Well, the point is: to feel well about "touberous breasts" is very hard in this culture in first place and the choice is outright unequal if it is publicly viewed as a "deformity", as a kind of sickness, and if women (and men) are permanently confronted with round, big (augmented) breasts as THE ideal of beauty and "feminity".
Hence, I totally understand anger and disappointment of wanting such a procedure because that means one has a lowered self-esteem because of breasts that don't look the way beauty industry, porn etc. and society view it beautiful.
The anger and disappointment results from the insight that hardly any woman would want such a procedure, or would even think of her breasts being "ugly" or "abnormal", if all shapes and sizes of breasts were equally accepted and appreciated - and: if there wasn't such an collective obsession about certain body parts and their look, may it be big, round breasts or supersized butts. Imagine women would be crazy about toes, and wanted to augment them, and define a great deal of their self image about having big long toes of a certain shape - wouldn't it be crazy and self contemptouous? This idea might seem absurd. But it's just absurd because our culture isn't collectively obsessed and doesn't define women due to their toes and the look of them. You cannot judge individual feelings and choices independently from the culture. Therefore I happen to find it quite cynical to reduce cosmetic surgery on plain "individual choice" and "personal preferences", as if such things come to happen randomly and free of external pressure just from the inner self of a person, as if it's kind of a game, or the failure of the person's body to be "wrong", instead of societal norms defining it as "wrong". That's just not true. Without enough pressure and a certain mentality about bodies, body images, their importance, econimisation and standardizing of bodies, legitimacy or importance of more or less severe body modification there wouldn't be such a social phenomenon of people making such decisions.
The extent to which - especially female - bodies and looks are standardized, examined and strictly judged has increased strongly within the past 20 - 30 years, or at least it has changed toward higher expectations and more severe and widespreading physical changes.
For a woman, who is usually socialized to be very attentive about her own body and criticism towards it, who learns that what others think is "beautiful" needs to be conformed, and who recognizes that a certain sterotype of "looks" is seen much more important and you are judged and measured by that, it is very hard to escape the pressure.
If you permanently get feedback from your environment that look x is better than look y, or that look y is even disgusting or at least not very welcome, you will almost certainly internalise this mentality as your own and judge yourself and maybe others by the same standards. And given these facts, that society or parts of society, let it even be single people who insult a vulnerable person, destroys self-confidence of people based on their looks, I find it absolutely understandable to be angry about "giving in" to the pressure and let it be such a dominant motivating factor in your life. It is the anger that one is even willing to hurt one's body to fit into cultural norms, that one has actually adapted these norms, and that by having breast augmentation or another procedure, one takes actively part in putting even more pressure on others to do the same, because now even people who "actually know it better" feel they can't stand it anymore. Severe lack of self-esteem aside, this can be very burdensome for a reflected person who understands how socialisation and social pressure works and who sees her role and responsibility in this puzzle, but yet isn't free of it or uninfluenceable - because she painfully experiences it on herself.
Maybe women or men, having deficits in self-confidence due to their bodies, but not critically reflecting what the causes are and don't question norms of how a body should look like (due to gender gap the norms of "female" and "male" beauty are quite different), have an easier decision - one way or the other. Maybe they won't experience such tough cognitive dissonance in either way they're dealing with their self-image.
Nonetheless, reducing self-image problems to merely individual "bad luck", and applauding the giving way of adaptational pressure as quasi-"empowerment" without regarding consequences - for the person acting and for others - doesn't meet the requirement of such a complex issue. For me that sounds like encouraging the development of a smoking habit as an "empowerment" against having to inhale the smoke of others, but "emancipatedly" causing oneself lung cancer. [sarcasm] Yey, what a progress! [/sarcasm]
I myself have what nowadays - in times of norming bodies to mainly one standard and increasingly stigmatizing natural deviations as "sickness" - is called "tubular breasts" (I conciously omit the usually added, abusive term "deformity" here).
I recently found out about the term and that it is contemptouously called a "deformity" by cosmetic surgeons (who make more money of more people believe them) and people who believed them or people who want women to have breast augmentation. Well my self-confidence hasn't increased due to this stigmatisation - oh surprise! - but lowered.
I never felt very happy about my breasts. As a teenager and young grown-up I was often teased by boys and men because they were small. Ironically I was hardly ever insulted because of my generally very thin figure, which usually includes having small breasts.
That men I knew, men's magazines, porns, public media, including underwear-advertizing for women always depicted big, round breasts as the perfect ones, displaying them as the ultimate female sexyness and quite much hailing them, added up to my lack of self confidence - even though I know how crazy and pathetic such people and their mentality must be.
