The Love Island look is all about self-disgust

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armchairlawyer
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The Love Island look is all about self-disgust

Post by armchairlawyer »

Striving to attain a version of body perfection that’s rooted in pornography is painful, time-consuming and demeaning
Janice Turner

When the great beard revival began circa 2009, granting men freedom from the daily face-scrape plus stubbly cover for weak or multiple chins, I wondered if this shift to the “natural” might benefit women, too. Because lately beauty duties had multiplied. Make-up meant not just a dash of lippy but mastering elaborate “contouring” techniques, while professional maintenance was now mandatory for eyebrows and nails.

Surely young women deserved that extra 20 minutes in bed gained by non-shaving male peers? Instead the equivalent “natural” trend for girls turned out to be long hair, which requires more work, in conditioning, colouring, extensions etc, rather than less.

What I’d hoped for, indeed expected, from a blistering feminist revival, was the death of depilation, the idea that the female body must be painfully plucked and waxed until it’s as shinily smooth as fibreglass. Because like Emma Thompson, interviewed this week by Emma Barnett on Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, I, too, “greatly regret the demise of the full bush”.

In her new film, Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, Thompson, playing a widow discovering sexual pleasure after a passionless marriage, appears fully naked for the first time. Now 63, Thompson says she has never much liked her body. Yet growing up in the 1970s, at least our beauty role models were dollybirds, bunny girls and beauty queens, just somewhat prettier versions of ourselves and, in trying to emulate them, there was a limit to the pain, effort and expense we were expected to endure.

Now the ideal is a Love Island contestant, sculpted, starved, worked out, surgically enhanced, injected and lip-filled into the ultimate beach-ready body, more avatar than human. Odd, given our new national concern for mental health, that a reality show that has clocked up three suicides — including the presenter Caroline Flack — and whose contestants are offered post-transmission therapy, is given a free pass. But it’s back, the nation’s TV knocking-shop and many young feminists’ guilty viewing pleasure, rejecting any fashionable notions of body positivity or inclusivity in favour of the porn industry’s international ideal.

On Love Island you won’t find a pubic hair, let alone a full bush. The thonged bikinis that contestants must wear at all times are cut so high it’s obligatory to have a Hollywood wax, where hair is ripped not just from the front but from your tenderest underparts, too. Odd that this process to “look sexy” makes you resemble a child. Or that it produces sore skin, even ingrown hairs and rashes, so sex at least temporarily is less fun. But the imperative here is public perfection not private pleasure.

In her new book Intact: A Defence of the Unmodified Body, the philosophy professor Clare Chambers argues that social media and selfie culture have generated intolerable pressure to pimp the human form into something both unique, in its tattoos and piercings, but also utterly compliant with cultural norms. (Sad to think that 50 years ago Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch argued the same.)

Chambers coins “shametenance” to describe the never-ending grooming that women, and increasingly men, must perform so their bodies are acceptable. Chief among these tasks is ensuring genital regions are hair-free, since the natural state is seen as dirty, ugly, lazy and sexually repugnant.

The writer Chidera Eggerue made a Channel 4 documentary in 2020 in which she and fellow Instagram influencers stopped shaving their nether regions for six weeks, a challenge they regarded with genuine horror. They’d never seen their bushes in adulthood, since salons will remove “virgin hair” of 12-year-old girls as soon as it appears. Even Mumsnetters discuss the best depilation products for pubescent daughters. While signs of male maturity — beard, chest hair and deepening voice — are celebrated, girls are told that womanhood is a tangle of tripwires into bottomless shame.

Eggerue also interviews men about their preferences. Most don’t mind what they find down below, men being far more sexually omnivorous than women are led to believe. But those who do prefer shaven parts cite pornography: they prefer the bare pudendum because you can observe the action more easily. Sex for them isn’t about two humans making love, but replicating what you watch alone.

These hair-phobic men remind me of the artist John Ruskin who reportedly didn’t consummate his marriage because, as his wife, Effie, writes, “he had imagined women were quite different to what he saw I was, and that the reason he did not make me his Wife was because he was disgusted with my person [that] first evening”. Except Ruskin’s expectations of the female body were formed by classical statues, not PornHub.

