Meanwhile, Western beauty ideals have metastasized throughout every media-saturated corner of the planet. We’re all well accustomed to a large daily dose of visual B.S., but that doesn’t mean it smells good, or that it’s healthy. Criticism is piling up in the West, from “Health Warning” label legislation to movie-style rating systems for manipulated photos. According to the speaker quoted below, our malignant Western beauty ideals are also compounding body issues in the already patriarchal beauty cultures of China and the rest of the world.

It’s no secret that Western beauty ideals rule in first- and second-tier Chinese cities. Of course, traditional and modern Chinese culture has plenty of its own ideas about which faces and bodies and postures, etc. are attractive. But walk through any mall and count the number of ads that use Caucasian models. The highest beauty ideals in China are Western. And the highest beauty ideals in the West require surgically and digitally altering the bodies of underfed, underweight, unhealthy women.

I’m thinking about this because of a recent speech at the UN Commission on the Status of Women, which opened fire not at oppressive patriarchal traditions of 2nd and 3rd World cultures, but at us, calling out our societies for our hypocrisy in criticizing foot binding and female genital mutilation, and for the cancerous effect on women that aggressive Western corporate marketing has in societies around the world, specifically including China. I’ve excerpted much of it below, but the whole thing (not long) is worth a read. Regardless of how much you disagree, it’s a fantastic conversation starter. Emphasis from the original.

Susie Orbach Speaks at the UN Commission on the Status of Women

. . .what has been overlooked have been the vicious body practices that girls and women have come to take on themselves in the west in the mistaken belief that they are doing good for themselves. . .

The west congratulates itself on its distance from Eastern practices of foot binding which constrained and limited women. It fails to see the links between toe operations carried out now to enable women to fit into the latest 4 inch high heels.

The west smugly criticises FGM while sanctioning labiaplasty and the remaking of the genital lips which has become a growth area for cosmetic surgeons.

The west makes appeals about famine victims in the southern hemisphere but has failed to notice the voluntarily insane food practices that exist in their own countries.

The west hasn’t noticed that these are forms of violence and constraint for women. . .

. . .the engine which feeds the tyrannical hold that beauty exercises on girls and women’s energies, dollars and sense of self. . .relates to those industries which grow rich on creating body distress and body hatred in girls and women. . .

The beauty companies, the fashion houses, the diet companies, the food conglomerates who also of course own the diet companies, the exercise and fitness industry, the pharmaceutical industry and the cosmetic surgery industry combine together, perhaps not purposefully or conspiratorially, to create a climate in which girls and women come to feel that their bodies are not ok. They do this through the promotion of celebrity culture, through advertising on every possible outlet from billboards to magazines to our electronic screens, through the funding of media outlets which can only exist because of their economic support. . .

As immoral and unethical as the activities of these companies are in and of themselves, the economics of growth as we currently conceive it depends upon their extending their markets. L’Oreal’s growth rate in China is 26%. They achieve this not by marketing their lipsticks and hair products to Chinese women per se but by marketing the western body as the body to have to Chinese women. They and the other beauty, fashion, media companies promote the western body to the new economies as a way of finding a place to belong in the maelstrom and confusion of modernity.

Alongside the disseminating of western ideals of beauty to Asia, Africa and South America, is the export of the consequences of these ideals: body hatred and body anxiety. This is the emotional fallout from the endeavours of these industries and the basis on which they make their extraordinary and obscene profits.

. . .They are mining bodies as though they were a commodity like coal or gold. Women’s bodies all over the world are being designated as profit centres.

As the western ideal becomes plastered over the globe we bear witness to the loss of indigenous bodies. This is a new frontier of colonialism. Mad eating is normalised. Western style bodies are revered and local bodies are swallowed up as fast as demise of local languages. [Link]

I wonder what my Tanzanian language tutor would think. Then again, they were selling skin-whitening creams in East Africa, too.

