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By Lee Nan-hee
Everyone has his or her own body. However, I wonder how many people will answer yes to the question of how much you accept your body comfortably and love your body. Probably many people will answer no. We are living in a world where we are bombarded with images, rhetoric, and discourses regarding body, flesh, face, height and being sexy. In particular, women are sexualized in the media and social media platforms. With lots of drugs, food, health training, beauty supplies and cosmetic surgical procedures widely available, our bodies and outer appearances seem to be at the frontline of a fierce war. This is true not only for women but also for men.
Even worse, still younger women or teenage girls are likely to be targeted for feminine attractiveness. The age of casualties of this war has become lower than ever. This is the case at home as well as abroad. Thus, the market and commodities of the beauty industry ― related to plastic surgery and cosmetics ― have gradually expanded. Sometimes we hear tragic news of some women dying due to botched plastic surgery or related side effects.
Naomi Wolf, a feminist scholar, criticized such phenomena as early as in 1991. She asserted that in a modern era, social control of women has occurred mainly via women's bodies and faces. The control has various forms such as restraint, punishment and compensation. Wolf used the term "beauty myth," revealing a myth of diversity in the beauty industry.
Meanwhile, a renowned woman scholar Susan Bordo pointed out that women are not simply victims of social standards and rules of feminine beauty. She tried to explain why a woman would be willing to follow such social rules at the expense of herself. Bordo maintained that power in modern times is exercised not in a manner of unilateral, material violence but by making people agree and obey voluntarily through intervening in their desire, subconscious and knowledge. She also asserted that women's bodies have been constructed by social, political power relations as can be easily shown in mass media. Such a construct of the women's bodies, of course, implies specific underlying assumptions regarding sexual division of labor and public/private split.
Now, I turn to the former question. Do you love your body? Do I love my body? I cannot see myself, my body from a place like a vacuum. We see our bodies, our society from a certain perspective, which means, certain assumptions and viewpoints. When I feel uncomfortable about my body, I am not happy. What if such a woman or person is not only me? What if majority of women or people are feeling uncomfortable, unhappy about their bodies and themselves? Then it is high time for us to rethink, reimagine and reconstruct those existing assumptions and viewpoints about our bodies and ourselves in our society.
Dr. Lee Nan-hee studied English in college and theology at Hanshin University.
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