Here's a thing I noticed about me (body mods)

[drwex]

In this entry I use "I" as though I were one unified self; in fact what I've been trying to do is interrogate my instinctive reactions of attraction/aversion. I seem to have some weird mental categorization of body modifications.

In the OK category are things like piercings (all the way from conventional earlobe to genital) and tattoos, including hidden decorative, symbolic/religious, and large-scale art. I'm OK with women who choose breast reduction and people who choose various surgeries to get their bodies to conform to felt gender identities. I'm OK with waxing and shaving of body and head hair on both male and female bodies. I am OK with hair coloring, dying, perming, weaving, braiding, including using color to hide gray hair.

In the not-OK category are breast and penile enlargements, spray tans, botox, liposuction and various sorts of "lift" cosmetic surgeries. I seem to be not-OK with a variety of apparent-age reducing treatments used on the faces of both on men and women that go by a bunch of commercial names.

My rational brain can't come up with a good reason why my emotional brain is holding onto these two categories, but there they are - shouldn't a body mod be just a body mod? Brains are weird.

What's in your OK/not-OK camps? Or don't you have those?

Comments

[badseed1980.livejournal.com]

I used to be more like you in terms of having an "OK/Not OK" classification (and it was similar to yours), but have since done some mental and emotional work to remind myself that fuck it, a person's body is theirs to do with as they will, and I'm not going to judge them for wanting their body to look a certain way, whether that way is against the mainstream or with it. I know damn well the pressure people are under from our society to conform to the ideals of beauty championed by the media. For women, especially, looks can mean the difference between being able to get a good job and not, or in how much they're paid for that job. I'm not going to look down on someone for internalizing that shit that keeps getting fed to them. I feel a lot of it myself, and I see that even among my friends who are supposedly NOT basing their ideals of beauty on what society tells us, they will often treat people better--again, especially women--when they conform to those societal ideals of beauty, as long as they do so in such a way that it isn't obvious they're trying to conform to them. I don't think it's conscious, and I don't think it makes them bad people, but it's there.

[ricevermicelli.livejournal.com]

THis resonates with me a ton. There is definitely a thing where women are supposed to conform to certain standards of appearance, and part of that standard is the appearance that women just happened to wake up that way.

[vvalkyri.livejournal.com]

That and women aren't allowed to age. I mean we can, but there are huge consequences men don't face as much. Although men do - one friend's husband eventually dyed his hair dark in pursuit of getting a job.

[drwex]

I've actually done the same thing. If you recall what I looked like when you saw me in January you might've noticed that the front portion of my beard is almost completely gray and much of my hair has gone gray. I was told that because it's so prominent that it gives the impression I'm older and I know older workers are discriminated against, both overtly and covertly. So when I was interviewing a few years back, I had my stylist dye the beard - we discussed doing the hair as well but did not end up choosing to do that.

[vvalkyri.livejournal.com]

Huh. Don't beards grow way fast?

[drwex]

They do grow but not significantly faster than any other hair on the human body. It is often noticeable because many men regularly shave to the skin so any growth at all is noticed.

I'm sometimes fond of saying that the difference between 0 and 1 is a lot larger than the difference between 1 and 2.

[badseed1980.livejournal.com]

Yeah, and that is why women can't win for losing when it comes to the appearance game!

[drwex]

Thanks for this. Yes, I definitely need to do some more mental work. I think this apparent distinction in my head is something I need to work to rid myself of.

I also recognize intellectually (and am still working to understand) the privilege I carry in this regard. I do see men going in for age-adjusting body modifications in increasing numbers but that's still a small minority and not, afaict, a response to the same kind of appearance/beauty conformity pressures that you describe.

I always find I have so much learning to do...

[badseed1980.livejournal.com]

Thank you for being willing to keep an open mind and examine your own reactions. :) Like I said, it's something I've had to do myself, and I know it's not easy. It's something I have to *keep* doing, too, on those occasions when I find myself having a knee-jerk reaction that is at odds with my more thoughtful, considered, compassionate opinion.

[drwex]

Exactly, yes! Thank you. This all grew out of my noticing my own subconscious reaction and wanting to open the lid and see what was going on.

Still on my to-read list is the book "Thinking Fast and Slow" which I've been told addresses some of these things (Amazon link)

[ceo]

My categories are roughly "cool!", "not my thing but OK" and "why the hell would anyone do that to themself?!" The latter is pretty much the same as your "not-OK" category.

I can map it two ways: either "modifications explicitly aimed at conforming to mainstream societal standards of beauty and/or apparent youthfulness" or "modifications generally undertaken by people in a lower socioeconomic class than mine".