Certainly unrealistic expectations don’t make us happy. Nichola Rumsey and Diana Harcourt, authors of The Psychology of Appearance, recently polled 77,000 adults and found only 16 per cent of women and 27 per cent of men reported liking how they look. I’d hoped equality would mean women becoming as insouciant about their looks as men: instead, sadly, they’re growing as insecure as us.

Now plastic surgery is normalised, with soaring demand for labiaplasty. Once the pubic beard shrouded “imperfections” but now waxing exposes a woman’s outer genitals, so those who fear they fall short of porn stars get them snipped into a neater shape, saving up for this modern form of genital mutilation.

The unmodified self, says Chambers, is an act of resistance to “disrupt social norms and structures that denigrate bodies”. But until “sex positive” feminism challenges the porn industry’s misogyny, women will stay enslaved by its cruel aesthetics. How can women have come so far, yet still be racked with self-disgust? The natural is political. Emma Thompson is right: bring back the bush.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the- ... -2tzvz92qw
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Re: The Love Island look is all about self-disgust

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^^^ I think you took a wrong turn somewhere in cyber space. What's the relevance here?
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Re: The Love Island look is all about self-disgust

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Username Taken wrote: Sat Jun 11, 2022 9:25 am ^^^ I think you took a wrong turn somewhere in cyber space. What's the relevance here?
Thank you.
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Re: The Love Island look is all about self-disgust

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Username Taken wrote: Sat Jun 11, 2022 9:25 am ^^^ I think you took a wrong turn somewhere in cyber space. What's the relevance here?
It interested me. Cosmetic surgery and bush waxes happen here.
The rest of the world thread says - Anything not really Cambodia related should go here.

It's had 113 views in 2 hours.
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Re: The Love Island look is all about self-disgust

Post by Alex »

armchairlawyer wrote: Sat Jun 11, 2022 7:22 am When the great beard revival began circa 2009, granting men freedom from the daily face-scrape plus stubbly cover for weak or multiple chins, I wondered if this shift to the “natural” might benefit women, too.
Seriously, Janice, what were you thinking? Like that was ever going to happen! Your love of the "full bush" isn't shared by many (m/f/x).
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Re: The Love Island look is all about self-disgust

Post by IraHayes »

I found it an interesting and thought provoking article. History is replete with an ever changing view of what justifies the term “beautiful” and society is simply continuing that process.
What I find contradictory in our current climate is that women are beholding to an ever more impossible standard of “beauty” and this must surely have an impact on the mental health of some women.
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Re: The Love Island look is all about self-disgust

Post by orichá »

...many expats become unaware of trendy Western social fads after living overseas for a long time. That said, all Western expats and tourists bring with them a whole unique set of presumptuous expectations when traveling anywhere. Like for depilation, especially... (One poster above has already expressed that prejudice quite clearly.)

But to me the really strange thing is how many of the world's nations' women, especially those from highly developed busy Asian nations, have been until recently detached from contemplating, much less enjoying, the diverse freedoms available to both genders in Western nations... For example, only now, in 2022, do a handful of South Korean ladies become aware that it is okay to work out and tan their bodies... (see article below)... Nowadays, since industrialization -- Koreans, Japanese and Chinese teach their women not to do physical things. It is a sad relic of the awful paternalism that has crippled all of Asia, and continues to limit womens' options through today...

As an aside, at least in Cambodia, one occasionally finds a naturally athletic woman, one who grew up on a farm hauling 20 kg sacks of rice and climbing coconut and mango trees when she was just a kid... Yet, socially, Cambodian women are terribly limited in their dreams, expectations, opportunities and ultimate choices, and that limitation is imposed by the same-old condescending paternalism that afflicts all of Asia, Latin America and Africa, too. Only men are allowed into certain types of managerial positions, etc, etc... You see that all the time...

Also, just look at all the old white sugar-daddies with trophy dollies. This phenomena only serves to underscore the laughable social limitation upon collective female aspirations suffered by Asian women, especially in Thailand and Cambodia. Yawn... Sometimes I wish all of us would just disappear...

In fact, I don't really like being part of the whole expat phenomena... Anywhere in the world, expat enclaves always end up looking like derivative forms of colonialism, no matter what. That said, I still balk at the idea of having to go back to North America, which I absolutely loathe to the roots of my hair. All the waste of energy, over-consumption, guns and ugly fat people -- bleck.