Related China & Beauty stuff from the blog:

• Beauty & Young Love… with Chinese characteristics
• White is beautiful… (by Jessica!)
• Beauty is all in the eye…lid? (by Jessica!)
• 瓜子脸 (“melon seed face”)
• 小鸟依人 (“birdie leaning on a man”)
• Woman, man, or East Asian pop star?
• The Men and the Boys
• On love and being “smart enough” (by Jessica!)
• “Beauty”
• Beauty (topic)

Related stuff from the web:

• A Photoshop reality check
• A Perceptual Metric for Photo Retouching
• Does the media require a Photoshop score?
• Legislating Beauty
• Has the Sexual Revolution Been Good for Women? No (WSJ)
• The Paris Paradox: how sexualization replaces opportunity with obligation
• Any-Body.org – …”challeng[ing] the limited physical representation of females in contemporary society.”
• CollectiveShout.org – “a grassroots campaigning movement against the objectification of women and sexualisation of girls in media, advertising and popular culture.”
• MelindaTankardReist.com – “…is well known for her work on the objectification of women and sexualisation of girls and working to address violence against women”
• PS Disaster’s Greatest Hits
• The criticism that Ralph Lauren doesn’t want you to see (BoingBoing)
• Vandalism is a crime, but… (creative, but illegal)
• U of Chicago research: conservative Christian women have the best sex. [Research, Slate article].
• “Fotoshop by Adobé“:

©2012 China Hope Live. All Rights Reserved.

Anyway, an American friend of ours in Tianjin just shared this picture of a pack of men’s underwear over Facebook, which she took in a shopping center near her apartment. Whether this particular example reflects typical Chinese talk about bodies or merely a lack of translation skill, it’s a fine anecdote for illustrating this particular painful (to North Americans) cultural difference:

The Chinese on the package says (mouseover for pronunciation):

肥佬纯棉轻柔舒适三角裤
Fat guy, pure cotton, soft, snug briefs

Who says there’s no honesty in advertising?*

(*But then why isn’t he wearing the underwear in the picture?)

We’ve both written on this kind of thing before:

• 关心 talk: so offensive it’s funny
• Comfort Zone Violation #379 – Naked English Practice? (by Jessica!)
• Please stop paying attention to my… (by Jessica!)
• “No offensive” (by Jessica!)
• Too fat! Too thin!! Everyone’s got an opinion. (by Jessica!)
• Chinese “compliments” — English student edition

©2012 China Hope Live. All Rights Reserved.

Albert at Laowai Chinese introduces two ideal and two undesirable Chinese face shapes: The Four Faces of Chinese People (women, really)

©2012 China Hope Live. All Rights Reserved.

Once our friends got there we found a little clearing where some other moms and babies had gathered. I was telling her about the scene she’d just missed, and my friend said (in Chinese): “She is beautiful. She is much, MUCH more beautiful than you.” Then in English, she said “No offensive.” :)

I thought it was funny. I wasn’t offended, as I know that Lilia is more beautiful than me (and want her to be). I just wouldn’t have ever said it that way myself. Yet another example of how the supposedly indirect Chinese are often very, very direct.

©2012 China Hope Live. All Rights Reserved.

“Is that a girl?” I asked.

The student, a teenager from Guangdong, looked slightly shocked and annoyed. “No! Of course not!”

“Are you sure?” I smiled and she and her friends knew I was just joking. But honestly, I was only half-joking. Here’s the photo:

It’s Korean pop star 金范, but I don’t know his Korean name.

Sometimes my northern Chinese friends mention how they think southern Chinese males, especially Taiwanese, are too feminine. They laugh at the way they talk and they way they look. Sometimes they say that Western (white) women are too masculine. I had an American co-worker in Tianjin who smoked, and she was constantly told that this made her too masculine.

Now, I’m not saying men can’t 打扮打扮 if they want. But I’d be lying if I pretended that young urban Chinese masculinity ideals — or at least Chinese pop media masculinity ideals — don’t sometimes appear a little feminine to my Western sensibilities. And the women, at least the young and trendy relatively privileged urban ones and their pop culture role models, seem like they’re trying to embody an extreme femininity: anemic, weak, passive, desperately in need of a male’s strength and assertiveness (there’s even a term related to this: “little birdie leaning on a man”/小鸟依人). It’s like gender identity in general plays out a little more toward the feminine side of the scale in China.

