We are beautiful enough!
My friend Katrin had to go to the gynecologist. A few days before the appointment, she told me on the phone about it. She said, "It's totally up to me, I have to think about it all the time." Oh no, I thought and asked worried what was going on. Katrin said, "My pubic hair, I do not want to shave it off just because I'm going to the gynecologist, but he has not seen pubic hair in years, all of his patients are sure to be shaved except me, and then I'm lying there with them Haaren, and he thinks I'm old and outdated, and I'm just embarrassed. " Last year I spent a day on the North Sea beach with my friend Lisa in the late summer. We sat in bikinis on our towels, we talked about job issues and children and the books we were reading, and in between we blinked quietly in the sun. Suddenly, Lisa said, "I would like a more contoured body." I looked down at myself and said that this is how I feel, but that a well-contoured body is very time-consuming to acquire and maintain, which is why I have to give it up until further notice.
Recently I was sitting in the canteen with some of my colleagues, one of them had dull green lacquer on her fingernails, which was admired on all sides, and the colleague smiled delightedly and said: "Well, perfectly manicured hands are a matter of course today." Listen, listen, I thought mockingly, but when I sat in the train the next morning, I wanted to know more. I inspected all women's hands in my field of vision. And indeed: of a good dozen pairs of hands, only two were unmanicured. One belonged to a teenage punk. The other was mine. And that was the moment when I finally realized that things had not gone very well for us over the past 20 years.
Am I the only one with unshaven feet?
When I started my adult life 25 years ago, I was a normal young woman with a normal figure, shaved legs and clean fingernails. I was not exactly electrified by my looks, but the bottom line was that there was not much to complain about. Meanwhile, I'm a forty-four-year-old with a normal figure, shaved legs, and clean fingernails, but by today's standards, I'm a hairy, unkempt freak. I've really believed that I would be more relaxed in terms of attractiveness with age. But the truth is: it's getting worse. We have to - or at least we have to - turn our heads around abstruse visual details that no one, two, three decades ago thought about for a single second. Not only attractiveness, but also Sexyness has become a standing order, and hardly a woman manages to escape the demands of this narrow-track beauty ideal. "If you're not sexy, you're worthless, and the definition of sexiness is getting narrower every year - in the truest sense of the word," said 25-year-old British feminist and author Laurie Penny ("Meat Market") Interview.
25 years ago, my mother was the same age as me today. If she or her friends felt too fat, which was what happened, they went on a ChroniquesDuVasteMonde or Atkins diet for a few weeks, and when they weighed three kilograms less, the world was fine. It was not known to them that a woman's body could be well contoured or even defined, in addition to being slim.
In the early 90's I started to work, I did a traineeship at "Playboy". Accordingly, I saw pictures of beautiful naked women almost every day, and they all had pubic hair. A Playmate with bottomless? Unthinkable. A normal woman with bottomless? I did not know. We had hair, we chipped a bit, not a particularly exciting topic. And today? Armpit hair, pubic hair, leg hair? Yuck, oh, oh, horror! I've recently discovered that my long toe ever grows three long very dark blond hair, and since then I have the terrible suspicion that I'm the only German city dweller with unshaven feet. Perhaps my generation, which has taken over the emancipation project as largely completed, has not looked so closely, but what we've been impressing for the past two decades would be worth a mid-size revolt: waxing studios and labia reduction, size zero, and deadly catwalk Girls, Dinnerskipping and "Make-up-free Monday", "Germany's Next Top Model" and "The Biggest Loser". Eyebrow transplantation and liposuction. Fat injection and Botox. Dinghy Lips and Hair Extensions. Highheels as a purpose and shapeware for all.
This is just a small, incomplete selection of the phenomena and actions that I find particularly bizarre.But what makes me even more indignant, is that this dictatorship no longer granted any shadows, that there are now no age limits down more and no upwards. The writer Sibylle Berg devoted herself a few months ago in her column on "Spiegel Online" the recently published and loudly adulterated book "Advanced Style" in which rich, good-looking women over 70 flaunt their virtuoso look. "Even in the final meters, when you're overweight or underweight in aprons over the verandahs, we can not say that with a grin, but have to meet the demands for elegant streamline, pleasing and sexyness," Berg etched in her article. "Again, a niche, the age in which a woman could rest, is threatened by capitalism and the media world that accompanies it.All right, then I'll die, you think, then I'll have my rest."
Last summer, hordes of eight to 18-year-old girls in hotpants populated the streets, Every time I got almost bad at the sight of them. At the thought of the greedy men's looks that they expose themselves to, and the thought of their peers, whose legs are not Hotpantstauglich, why spend the summer in the darkened room and cry in the pillow. But of course it is even younger. "The Susanne has no Fettabbbel there," said the five-year-old Hanna and grabbed my girlfriend Jutta courageously in the inner thighs, as mother and daughter sat together in the bathtub. Susanne is the girlfriend of Jutta's ex-husband. "I have no idea where Hanna knows the word Fettabbbel from me at least not," groaned the stunned Jutta, as she dripped wet to the phone and called me. "In the past, stepmothers were evil. Today they are thin."