Edited to add, because it was poorly worded: category number 3 up there isn't "that's not OK" so much as "I don't understand why someone would do this". Which of course is entirely on me and not a judgement about them.

Or maybe I kind of do understand, but I don't like that the reasons exist.

This conversation has made me aware that there's a bit of latent classism in my reaction to it. Not real proud of that.

[ricevermicelli.livejournal.com]

It's pretty important to me at this stage that a body mod be just a body mod.

It pisses me off when I see them done badly. I harbor a lot of anger about plastic surgeons.

If you remain not-ok with lifts, lipo, etc., I have to ask you not to come round me or mine. My discomfort with my body is bad enough without feeling that anyone's faking their acceptance in person.

[drwex]

I would never fake it with you, or anyone else I cared about. This is one installment in an ongoing series of me examining things in my head that aren't right and trying to right them.

But I can't fix my defects if I don't understand them. I hope that's understandable.

[chienne-folle.livejournal.com]

I think my reaction to a body mod depends entirely on what I believe the motivation for the mod to be.

So I'm perfectly capable of being okay with a woman who shaves her legs because she likes the way they feel when they're smooth or because she thinks not shaving would bring penalties in the workplace that she doesn't want to pay and not okay with a woman who shaves her legs because she's been brainwashed into believing that she has to, and she's too unaware of her own cultural conditioning to ever question it.

[drwex]

I think that I understand cultural conditioning even less than I understand my own foibles. I have a hard time parsing peoples' motivations for these things. Sometimes I am in a situation where I am able to ask, and the person is often willing to talk about their motivations, but most of the time it feels horribly intrusive and I don't ask.

I also wonder about the complexity of motivation - do people do things just for one reason? Or because it's what they were brought up with/see as normal? If someone does something not out of specific desires but just because it's "normal" to them is that a problem?

Me

[sweetmmeblue.livejournal.com]

I feel I have to shave my legs if I'm going to wear shorts or go out in public. I will wear long pants to the gym, or yoga; I will wear tall boots and socks to cover if I haven't. It's like wearing the appropriate clothing for situations. I do NOT feel that others have to do this, it's strictly in my head.

[vvalkyri.livejournal.com]

I feel similarly, fwiw. More I guess that I have far more tolerance for leg or underarm hair on me if only I am looking at it. Although I am highly annoyed to apparently be mutant re ever getting rid of underarm hair. I did manage to mostly permanently get rid of hair-that-needs-shaved-outside-non-skirted-swimsuit, which I would forego swimming if I couldn't first shave. I

[chienne-folle.livejournal.com]

*smile* I promise you, sweetmmeblue, that I would never mistake you for a mindless sheep who was thoughtlessly unaware of social pressures and who conformed because she was unaware that she could do anything else.

And really, people who ARE mindless sheep have a right to live without my judging them for it; it's just that my mother is a mindless sheep, so I'm especially annoyed by that type. In one of his books, Garrison Keillor said, "My parents taught me that North was East, so I became convinced that it was West. It was years before I realized that I was just as wrong as they were, only in the opposite direction." I doubt Mr. Keillor could have written a better two-sentence summary of my attitude towards my mother if he'd been following me around and taking notes. :-)

[elfy.livejournal.com]

Honest question: Which workplace has penalties for unshaven legs? o.O

[drwex]

Not to preempt Cory's answer but roughly they fall into three categories.

1. Workplaces where a person (almost always a woman) is hired for her appearance in front of customers. Retail outlets, particularly clothing, are obvious examples but see also retail chains such as Aveda or any other line of beauty products.

2. Workplaces where a woman (let's just be direct about this) is required to maintain what's typically called a "professional" appearance in front of customers. These might include offices where women staff the front desk, airlines where women are prominent in cabin crews and ticket counters, and so on.

3. Workplaces of all sorts where people have cultural and unconscious biases about appearance and beauty. These can be any Fortune 2000 company not covered above, down to just your random professional services firm run by a small business owner.

Since it is often illegal to discriminate outright in categories 2 and 3, there are often hidden biases in things like dress codes. So it might be more accurate to say that "unshaven and visible" is what is penalized. Though many women can tell stories of being (overtly or covertly) pressured to wear more "feminine" clothing (i.e. skirts) when they dress in other kinds of business attire (e.g. pant suits).

[elfy.livejournal.com]

I have never ever, honestly, in my whole life, heard the tiniest hint about this sort of penalty in any of the mentioned workplaces. I wonder if this is a US thing.

[drwex]

I'm not in any posistion to comment on the relative levels and kinds of sexism in the US and Germany but I know from working for a French company that it definitely happens in France.

[elfy.livejournal.com]

It's totally possible I live in a social bubble regarding that. I never had a job that was even close to one where shaving your legs could be relevant in any way.

