perhaps one that advances women.
Beauty bias notwithstanding, there are still opportunities for people who aren’t hotties—lots of them. Virtually all the women I know have come to terms with the fact that their self-esteem cannot be tied to Photoshopped 15-year-olds on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar.Never in the history of the world have women had so many amazing opportunities, and it makes not a whit of sense to squander them obsessing over our looks. We do not yet reap rewards equal to those of men. But we can either succeed in the breathtaking arenas that are now open to us—and work to enter more of them—or we can spend our days competing with fashion models and movie stars. In other words, you can be Hillary Clinton or Heidi Montag. It’s your choice.
While I don’t think the line between career and beauty is as black and white as she points it out to be – for example, it seems that female politicians in the public eye must be conscious of their looks, and even if they are not, the media will make them – her general message makes sense and I think there are quite a number of girls and women who, too focused on their looks, should heed her advice.
Newsweek offers up two articles to balance the perspective on beauty they present. The first I’m posting of these is by Tony Dokoupil called Don’t Hate Me Because I’m Beautiful. As the title implies, it discusses some of the perils of being beautiful.
Importantly, he notes, and correctly so, there is less research on the disadvantages of being beautiful than on the advantages, and even less on attractiveness of men. Why is this? Does this tell us something important about how researchers think about beauty? Some seem to think academic research is impenetrable to error or misguidance, something which is, of course, false. Asking questions and searching for answers is good, but occasionally we ask the wrong questions, get off track, or are misguided by our own assumptions or stereotypes about the world and people in it.
Did researchers assume there were no downsides? Did they know or predict there were disadvantages, but felt beautiful people’s difficulties weren’t worthy of research? Or, more simply, were the upsides just more interesting to them?
From the article:
Even when attractive women are performing at the top of their game, studies show that beauty can be its own glass ceiling. Pretty women tend to be seen as too feminine, and thus unsuited, for most leadership positions that are associated with masculine traits-one reason, perhaps, why so few women CEOs control Fortune 500 companies or Wall Street firms.
She Stoops to Conquer suggests there isn’t anything wrong with using your looks to get ahead. As the article points out, people have all sorts of different advantages they use to facilitate success in their careers or other aspects of their lives. Some people come from money and some have parents that advise them really well, for example. It is a tough ol’ world out there and it seems foolish to not make use of advantages you have.
Consider these further advantages. If you work for an ad agency and you are more creative than your co-workers, do you try to be less creative thinking, otherwise, it wouldn’t be fair to them? No. If you won $50,000 in the lottery would you just throw that money away because it wasn’t part of your salary you worked hard to earn and thus, might not be fair to the people who didn’t win that lottery? Of course not.
The article also mentions that taking advantage your your looks (ladies) might even be considered the feminist thing to do. I wasn’t strongly opposed to this, but I was a bit sceptical until I thought of the following scenario. Let’s say you have worked hard your whole life. You have advanced post-secondary degrees under your belt, years of long hours spent working towards your career, you have sacrificed much and are excellent at what you do. You are working towards a coveted position. A job no woman has ever held. (President of the United States?) You find out you are being considered for this job and are eventually offered it. What if, somehow, you found out that it was offered to you, partly because of your good looks. Do you decline the job offer, one that is an advancement for women in this particular area of professional, business, or political life? Or, do you happily take the job and not give a damn about whether your looks helped you get it? Myself, the latter is an easy choice.
However, in these ways, we are thinking of the issue as action or intent of the person possessing the attractiveness. If we think about the person acting favourably or unfavourably towards an attractive or unattractive individual, things get troublesome. If someone is discriminated against because they are unattractive, this is a big problem. Can we have one and not the other, though?
At the end of the day if you don’t have the brains, talent, or know-how to accompany your good looks, they will likely only get you so far.
As the title suggests, the text attempts to frighten with alarming figures and evidence of how beauty can get people ahead, and unattractiveness will set one back, in the workplace. Have you noticed the theme of fear in what Newsweek has published about beauty yet? How not having beauty is scary, and how striving to achieve it is dangerous, too?
Fifty-seven percent of hiring managers told NEWSWEEK that qualified but unattractive candidates are likely to have a harder time landing a job, while more than half advised spending as much time and money on “making sure they look attractive” as on perfecting a résumé. When it comes to women, apparently, flaunting our assets works: 61 percent of managers (the majority of them men) said it would be an advantage for a woman to wear clothing showing off her figure at work. (Ouch.) Asked to rank employee attributes in order of importance, meanwhile, managers placed looks above education: of nine character traits, it came in third, below experience (No. 1) and confidence (No. 2) but above “where a candidate went to school” (No. 4).
9. It’s a Miracle She Snagged a Man With Her Real Tits
“Honestly, the way I got Spencer, I had no surgery,” she tells People. “It was my inner beauty that he loved.” Nice sentiment. Sadly, her case that you don’t need silicone to snag a man is undermined by a pre-surgery video on People’s site, in which Montag signs off this way: “This is Heidi Montag going in. When I wake up, I’ll be Mrs. Pratt: new last name, new face.”
Since it’s related to my last two posts, here is one of the photos from Cara Phillips Ultraviolet Beauty exhibit. Click here to visit the homepage of her site, then click through to photographs 20 to 40 to see more.
There is something about looking at these subjects with their eyes closed – it feels as though the looking is less inhibited because the subject is not looking back at us. We can just gaze at their face freely — the contours, shapes, contrasting pigmentation, glow of their skin, and their expressions.
Can those “unfortunate” age and sun spots beauty counters warn us of, highlighted by ultraviolet light in these images, add beauty and interest to faces rather than detract from them? Can damage be pretty?
Singular Beauty is a compilation of photographs taken by Cara Phillips in cosmetic surgery offices. No blood or gore here. To me, by featuring aspects of the offices and operating rooms without patients, the eeriness of it is all the more powerful. Picturing a person might have caused viewers to humanize the surgical experience more. Her photographs convey stark, cold, and odd aspects of (supposed) surgical beauty production.
“America’s fixation with beauty is a complex and pervasive phenomenon. For some women, cultivating, maintaining and creating a beautiful exterior, is a full-time job. In my own experience, first as a child model, and then as an in-store makeup artist, the industry had a profound effect of how I viewed myself. ”
“So in my late 20s, when I began studying photography, I felt compelled to revisit these places of beauty as an artist. It was a way to confront my personal demons. I didn’t necessarily want to capture the offices of cosmetic surgeons as they existed in reality, but to capture the promise of beauty and confidence held behind their doors. But during the process of making the following images, I didn’t find the ‘magic of transformation,’ instead, I saw the fears, self-loathing, and anxieties, of those who struggle to measure up to the current cultural expectations of beauty.”