Westerners have been getting this impression for generations, as have the Chinese themselves (“feminine” is one of many adjectives Lin Yutang uses to describe Chinese masculinity). There are lots of reasons why Chinese and Westerners perceive each other as too masculine or too feminine — some of it’s biological, but a lot of it’s cultural. And this post is really only talking about the thin slice of Chinese society that foreigners interact with the most: the urban, educated, relatively privileged with enough disposable income to enjoy a consumerist lifestyle. (If foreigners in China spent most of their day-to-day lives with peasants, I wonder how our gender impressions might be different.)

Ever since my first major cross-cultural experiences in rural Uganda and Tanzania, where my language teacher and new friends explained in all sincerity that fat women are more attractive than skinny women, and then laughed so hard (once they got over their disbelief) when we told them that in America it’s the opposite, I’ve been aware that a lot of the specifics of what we “naturally” find attractive (fat/thin, dark/pale, tall/short, muscular/weak, smooth/scruffy, manicured/”man-hands,” etc.) have a lot to do with the families and cultures we grow up in.

Other posts about Chinese/Western beauty ideals:

• Please stop paying attention to my… (by Jessica)
• Beauty is all in the eye…lid? (by Jessica)
• White is beautiful… (by Jessica)
• The Men and the Boys
• 小鸟依人 (“little birdie depending on a man”)

©2012 China Hope Live. All Rights Reserved.

All that to say, recently there was a weekend in which the experiences of myself and several of my friends proved to me that I’m not nearly as used to these comments as I had thought. While at the gym, a good friend had the following experience (quoted from an email to her family) which sort of seemed to kick off a whole weekend of people paying entirely TOO much attention to foreigner’s body shapes…especially the hind end. :D

On that day, my friend said:

One of the many people who decided to converse with me (that day) was one of the cleaning ladies. She is really nice and I usually say some little nothing to her most days, even though her accent makes her hard to understand. Here’s my favorite paraphrased and truncated excerpt of her conversation with me: “WA! Your face is getting really thin. But your butt, back here (pointing in case I wasn’t sure which butt she was referring to), is still very big. Why don’t you try to lose some weight back there? It’s not very attractive. Everyone says. (I LOVE that part) Do you understand me when I speak Chinese? (She asks this 2-3 times every time she speaks with me) You’re upper body is thin too but, aiya, that butt….” I said something like blah blah genetics blah blah taking time but on the inside I was laughing really hard.

It should be noted that my friend is of a pretty average size for a North American…curvy, but not to an unusual extent. I’m proud of her for being able to laugh it off at that point…that’s how you know you’ve started to get used to this kind of comments. When I first came, comments like this made me want to go home and cry. Now, I’ve also gotten to the point of laughter most of the time…however, when the comments keep rolling in, all in a short period of time it gets a little harder to just shake off.

Later that afternoon, I went to the mall below the gym looking for some summer clothes. I located a rack of capri pants that were on serious sale, and started looking through them. As I was looking through them, the saleslady came over to me…and trying to be helpful, picked up a pair of shorts from the rack of MEN’S shorts. Assuming that I didn’t speak Chinese, she pointed at me, pointed at the shorts, and then pointed back at me again. Meaning, in the universal language of “gesture”: “I recommend you try these.” Not only were these men’s shorts, but they were the BIGGEST pair of shorts I have ever seen in my life. I’m not exaggerating in the least when I say that I could have fit my whole body (with room to spare) in one leg of these shorts. Um, thanks for the recommendation, saleslady. So, I finally managed to say something along the lines of “Hey, those are men’s…and they’re way TOO big!” To which she replied, “Well, you definitely can’t wear those pants that you’re looking through, there aren’t any big enough for you!”

