Women and Body Image

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Women and Body Image

Introduction

Beauty has become a major growth industry , with advertising promoting body preoccupation for everyone . With most cosmetics , you 're basically selling dreams , hope in a bottle , says Martin Stevens , former creative director at Revlon . The diet industry is now a multimillion-dollar enterprise , built on the promise of a better , more beautiful self

In 1972 , Nora Ephron wrote a piece in Esquire magazine called A Few Words About Breasts ' It was the humorous confession of the woes of a less-than-amply-endowed woman . This piece

seems so dated today . Bodies are now seen as malleable , correctable (Rodin , 1992

Women 's Body Image

For many years , plastic surgery . Was generally regarded as an indulgence of vain aging women having face-lifts and spoiled , rich high school girls having nose jobs . But in the 1980s , it became a much bigger business . According to a report issued in 1985 by the American Society of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeons (ASPRS , its 2 ,700 board-certified surgeons performed from 1981 . These included dermabrasion (peeling the skin , abdominoplasty (tummy tuck mentoplasty (chin implant , mastopexy (breast lift , otoplasty (ears and hair transplantation . The percent increase for these types of surgeries ranged from 7 percent for hair transplantation to 40 percent for chin implants . But the leader by a wide margin---growing 300 percent in four years---was surgical body contouring (Rodin , 1992

This recent phenomenal growth in plastic surgery is the by-product of a change in the role of appearance . In addition to their traditional ornamental roles , the face and the body are increasingly being pressed into service as essential business accessories , a mobile billboard , for their owner 's brilliance , energy and savvy . There are currently few occupations for which appearance is not important . To take but one example , a study of accounting firms by business school professors Jerry Ross and Kenneth Ferris showed that both salary and the likelihood of becoming a partner were more strongly related to physical attractiveness than to whether the person had a graduate degree or to the quality of the school he or she had attended (Rodin , 1992

In fact , now women 's body shape and wardrobe are not only possessions that go in and out of style . Her face does too . A panel of plastic surgeons reported at a recent ASPRS meeting that facial features may be in ' one decade and out ' another . These doctors evaluated their patients ' surgery request over the last thirty years . They found that the face of the decade of the eighties was a far cry from that of the fifties . Women of the eighties wanted to see themselves as intelligent and assertive . The image moved from young Elizabeth Taylor to Christie Brinkley . Women wanted a more vertical forehead , prominent cheekbones , deep-set eyes , wider eyebrows , narrower eyelids , fuller lips . They tell me , `I don 't want to look sweet ' says Dr , Norman J . Pastorek , a New York facial plastic surgeon . `When I 'm toe to toe with those guys on the stock exchange...