But my experience with women is different than illustrated here: I often experience great tolerance for procedures like breast augmentation or a general big boobs-obsession with women who are more or less well endowed, at least usually have no perky, tubular breasts, which look smaller than they actually are due to their shape. My guess is that they - as their breasts more or less correspond to the norm - don't even have the slightest idea of how much pressure there is for a woman to have the "right" boobs and how humiliating it can be not to have them. They often won't even notice the fundamental pressure in our culture or that there is such a norm which many women naturally do not comply with and therefore are made to feel "inadequate" or "unfeminine". That is usually not of bad will, but because they don't feel affected and thus have never been confronted with this side of the coin.
This makes me, not only politically, but personally very sad, angry and disappointed, because I know I wouldn't have such severe self-confidence issues, I would't think negative of the size and shape of my breasts if there wouldn't be such a fuss about female breasts and a norm about their size and shape. The same as I don't become depressive about my toes. I just wouldn't care.
This is why I refuse to seriously think of a "boob job" (what an euphemistic phrase, actually) as a realistic option - besides I fortunately couldn't afford it anyway. To get a boob job probably wouldn't free me from this mental trouble, it would just change the perspective and help a cosmetic surgeon becoming rich by exploiting a low self-confidence, but it wouldn't change anything about the societal pressure. Besides I actually don't want to be more likeable or attactive because of shape and size of "boobs". Cognitive dissonance would probably stay, either way. Despite and because of inner and outer pressure...
At least I often try to become more comfortable with my body, especially my breasts, sometimes I succeed. But then I'm always confronted with the collective and/or medial preference with breasts completely different than mine and everything goes down the tubes again (no pun intended). To built up an already damaged self-confidence and to hold it on a higher level constantly is definitely harder than to destroy a solid self-esteem.
This is a really hard struggle for me, day in day out. Then to hear people promoting and encouraging to rather physically change and get hurt just to fit in, is really hurtful and counterproductive for a positive self-image and not getting "brain-washed", at least for me. Like I said, hundreds of thousands of women getting breast implants because they feel inadequate or want the "perfect" tits, or even become totally "boob greedy" themselves, like one anorexic is greedy about slenderness, isn't really helpful in accepting oneself naturally, without such a procedure, and it is far from being a completely free, individual choice. I know. So please don't take this so easy. It is not.
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Well, the point is: to feel well about "touberous breasts" is very hard in this culture in first place and the choice is outright unequal if it is publicly viewed as a "deformity", as a kind of sickness, and if women (and men) are permanently confronted with round, big (augmented) breasts as THE ideal of beauty and "feminity".
Hence, I totally understand anger and disappointment of wanting such a procedure because that means one has a lowered self-esteem because of breasts that don't look the way beauty industry, porn etc. and society view it beautiful.
The anger and disappointment results from the insight that hardly any woman would want such a procedure, or would even think of her breasts being "ugly" or "abnormal", if all shapes and sizes of breasts were equally accepted and appreciated - and: if there wasn't such an collective obsession about certain body parts and their look, may it be big, round breasts or supersized butts. Imagine women would be crazy about toes, and wanted to augment them, and define a great deal of their self image about having big long toes of a certain shape - wouldn't it be crazy and self contemptouous? This idea might seem absurd. But it's just absurd because our culture isn't collectively obsessed and doesn't define women due to their toes and the look of them. You cannot judge individual feelings and choices independently from the culture. Therefore I happen to find it quite cynical to reduce cosmetic surgery on plain "individual choice" and "personal preferences", as if such things come to happen randomly and free of external pressure just from the inner self of a person, as if it's kind of a game, or the failure of the person's body to be "wrong", instead of societal norms defining it as "wrong". That's just not true. Without enough pressure and a certain mentality about bodies, body images, their importance, econimisation and standardizing of bodies, legitimacy or importance of more or less severe body modification there wouldn't be such a social phenomenon of people making such decisions.
The extent to which - especially female - bodies and looks are standardized, examined and strictly judged has increased strongly within the past 20 - 30 years, or at least it has changed toward higher expectations and more severe and widespreading physical changes.
For a woman, who is usually socialized to be very attentive about her own body and criticism towards it, who learns that what others think is "beautiful" needs to be conformed, and who recognizes that a certain sterotype of "looks" is seen much more important and you are judged and measured by that, it is very hard to escape the pressure.