The next day, the same friend quoted above and I decided to go clothes shopping. We went to a favorite local market that sells mostly clothes that were intended for export (meaning: they often have clothes in foreign sizes!!!). My friend found a pair of linen trousers she wanted to try on and asked the lady if there was a place where she could try them (most of these shops hang up a sheet behind which you can try on clothes, but this one didn’t have one). The saleslady took one look at her, looked at the trousers and said “Nope. You can’t wear those. You’re too thick back here” and proceeded to pat my friend’s butt. Then the saleslady pulled a pair of trousers (five or six sizes bigger) off the rack and said, “Here, try these.” These trousers were obviously far too big, and my friend said so. However, the saleslady just shrugged her shoulders and turned to the next customer. We gave up on the linen trousers and went to the next stall. As if that part of her body hadn’t garnered enough attention in the preceding 24 hours, within five minutes of this conversation, a random passer-by also happened to run her hand over my friend’s rear-end.

There were more incidents that factored into this particular weekend, concerning both myself and several other friends, but in the interest of brevity (ha! no hope for that!) I’ll spare you all the gory details. Suffice it to say, it helped me realize that I’m not quite as used to all this commenting as I had thought. The occasional comment is easy to laugh off (which is progress), but by the end of a weekend which seems like it has been chock full of comments toward yourself and your friends…it gets much harder and more frustrating.

Now that time has passed (and the comments have gone back to normal levels), the humor in all of this has returned. I don’t want what I’ve posted above to be taken only as a vent though, because it actually has triggered some interesting thoughts and important realizations on several levels. I hope I can blog more about some of this stuff later on, but for now, I’ll just list a few of the thoughts below.

1. The notion of customer service in China is entirely different from in North America. In China, the customer ISN’T always right. Salespeople consider themselves to be experts in their fields and the “service” they are providing is that of telling you straight out what you can and can’t wear (and why). There is no need to flatter and cater to the customer’s whim…because with a population this big, the loss of a customer or two is no big deal. This can be a jolt for the foreign customer…who expects not only to be fawned over a bit, but is also not expecting (what she considers to be) personal comments regarding body size/shape.

2. It seems like a possibility that body shape/size/looks may be, particularly for older generations, a less important factor in self-worth than in North America. I was telling a friend of ours who is Chinese (born and raised in Taiwan) but completely bi-lingual (educated in international schools and graduated from college in the US) about these incidents and she said that she feels like these women are that direct about body shape/size because to them, in the end, it really doesn’t matter as much. Somehow less of who one is is invested in their shape, size, or looks…and that makes it okay to make comments about things that are obvious to everyone. This is an interesting idea, especially juxtaposed against the things that I hear from my young Chinese friends which indicate to me that, even if the above has some truth to it, body image and looks have shifted to become more important somewhere in the last several decades.

p.s. To top it all off, when I told my teacher (who has heard about this same phenomenon from many students) about all the comments/touching incidents within that one weekend she first sympathized (she gets comments from salesladies too), but then responded with the following “说实在的，我有的时候也想摸一摸你们的屁股!” or roughly, “Hey, to tell the truth, sometimes I want to feel your butts too!” Hilarious…though I still haven’t quite figured out whether this is just plain curiousity speaking, or because patting someone’s butt is some kind of affectionate gesture…or quite possibly, it’s a mixture of both.

©2012 China Hope Live. All Rights Reserved.

But here in China, just like friends often greet each other with “You got whiter!” or “You got darker!” it’s also not uncommon to hear “你变瘦了!” (You got thinner!) or “你变胖了!” (You got fatter!). Sometimes this will be shortened to a simpler “瘦了!” (Thinner!) or “胖了!” (Fatter!).

It’s also not uncommon for random people (especially salespeople in markets for some reason) to grab hold of one’s upper arm and exclaim about how fat one is. Especially when one is a foreigner. At that point, it’s quite common that the foreigner has to work hard to restrain the urge to punch the lights out of this person who not only invaded valuable personal space, but also pushed the sensitive “weight/size” button. Then most of these salespeople go on to try and sell us their fabric or vegetables or whatever, and wonder why exactly we’re NOT inclined to buy. Yes, I’m speaking from personal experience here, though at least no one has dared to pat my tummy yet and ask how far along I am (another foreign friend has had this happen more than once). Yet this doesn’t just happen to those of us that are bigger, it also happens to foreign ladies that most of us would consider to be of “average” build.

