Race & Beauty

Earlier this week I caught an interesting piece on WNYC, my go-to public radio station. The host, Brian Lehrer, was discussing the topic of Race & Beauty, with journalist Maureen O’Connor, whose recent article is the current cover story in New York Magazine.

It seems that black, Hispanic, and Asian women are seeking the services of cosmetic surgeons like never before. Statistically, non-white women are enjoying the power of more disposable income these days. The big question was, are women going under the knife in deliberate pursuit of a Western/white beauty ideal?

I’m in my forties. I’ve birthed two children. I can say without hesitation that there are things about my body that I wouldn’t mind changing.  I didn’t realize how content I was with my body in my twenties, until that body morphed into my current one.

I’ve been body conscious as long as I can remember. At sleep-away camp, where my bunkmates and I freely took off our clothes in front of each other simultaneously, comparisons were unavoidable. Who was the most developed? Who had hair in embarrassing places? Who had a bubble butt?

That was me: bubble butt. No bathing suit could fully cover the roundness.  In dance classes, my leotards were either loose through the middle, or giving me a wedgie. Most blue jeans were huge in the waist if they fit over my hips. My mother assured me that my “hourglass shape” would be fully appreciated when I got older. “Look at Marilyn Monroe!” she said. “She’s arguably one of the most desirable women ever! Look at her curves.” But I didn’t want to be curvy. I wanted a small, flat butt like the models in magazines, and most of my friends.

Then there were the lip comments. At some point in middle school, someone came up with the term “b-j lips”. The “b” stood for “blow”… get it? It was decided that most black girls had b-j lips. The boys acted like it was a bad thing, and those of us who bore the label really wished we didn’t. But by high school, a couple of the white girls with full lips were earning locker room praise for their “b-j lips”. It turned out the boys liked girls with b-j lips!

And then came the Tyra Banks photo on the cover of Sports Illustrated.

I repeatedly overheard grown men debate whether or not Tyra was white.

It was as if their hard-ons obstructed the link between their eyes and their brains.  Tyra had the bubble butt, and the full lips, and the glowing bronze skin of a beautiful (albeit very fair) black girl. All that beauty made her race debatable.

Now, in 2014, we have Anjelina Jolie and Scarlett Johansson with their famously full lips representing the beauty ideal. The Kardashian sisters are trotting around some pretty “ethnic” booty enhancements. And the US Military is restricting black enlisted women from wearing their hair in natural styles.

It’s all very confusing. Are we consciously moving toward a diversity-based ideal of beauty? A melding of many ethnic attributes into one gorgeously ambiguous form? If we’re becoming more accepting and more diverse, why is the plastic surgery rate among non-white women ballooning?

Ballooning. Funny choice of words, as I sit here on what was once a pretty cute bubble butt.