Women want to be sexy, but they are not allowed to
We do not have to talk about voluntariness in the case of a five-year-old, and even the belief in freedom associated with the great beauty circus is sheer self-deception, even though the neo-feminist credo, "Women want to be sexy, but they do not have to", gives us some room to decide , The average media consumption in Germany is now ten hours a day, and the trend is rising. We're exposed to around 3,000 commercial messages a day and see more advertising in a year than people 50 years ago in their entire lives. If a razor blade manufacturer takes a three-digit million amount for marketing measures in order to keep the competition in check, it can only be in the interest of razor manufacturers in the world that women of all countries continue to disgust their body hair. But that's not all: Between five and ten million women around the world now wear silicone pads under their breasts. The market for fitness DVDs is growing in the US by eleven percent per year. Year after year, a renewed increase in sales for the nail polish segment is reported, the cosmetics industry never tires of cheering over the colorful hype. One has almost to wonder that at the beginning of the new millennium there was this small place on the female body, which was not used as a sales market yet optimally, but since the responsible have now successfully worked.
"If all the women of the world woke up tomorrow morning and felt well and powerful in their bodies, the world economy would collapse overnight," claims Laurie Penny in her terrifically revealing book "Meat Market," and immediately gets dizzy at the thought that We are as powerless as we often feel, not at all.
Well and powerful - two wonderful words. But unfortunately too: two pretty ambitious premises. Because on the long road to the anti-aesthetic world revolution lurk a few men except capitalism. Who have become accustomed to the fact that women of all ages are also available in the hairless, well-trained, busty version. Their idea of beauty is increasingly shaped by the plastic doll look that the porn industry dictates (annual sales in the US alone: $ 14 billion). According to the Israeli sociologist Eva Illouz, the announcements are made in the market of couples willing to mate. Because they can start families even later in life, therefore have less attachment pressure and are thus heavily courted by women willing to relationship. Or in other words: have to be hunted with all imaginable optical baits.
British actress Charlotte Rampling said in conversation with ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN last year that many of her fellow female doctors were chipping on their bodies, "supposedly because the screen demands it, and I think they do it mainly because they think men want those perfect ones Breasts and the round buttocks Yes, that's right, they want it Because many women offer it But we should be bold and say, 'Fuck you, I'm the way I am.' "
We need a new body solidarity
After being spotted in the media worldwide over the weight gain of the pop icon Lady Gaga in September of last year, she called out annoyed and fiercely to the "Body Revolution 2013". Through Facebook and Twitter, she encouraged women to stand by their physical stigma, to celebrate it as part of their individuality. And yes, we need this individuality as urgently as ever. We have to answer our desire for beauty with maximum variety. But above all, we need one thing now: solidarity. A new body solidarity among women.
For me, the thing is crystal clear: Alone in these times, no woman manages to oppose the interests of the media and markets and men. Well, we will not feel well and powerful overnight, just because we suspect that it could make our lives more comfortable. But the good news is: we do not need public push-up bra burning to make a radical start. Because for now it would be quite enough if we treated women more friendly and benevolent with each other. And developed an awareness of how the small and big decisions affecting our appearance affect other women.
Of course, I too belong to the women, several times a day derogatory and thoughtless talk about other women and judge. "She wears a dress that was unfashionable five years ago, it was thinner and the haircut did not work at all - and it turned out to be pretty wrinkly." What a horrible, undignified endless loop! Could we just as well leave. "Interestingly, your own body feeling is much more positive if you do not spend the whole day trying to find other people's mistakes," writes blogger and author Anke Gröner in her book "Nudeldicke Deern". "If, instead, you try to find something that is beautiful with each person, you realize, first, that you always find something, and second, how good you are."
If a colleague at lunch tells that she's seriously thinking about Botox now (and by the age of 50 at the latest, the number of serious thinkers is growing rapidly), it would be quite possible not just to remind her of the health and visual risks, but to say, "What's up, when you're walking around with a baby-sleek face, we're all just going to put more pressure on it."
When a friend recently fell for the first time with a newly conquered man in the pillows, blasphemed after consummate Beischlaf, they could down below sometimes synonymous shave a bit more extensive. She promised improvement, terrible, but in such a situation there is only one proper reaction: to send home the idiot. Not just out of self-esteem, but for the cause. So that he puts in the bed of the next woman a more elegant behavior to the day.
We must start to empower ourselves, to support each other and fight back together. Keep each other from dieting and buying absurd tight skinny jeans. If we managed to become accomplices, what a freedom, what fun. We could give ourselves chocolates and cook each other with cream sauces. We would throw ourselves in airy-fast clothes and pronounce a highheel ban before we go out together, and then dance in sneakers until four in the morning.
Maybe that would be the biggest win, which we could bring in when we showed the beauty finger the stinky finger: time. Every hour we do not sweat in the gym we can spend with people we love. With our friends, with our children, also with nice men. Or we can read great books and train our brains instead of our muscles. And, even better, to be a role model for our daughters, as they will leave their mark when they often see us laughing with clever girlfriends at the kitchen table rather than lonely at the manicure or the reading of low-carb diet books. And if it gets a bit boring on long winter evenings, we could sew plump, flesh-colored rag dolls out of our shapeware and put them in the Barbie house for our daughters ... Yes, all right, I know we're not the first women Generation that fails on this particular project. But you can try it again.
Read on
? Laurie Penny: "Meat Market: Female Body in Capitalism" (128 p., 9,90 Euro, Edition Nautilus)? Eva Illouz: "Why Love Hurts: A Sociological Explanation" (467 pages, 14 euros, Suhrkamp paperback)? Anke Gröner: "Noodle Thicker Deern: Free your mind and your fat ass will follow" (240 p., 14.95 euros, Wunderlich)