I should point out, however, that the above interactions were all between females. I think guys around the world have enough common sense to know that it’s best not to be quite THAT direct when talking about a lady’s body size/shape. As an illustration of this, last week I got a compliment from Mr. Lu and the other old guys that sit around on the corner and repair bikes all day. However, their way of paying me a compliment was pretty indirect and really interesting.

Last Friday night, Joel and I went for a walk in the park. On the way to the park, we stopped at the corner to chat for a few minutes with Mr. Lu and company. As soon as we walked up, Mr. Lu started to chastise Joel. “大江！ You’re not being a very good husband these days!!! You’re not taking very good care of your wife!” We both looked slightly surprised at this unusual start to the conversation. Mr. Lu continued by asking Joel, “Why aren’t you giving your wife enough good food to eat?” At the puzzled looks on our faces, he grinned a little bit and said “She’s gotten too thin!!!”**

At this, we laughed and I began to explain that Joel is taking care of me just fine, but that I’ve been exercising lately. Apparently not quite satisfied with this explanation, or (more likely) just out of the desire to mess around with Joel a little bit more, he turned to Joel again and said, “Don’t bully (欺负） her to go exercise!” Then he turned to me, still grinning, and said, “He’s bullying you to go exercise, isn’t he?! He must be for you to have gotten this thin…what did you weigh before?” (At this point, one of the other old guys hit him and said something to the effect of “Hey, what are you thinking..You can’t ask her that!!!”) Mr. Lu backtracked a little and said “Well anyway, he must be bullying you to go.”

I told them that we’ve actually both been exercising, and that we decided since we’re still young and don’t have a family we should use this time to pay more attention to our health. We all laughed together for a little bit, they all warned Joel that he shouldn’t lose any weight (and spent a minute or two miming what would happen to Joel if he got any thinner), and then we headed for the park. I’m guessing that it wouldn’t be very culturally appropriate for these older guys to tell me “You look nice”…so they disparage Joel’s skills as a husband in a roundabout way of paying me a compliment. I have to confess that even though the compliment was at Joel’s expense, it was still really nice to hear, and I was pretty tickled by their creativity.

**For the record, there’s no need to worry that I’ve suddenly turned into a beanpole or something. Having peeled off the requisite 15 layers of winter clothing and started to get into better shape, the appearance of change is probably far more dramatic than any changes that have actually occurred. :D

©2012 China Hope Live. All Rights Reserved.

I think one reason for these seemingly contradictory conversations and my continuing inability to pin things down more clearly is the ever broadening influence of Western culture, piggybacked in by movies and media. Obviously, some people have been more influenced by these things than others, unknowing recipients who slowly become conditioned to appreciate the current forms of “beauty” being marketed in media from the West. Of course, this is just one factor of many.

I guess in a way, this is just an illustration of how the definition of “beauty” and what we come to see as beautiful is a complex thing. Aesthetic sensibilities, historical frame of reference, cultural and sociological conditioning, and genetic predispositions in a given population all play a part, not to mention personal taste and preference. What is seen as “beautiful” changes over place, time, and location. It’s hard to define. Perhaps my fears about misrepresenting what is considered beautiful here in China actually have less to do with the specific situation here, and more to do with the reality that worldwide our definitions of beauty seem to be in continuous flux; shifting and changing within our various cultural contexts, shaped by the past and present and impacted by outside influences.

Now that I’ve made my very large disclaimer, I’ll carry on as planned. The next post should be something regarding the female body. After that, there should be another on “sexiness” and then, if you’re really lucky, some thoughts that my female friends have shared with me about what makes a guy “really, really ridiculously good looking.”

©2012 China Hope Live. All Rights Reserved.

Now, this “double eyelid” is not to be confused with the triple eyelids of the camel…there really is only one eyelid, and the term double has more to do with the shape of the lid and the presence of a crease in the middle of it. For those of us who don’t pay much attention to people’s eyelids at all (most of us, I think) I’ll post a couple before and after pictures of people with “single eyelids” that got surgery done to create the apparently beautiful and extremely desirable “double eyelid.” Since Asians tend toward “singleliddedness” this is also (reportedly) the most popular cosmetic surgery in this part of the world.