But if I could find a place on Earth that had no expats, but plenty of liberated and independent babes, I'd go live there... Of course, no such place exists, does it?

"Muscles Look Cooler"...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/ ... -of-beauty
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Re: The Love Island look is all about self-disgust

Post by Jerry Atrick »

armchairlawyer wrote: Sat Jun 11, 2022 7:22 am Striving to attain a version of body perfection that’s rooted in pornography is painful, time-consuming and demeaning
Janice Turner

When the great beard revival began circa 2009, granting men freedom from the daily face-scrape plus stubbly cover for weak or multiple chins, I wondered if this shift to the “natural” might benefit women, too. Because lately beauty duties had multiplied. Make-up meant not just a dash of lippy but mastering elaborate “contouring” techniques, while professional maintenance was now mandatory for eyebrows and nails.

Surely young women deserved that extra 20 minutes in bed gained by non-shaving male peers? Instead the equivalent “natural” trend for girls turned out to be long hair, which requires more work, in conditioning, colouring, extensions etc, rather than less.

What I’d hoped for, indeed expected, from a blistering feminist revival, was the death of depilation, the idea that the female body must be painfully plucked and waxed until it’s as shinily smooth as fibreglass. Because like Emma Thompson, interviewed this week by Emma Barnett on Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, I, too, “greatly regret the demise of the full bush”.

In her new film, Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, Thompson, playing a widow discovering sexual pleasure after a passionless marriage, appears fully naked for the first time. Now 63, Thompson says she has never much liked her body. Yet growing up in the 1970s, at least our beauty role models were dollybirds, bunny girls and beauty queens, just somewhat prettier versions of ourselves and, in trying to emulate them, there was a limit to the pain, effort and expense we were expected to endure.

Now the ideal is a Love Island contestant, sculpted, starved, worked out, surgically enhanced, injected and lip-filled into the ultimate beach-ready body, more avatar than human. Odd, given our new national concern for mental health, that a reality show that has clocked up three suicides — including the presenter Caroline Flack — and whose contestants are offered post-transmission therapy, is given a free pass. But it’s back, the nation’s TV knocking-shop and many young feminists’ guilty viewing pleasure, rejecting any fashionable notions of body positivity or inclusivity in favour of the porn industry’s international ideal.

On Love Island you won’t find a pubic hair, let alone a full bush. The thonged bikinis that contestants must wear at all times are cut so high it’s obligatory to have a Hollywood wax, where hair is ripped not just from the front but from your tenderest underparts, too. Odd that this process to “look sexy” makes you resemble a child. Or that it produces sore skin, even ingrown hairs and rashes, so sex at least temporarily is less fun. But the imperative here is public perfection not private pleasure.

In her new book Intact: A Defence of the Unmodified Body, the philosophy professor Clare Chambers argues that social media and selfie culture have generated intolerable pressure to pimp the human form into something both unique, in its tattoos and piercings, but also utterly compliant with cultural norms. (Sad to think that 50 years ago Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch argued the same.)

Chambers coins “shametenance” to describe the never-ending grooming that women, and increasingly men, must perform so their bodies are acceptable. Chief among these tasks is ensuring genital regions are hair-free, since the natural state is seen as dirty, ugly, lazy and sexually repugnant.

The writer Chidera Eggerue made a Channel 4 documentary in 2020 in which she and fellow Instagram influencers stopped shaving their nether regions for six weeks, a challenge they regarded with genuine horror. They’d never seen their bushes in adulthood, since salons will remove “virgin hair” of 12-year-old girls as soon as it appears. Even Mumsnetters discuss the best depilation products for pubescent daughters. While signs of male maturity — beard, chest hair and deepening voice — are celebrated, girls are told that womanhood is a tangle of tripwires into bottomless shame.

Eggerue also interviews men about their preferences. Most don’t mind what they find down below, men being far more sexually omnivorous than women are led to believe. But those who do prefer shaven parts cite pornography: they prefer the bare pudendum because you can observe the action more easily. Sex for them isn’t about two humans making love, but replicating what you watch alone.