If you permanently get feedback from your environment that look x is better than look y, or that look y is even disgusting or at least not very welcome, you will almost certainly internalise this mentality as your own and judge yourself and maybe others by the same standards. And given these facts, that society or parts of society, let it even be single people who insult a vulnerable person, destroys self-confidence of people based on their looks, I find it absolutely understandable to be angry about "giving in" to the pressure and let it be such a dominant motivating factor in your life. It is the anger that one is even willing to hurt one's body to fit into cultural norms, that one has actually adapted these norms, and that by having breast augmentation or another procedure, one takes actively part in putting even more pressure on others to do the same, because now even people who "actually know it better" feel they can't stand it anymore. Severe lack of self-esteem aside, this can be very burdensome for a reflected person who understands how socialisation and social pressure works and who sees her role and responsibility in this puzzle, but yet isn't free of it or uninfluenceable - because she painfully experiences it on herself.
Maybe women or men, having deficits in self-confidence due to their bodies, but not critically reflecting what the causes are and don't question norms of how a body should look like (due to gender gap the norms of "female" and "male" beauty are quite different), have an easier decision - one way or the other. Maybe they won't experience such tough cognitive dissonance in either way they're dealing with their self-image.
Nonetheless, reducing self-image problems to merely individual "bad luck", and applauding the giving way of adaptational pressure as quasi-"empowerment" without regarding consequences - for the person acting and for others - doesn't meet the requirement of such a complex issue. For me that sounds like encouraging the development of a smoking habit as an "empowerment" against having to inhale the smoke of others, but "emancipatedly" causing oneself lung cancer. [sarcasm] Yey, what a progress! [/sarcasm]
I myself have what nowadays - in times of norming bodies to mainly one standard and increasingly stigmatizing natural deviations as "sickness" - is called "tubular breasts" (I conciously omit the usually added, abusive term "deformity" here).
I recently found out about the term and that it is contemptouously called a "deformity" by cosmetic surgeons (who make more money of more people believe them) and people who believed them or people who want women to have breast augmentation. Well my self-confidence hasn't increased due to this stigmatisation - oh surprise! - but lowered.
I never felt very happy about my breasts. As a teenager and young grown-up I was often teased by boys and men because they were small. Ironically I was hardly ever insulted because of my generally very thin figure, which usually includes having small breasts.
That men I knew, men's magazines, porns, public media, including underwear-advertizing for women always depicted big, round breasts as the perfect ones, displaying them as the ultimate female sexyness and quite much hailing them, added up to my lack of self confidence - even though I know how crazy and pathetic such people and their mentality must be.
But my experience with women is different than illustrated here: I often experience great tolerance for procedures like breast augmentation or a general big boobs-obsession with women who are more or less well endowed, at least usually have no perky, tubular breasts, which look smaller than they actually are due to their shape. My guess is that they - as their breasts more or less correspond to the norm - don't even have the slightest idea of how much pressure there is for a woman to have the "right" boobs and how humiliating it can be not to have them. They often won't even notice the fundamental pressure in our culture or that there is such a norm which many women naturally do not comply with and therefore are made to feel "inadequate" or "unfeminine". That is usually not of bad will, but because they don't feel affected and thus have never been confronted with this side of the coin.
This makes me, not only politically, but personally very sad, angry and disappointed, because I know I wouldn't have such severe self-confidence issues, I would't think negative of the size and shape of my breasts if there wouldn't be such a fuss about female breasts and a norm about their size and shape. The same as I don't become depressive about my toes. I just wouldn't care.
July 9, 2010 - 7:27pmThis is why I refuse to seriously think of a "boob job" (what an euphemistic phrase, actually) as a realistic option - besides I fortunately couldn't afford it anyway. To get a boob job probably wouldn't free me from this mental trouble, it would just change the perspective and help a cosmetic surgeon becoming rich by exploiting a low self-confidence, but it wouldn't change anything about the societal pressure. Besides I actually don't want to be more likeable or attactive because of shape and size of "boobs". Cognitive dissonance would probably stay, either way. Despite and because of inner and outer pressure...
At least I often try to become more comfortable with my body, especially my breasts, sometimes I succeed. But then I'm always confronted with the collective and/or medial preference with breasts completely different than mine and everything goes down the tubes again (no pun intended). To built up an already damaged self-confidence and to hold it on a higher level constantly is definitely harder than to destroy a solid self-esteem.
This is a really hard struggle for me, day in day out. Then to hear people promoting and encouraging to rather physically change and get hurt just to fit in, is really hurtful and counterproductive for a positive self-image and not getting "brain-washed", at least for me. Like I said, hundreds of thousands of women getting breast implants because they feel inadequate or want the "perfect" tits, or even become totally "boob greedy" themselves, like one anorexic is greedy about slenderness, isn't really helpful in accepting oneself naturally, without such a procedure, and it is far from being a completely free, individual choice. I know. So please don't take this so easy. It is not.
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