There…now I’ve passed on my recently acquired beauty knowledge to you. Why does this matter? Well, Chinese believe that “double-lidded” eyes are much more beautiful. I’ve heard from several friends that some Asian born actresses and models that have become famous in the West are, in their own part of the world, not considered beautiful at all…and the lack of a double eyelid is sometimes part of the criteria for this. These friends also told me that they couldn’t understand why foreigners think that Asians have beautiful eyes, given the dominance of single-liddedness. When I tried to explain that most of us are referencing the “exotic” (to us) shape of the eyes, and that many people may not have even paid much attention to eyelids or lack thereof…my explanation was met with a bit of amazement and a hint of disbelief. How could such an important beauty standard not even register on our radar screens? How could shape be a more important factor?

Some of me wonders how much this is a classic case of the grass being greener on the other side of the fence. We’ve got “double lids” and they want ‘em. They’ve got the “exotic shape.” Neither side is satisfied, and people on both sides go get cosmetic surgery done to change what they’ve got. Fortunately, since my eyelids have been pronounced “sufficiently double-lidded” by a Chinese friend, and “slightly exotic” by Western friends, I guess I can rest easy in both beauty standards. :D Living in a world where some more obvious beauty standards (body size and shape, in particular…more on that in the next post) are decidedly NOT in my favour, it’s nice to at least have one or two things that are.

©2012 China Hope Live. All Rights Reserved.

This may actually end up being a post series…I keep getting into these really interesting conversations with some of my Chinese friends and keep uncovering more and more fascinating little tidbits that just beg to be shared. Lately, most of these have been regarding the differences between what Chinese and Westerners think of as “beautiful” or “attractive.” I’m not presenting any textbook facts here, or citing any surveys to support anything I’m about to say…just sharing a few anecdotes from recent conversations that have been pretty interesting.

In Taiwan, it was not unusual for some of the older ladies to come up to me and make a big fuss about how white my skin is. At first I thought, wow…I must look really sickly for them to be making this big of a deal over it. Then it dawned on me that I was white and that they LIKED it. It’s nearly impossible to buy any kind of moisturizer or beauty product over here that doesn’t have added “whitening” components. There are whitening creams for parts of the body that I had never even dreamed might need whitening. When friends (foreign or Chinese) go get facials, even I can tell that they have become whiter. It’s also not unusual to hear ladies that haven’t seen each other for a little while say something along the lines of (in a very excited tone of voice) “你变白了！” （You got whiter!)…or (in a “What happened to you?” tone of voice) “你变黑了！” (You got darker…).

My best joke lately has to do with what happens if someone as white as me goes and gets these “whitening” beauty treatments that are available everywhere. I tell my friends that I’m afraid I’ll turn clear…and then they won’t be able to see me. I also have another foreign friend (who is also pale) that recently got engaged to a local guy. On hearing that she must (as part of her preparation for the wedding) schedule a whole round of these beauty treatments, we joked… “What if she turns invisible? Then her husband won’t be able to find her!” Okay, maybe you have to be here and be surrounded by the obsession with whiteness for it to actually be humorous, but we thought it was a knee-slapper.

Having never paid much attention to my own skin color, or that of those around me (except for “working on my tan” while camping in the summer), it’s a bit disconcerting to know that one of the first thoughts that run through the minds of people here (mostly other women, I think) when they meet me has to do with how white I am. I don’t know why this is so disconcerting, except that from my viewpoint, the difference between my skin color and the color of my Chinese friend’s skin is minimal. But from their viewpoint, or at least judging from the things that are said, it seems like this is a very big and important difference between us.

It’s also been fun to watch the reaction from my Chinese friends when they hear about beauty ideals from the Western side of things. Though the idea of a “healthy tan” may eventually get more popular, at this point the idea of intentionally trying to get darker is not only a beauty crime, it’s viewed as borderline insanity.

©2012 China Hope Live. All Rights Reserved.