[elfy.livejournal.com]

It's totally possible I live in a social bubble regarding that. I never had a job that was even close to one where shaving your legs could be relevant in any way.

[chienne-folle.livejournal.com]

I had thought you were being deliberately obtuse until I saw drwex's reply to you, so I'm glad he clarified that you're asking as a person not from the US. :-)

The norms that women will shave their leg hair are VERY strong in the US, and the primary enforcers of this code are actually other women. Even when there are no overt penalties -- such as being fired -- there is usually the covert penalty of being ostracized, such as being left out of the gossip loop, finding that no one will eat lunch with you, finding that people stare at you or whisper about you, being told point-blank that one is strange and deviant. In addition to all of the places that drwex mentioned, any workplace that has more than one female member will usually enforce this rule, even if the employee has no contact with customers/clients/patients. Often this enforcement takes the form of subtle harassment performed by the other women in that workplace against the deviant member.

[donnad.livejournal.com]

The way I look at it is who am I to judge. You can do whatever you want to your body. I don't have to approve of or like it, it's your body. If something you do make me go ew, squick, that's on me, as long as it's what you would want, I don't really care. I don't think there is much one can do to their own person that would change my opinion of them or if it's someone I am friends with and enjoy the company of regularly, change that in any way. What's inside is what matters.

[tamidon.livejournal.com]

for me, I think people have the right to change things about themselves they don't like however they want without judgement from me. What I have a problem with is the idea that changing the thing is going to change their life. Keep in mind, I had a surgery that led me to lose 90#. Now, no longer being diabetic was a major thing, but it would be lying to say I wasnt happier with how I looked. If someone looks in the mirror and hates their nose/boobs/hair colour, it's their business how they decide to change it. If they think better tits/nose/hair colour will mean they have a better life, get laid, get a spouse,or will be happy, then there is a problem, because things don't usually work that way.

[drwex]

Yep, I agree on all counts. I just can't figure out why my brain has developed these arbitrary categories. Unexamined prejudice? Privilege? Social hangovers? As I said above, if I don't take this stuff out and examine it I'm never going to get better.

[tamidon.livejournal.com]

Do you dislike those particular procedures even when you don't know someone has had them, or just when you can tell it's been done. That falls into the whole thing of guys saying that they like when women look "natural" without getting that the look they are referring to is rarely makeup free. You like large breasts, but have a problem if you can tell they are not natural. Not a lot of space between the 2 situations

[drwex]

What started all this was that some entity (name eludes me) has started sponsoring things on WBUR. So there are ads for "age-reducing treatments" and "beauty procedures" now. My gut reaction was 'bleah' and I had to stop myself and take that out because as you say, a body mod is a body mod and people ought to do what they like with their bodies, right? So where did I get this embedded idea?

I spent some time looking at various pictures and descriptions online to see what I could discover about my internal stuff and I came up with the general idea I wrote into this entry.

You like large breasts, but have a problem if you can tell they are not natural. Not a lot of space between the 2 situations

Yes, exactly. Where did I get this idea? I think, having spent some more time on it today and answering some of these comments, that it's an error of bleeding like/dislike into judgment. That is, I'm still allowed to like or dislike various things and to have my own aesthetic opinion, but I need to find out better ways to disentangle "I don't like" from "is somehow bad."

[/me goes away and thinks some more, writes and deletes some paragraphs because they aren't saying it well]

I very much fear I'm descending into "to bake an apple pie you must first invent the universe" territory.

[ceo]

I think part of my reaction to it is precisely that it is sold as "this will give you a better life, get you laid, get you a spouse and/or make you happy", and lots of people do it on that basis. Of course, that's true of basically everything bought and sold in this culture. :-/

[anotherjen.livejournal.com]

My issue with spray tans is that (at least, when I notice them) they look fake, and I worry that the people with them don't realize this. On the other hand, I'd much rather people get a spray tan, crappy or otherwise, instead of baking in the sun or a tanning booth and getting skin cancer.

I have similar biases to yours. I think in my case it's because I view your okay-list as part of being nonconformist and creative, and the not-okay list as being mundane and low-class. Thanks for pointing it out; I will be guard against that when I meet people! (and I'm aware that in certain circles, the non-conformist mods are becoming conformist)

Personally, the only permanent body mod I have ever had is getting my earlobes pierced, once. But I have thought about getting a tattoo someday, Botox-ing the frown line between my eyebrows, and a boob lift (if I could somehow be assured it'd look natural). If I could have surgery to bring my size 11.5 feet down to a 10, I'd do that in a heartbeat.

