While on a holiday recently I had my first pedicure. I was in Hong Kong, in someone's 15th floor apartment-turned-salon, watching a Steven Segal movie on the wall television and avoiding the disparaging glances my pedicurist shot my way as she shaved away several kilograms of my dead foot-skin.
A young Asian woman entered the salon and asked, in English, how much it would cost her to have artificial eyelashes implanted. Struggling in English, the beautician informed her that she wasn't able to perform the procedure that afternoon and that she would have to book ahead, shoving a flyer in the woman's hand. 'How much to just remove my eyelashes, then?' she persisted.
'Ouch!' I almost said aloud. Remove? Eyelashes?
I was struck by the realisation that not only do many women of all ethnicities spend a great deal of money on painful procedures in the name of beauty, but they do so to look like one woman: Pamela Anderson. That ridiculous wide-eyed, straight-nosed, enormous busted white woman maintains international currency as a beauty standard, despite our knowing better.
Feeling significantly lighter from my pedicure treatment, I headed straight to the internet café to read up on cosmetic eyelid surgery, blepharoplasty. It's a popular cosmetic procedure some East Asian women (and men) pursue where the eyelid is sliced and fat removed to add a fold in the lid, which has a 'widening' effect on typically 'Asian' eyelids.
The desired result strives for a more 'western', less 'Asian' appearance.
We know that in many Asian cultures paleness as an indication of class and beauty predated colonialism. But whiteness, western-ness, arrived as a beauty standard with colonisation — and with a racialised imbalance of power which favoured Europeans.
So why would an Asian woman want to look like Pamela Anderson? Probably for the same reason white women do: there's a globalised beauty standard that is gendered, racialised, and hierarchical.
Whether white people choose to participate, challenge, or opt out of their prescribed cultures, whiteness — like any other marker of speciality — is entrenched in a complex history of manufactured power. Whiteness is equated with normativity and privilege; whiteness, western-ness, is the index. It remains the 'us' to a brown 'them'. Just turn on any television station other than SBS and try to find a program that reflects the way ordinary (read: diverse) viewers at home look.
It's distressing to think of women altering their physical markers of ethnicity to conform to such an arbitrary notion of beauty. More distressing is that, like cosmetic surgery, we describe it using the rhetoric of choice. As though a female could wake up one morning and, free of cultural coercion, invent what femininity means, and choose to spend $10,000 to attain it.
This perception of autonomy as merely the right to mutilate one's body without any regard to the historical hierarchy one is born into is insulting. If an Asian woman living in the west who solicits eyelid surgery is exercising 'choice' and 'autonomy' over her body, she is doing so only to conform to an ethno-centric norm and so escape prejudice based on her physicality. Similarly, a white woman does it to conform to a gendered, damaging beauty standard.
Outside the west there are other, more optimistic ideas about plastic surgery. Residual from wartime, surplus Iranian surgeons earn a living by trimming the Aquiline snouts of the middle-classes in Tehran. If rumour is to be believed, a bandage pulled across the bridge of one's nose is something of a status symbol in urban Iran.
One Iranian artist, Shirin Aliabadi, plays with the idea that affordable cosmetic surgery 'democratises beauty'. If the luck of birth dictates that one's nose and chin meet where one's mouth is supposed to be, why shouldn't one correct it and join the ranks of beautiful people?
Here, I'm ambivalent. I know that beauty is bound up with race, gender and power, but it appears so transcendent and desirable that almost nothing could convince me to stop wearing lipstick and ostentatious outfits. But I cannot forget that women keep paying and paying to belong in the world.
I know that women as the primary consumers of the beauty industry are still conditioned to identify with their bodies above all else, and that the small number of women lucky enough to escape or transcend this do not set the standard.
Ellena Savage edited the Melbourne University student magazine, Farrago, in 2010. She writes essays and fiction.