[miss_jane]

As I read through some of the threads about various aspects of beauty (cosmetic surgery, shaving, makeup etc) I noticed that the majority of them were distinctly not about the politics but about hints ands tips. I thought it would be useful and nice for busties to have a place to discuss the politics behind the "beauty myth" and hopefully clear some of our thoughts on it.

The type of topics that have been playing on my mind:

*Cosmetic Surgery
*The Removal of Body Hair
*Diets
*Makeup
*The Media's Attitude

Just to make everything clear I don't want this to become a place to attack busties who chose different ways of expressing their beauty.

So what are your thoughts? Can stereotypical beauty maintenance sit comfortably with feminist politics? Feminism is about a lot about choice for the individual, but is any choice (specifically about beauty) that a woman makes necessarily feminist? How difficult is it to stand up and fight the beauty myth?

As a side note : The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf is the book that stemmed these thoughts in me and a few years own I still haven't cleared in my mind the way I feel about things.

[bklynhermit]

i don't know, i feel like the level of influences in the suburbs is more of a choice than we're willing to admit.

i guess, though, that it depends on what we're really talking about -- people in Westchester have the time and money to do whatever they want with themselves. They're less than an hour from a major metropolis and a lot of the people who live there have plenty of access to different influences, diversity, multiculturalism, etc. in fact, in comparison to, say, Iowa, Westchester is pretty ethnically diverse.

but, yet, go to Westchester and it's still SUV Ann Taylor botox crap. And you'll find the same thing in Oak Park, IL, Orange County, CA, Arlington, TX, etc. etc. etc.

in fact, thinking about the town where i grew up, i notice that things are getting more cookie-cutter as the community becomes more affluent. girls' moms used to sew their prom dresses, now they order online from the designers in the prom issue of Seventeen. the big thing to do when i was in high school was to get a tan fishing offshore on the weekends -- now it's tanning beds.