[drwex]

Nod. ceo pointed out that I seem to have some classist biases built in, too. Which is interesting because as I mentioned in response to tamidon, the origin of this examination came because of sponsorship on NPR, which I generally associate with high-brow/upperclass.

[vvalkyri.livejournal.com]

Most cosmetic surgery and other 'beauty treatments' are anything but cheap. I'm not sure how that goes to classism.

Re boob lifts, a friend's ex had some sort of internal bra net as a boob lift. I've seen her topless and was minorly boggled at how boobs her size post six kids could be so far from droopy but it did look natural.

hmmm...

[cthulhia]

If I had the money and could donate all the extra skin to a burn victim or something, I'd get a boob lift in a hot minute.

just to be able to, for the first time since the age of, say, 13, be able to go bra-less and not be self-conscious about how droopy my tits looks without a bra or corset to keep them approximately near where the cut of the clothing says most boobs will be.

[vvalkyri.livejournal.com]

Hm you seem to be categorizing things as perceived to make one more attractive to oneself vs make one more attractive to others.

[vvalkyri.livejournal.com]

Although covering gray would seem to be more the latter. Hrm

[drwex]

That's an interesting idea. Do you think that decorative modifications such as tattoos, scarring, piercing are in the self category?

[vvalkyri.livejournal.com]

In this culture, definitely. That's part of why I was fascinated by everybody thinking that it was a classist thing to look down on cosmetic surgery / chemical peels - those are mostly to adhere to societal expectations of beauty, while other than basic ear piercings tattoos and piercings are counter culture and an impediment to getting jobs.

An extreme example: I met a guy a few years back who had tattooed Game Over on his knuckles. He explained that he intended to make a living from his art and never wanted to work for anybody else again. A few years later it turned out he was indeed making a living from his art, but that was the first time I'd ever met someone with a hand tattoo who had done so with full intent to adversely affect his hireability.

[drwex]

One of the things that confuses me in this area is the idea of getting tattoos (which we might say are for the self) but are in places where the owner cannot see them.

[vvalkyri.livejournal.com]

"tramp stamp" is still a concept of self decoration; I suppose it could conceivably fit under a very narrow subculture's "fitting in," but tends to also be by those young enough to be doing the rebelling thing. many other tattoos the owner can't see sie can see in the mirror, and usually have meaning. And, well, I guess I seldom see my earrings while I wear them, but other people see and comment.

[woodwardiocom.livejournal.com]

I'm opposed to circumcision, when it's not consensual.

[drwex]

Ooh, interesting point. I know very few people have the procedure consensually because it's incredibly risky at any age where a man is old enough to consent.

[anotherjen.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I am awfully glad my baby turned up with girl parts, because I would have lost that battle with O. I also don't like it when parents have their babies' ears pierced.

[dcltdw]

Interesting post. Thanks for starting the discussion.

I've been doing similar internal thinkywork re tattoos -- I have a new circle of larp friends who are quite into them, and painting with a broad brush, tattoos make me flinch. So I've been telling myself -- their body, their decision, end of discussion -- which sits quite well with me. It's been getting much easier for me to be sincerely happy for their decisions to get more artwork.

For your particular not-OK set: I don't know if this is true for you, but I know that sometimes I still have latent "I am a socially outcast geek, and I reject your mainstream ideas!" fist-shaking thoughts in my head, which I find... not helpful. Yes, yes, I was a downtrodden geek in my youth, that's nice, but ugghhh I like to think I've, y'know, grown up so I try to be aware of those thoughts and unpack them. For me, it's usually an old reaction against toxic masculinity that's no longer applicable (hel-lo, I am a socially and economically very successful male, let's try to be aware of my blessings, mm?) that I try to replace with empathy/understanding for those electing for those options.

Also, in particular with age, I try hard to subscribe to "plan on living until 200; live as if today is your last day". So then hearing of people electing for apparent-age reducing treatments reminds me that, geez, I'm not even quarter-aged yet. There's definitely a pitfall of smugfuckery, but at least for me, I think that's fairly easy to avoid.

Question

[sweetmmeblue.livejournal.com]

Are you against breast implants when the person getting that implant is trans? What about those body modifications?

Re: Question

[drwex]

I am not "against" any sort of body modification - I'm trying to interrogate my semi-conscious biases. As I noted, I don't seem to have any problem with the people I've seen (in various states of undress) who've had different procedures done to align their bodies with their gender identities.

I have also remembered that in the past I've been naked with one woman who had implant surgery done to repair damage from an auto accident and that didn't bother me. So it makes no sense to me why I have this undercurrent of bias. Though as discussed in other comments there's definitely elements of my own privilege and classism mixed up with social expectations/stigmas.