These hair-phobic men remind me of the artist John Ruskin who reportedly didn’t consummate his marriage because, as his wife, Effie, writes, “he had imagined women were quite different to what he saw I was, and that the reason he did not make me his Wife was because he was disgusted with my person [that] first evening”. Except Ruskin’s expectations of the female body were formed by classical statues, not PornHub.

Certainly unrealistic expectations don’t make us happy. Nichola Rumsey and Diana Harcourt, authors of The Psychology of Appearance, recently polled 77,000 adults and found only 16 per cent of women and 27 per cent of men reported liking how they look. I’d hoped equality would mean women becoming as insouciant about their looks as men: instead, sadly, they’re growing as insecure as us.

Now plastic surgery is normalised, with soaring demand for labiaplasty. Once the pubic beard shrouded “imperfections” but now waxing exposes a woman’s outer genitals, so those who fear they fall short of porn stars get them snipped into a neater shape, saving up for this modern form of genital mutilation.

The unmodified self, says Chambers, is an act of resistance to “disrupt social norms and structures that denigrate bodies”. But until “sex positive” feminism challenges the porn industry’s misogyny, women will stay enslaved by its cruel aesthetics. How can women have come so far, yet still be racked with self-disgust? The natural is political. Emma Thompson is right: bring back the bush.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the- ... -2tzvz92qw
I don't watch TV for around 20 years, and never watched reality shows so luckily I absolutely can't relate to any of this drivel at all
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Re: The Love Island look is all about self-disgust

Post by IraHayes »

orichá wrote: Sat Jun 11, 2022 12:51 pm ...many expats become unaware of trendy Western social fads after living overseas for a long time. That said, all Western expats and tourists bring with them a whole unique set of presumptuous expectations when traveling anywhere. Like for depilation, especially... (One poster above has already expressed that prejudice quite clearly.)

But to me the really strange thing is how many of the world's nations' women, especially those from highly developed busy Asian nations, have been until recently detached from contemplating, much less enjoying, the diverse freedoms available to both genders in Western nations... For example, only now, in 2022, do a handful of South Korean ladies become aware that it is okay to work out and tan their bodies... (see article below)... Nowadays, since industrialization -- Koreans, Japanese and Chinese teach their women not to do physical things. It is a sad relic of the awful paternalism that has crippled all of Asia, and continues to limit womens' options through today...

As an aside, at least in Cambodia, one occasionally finds a naturally athletic woman, one who grew up on a farm hauling 20 kg sacks of rice and climbing coconut and mango trees when she was just a kid... Yet, socially, Cambodian women are terribly limited in their dreams, expectations, opportunities and ultimate choices, and that limitation is imposed by the same-old condescending paternalism that afflicts all of Asia, Latin America and Africa, too. Only men are allowed into certain types of managerial positions, etc, etc... You see that all the time...

Also, just look at all the old white sugar-daddies with trophy dollies. This phenomena only serves to underscore the laughable social limitation upon collective female aspirations suffered by Asian women, especially in Thailand and Cambodia. Yawn... Sometimes I wish all of us would just disappear...

In fact, I don't really like being part of the whole expat phenomena... Anywhere in the world, expat enclaves always end up looking like derivative forms of colonialism, no matter what. That said, I still balk at the idea of having to go back to North America, which I absolutely loathe to the roots of my hair. All the waste of energy, over-consumption, guns and ugly fat people -- bleck.

But if I could find a place on Earth that had no expats, but plenty of liberated and independent babes, I'd go live there... Of course, no such place exists, does it?

"Muscles Look Cooler"...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/ ... -of-beauty
You really do hate yourself dont you. You said " Sometimes I wish all of us would just disappear... " well, how about leading by example?
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Re: The Love Island look is all about self-disgust

Post by orichá »

IraHayes wrote: Sat Jun 11, 2022 3:51 pm
orichá wrote: Sat Jun 11, 2022 12:51 pm ...many expats become unaware of trendy Western social fads after living overseas for a long time. That said, all Western expats and tourists bring with them a whole unique set of presumptuous expectations when traveling anywhere. Like for depilation, especially... (One poster above has already expressed that prejudice quite clearly.)

But to me ...

As........

"Muscles Look Cooler"...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/ ... -of-beauty
You really do hate yourself dont you. You said " Sometimes I wish all of us would just disappear... " well, how about leading by example?
Okay, have a nice weekend...

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