In the Eye of the Beholder

The New York Times ran a story this weekend about changing conceptions of beauty in Brazil. Anorexia is a growing epidemic in a country that didn't traditionally conform to modern Western beauty standards. Ahhh, globalization. It's not just for Coca Cola anymore.

To wit:

"Though such globalized standards of beauty originated in rich, mostly white neighborhoods, they are gradually being spread to the rest of Brazil and across racial lines by the actresses and models who live here and perform in popular telenovelas. Exercise academies can be found in slum areas, and newspapers noted that the most recent anorexia victim was a dark-skinned teenager from a working-class suburb of Rio who dreamed of becoming a model."

And as a true testament to the global market and the comodification of the aesthetic (forgive me, I'm an academic these days), since 2000, Brazil also maintains the highest per capita plastic surgery rate.

Here's another interesting bit from the NYT article:

"This abrupt shift is a feminine decision that reflects changing roles” as women move out of the home and into the workplace, she said. Men are still resisting and clearly prefer the rounder, fleshier type. But women want to be free and powerful, and one way to reject submission is to adopt these international standards that have nothing to do with Brazilian society."

This kind of claim is really interesting because it shows a couple of important things. First, that even when challenging tradition and patriarchy in their own nations, women have to be aware of the patriarchy they adopt via modernization. This is so clear to me in the case of India as well, watch a Bollywood movie from 1956 and one from 2006 and you'll see that the outfits have changed dramatically, but the types of characters that women play, or the options available to them in these movies has changed little.

Second, there's something interesting here about standardizing beauty at all. We live in a world that is set up on a skewed geopolitical power spectrum. Big money means big influence over the world market and therefore over the commodification of culture itself. But is our concept of beauty something that can be so easily influenced by market forces and billboards? It seems to be the case. I always knew that ideals of art and beauty were products of their times. I mean, who would put Botticelli's angels on a billboard today without airbrushing them first? If this is true, and our art changes with our politics, then what will it take to change these harmful standards of human attractiveness? Feminism? Counterculture?

Thoughts?