ChapterZero

I usually try to refrain myself from giving excerpts of books I’m reading, but in this case the excerpt is self sufficient and well worth the giving. I’m reading The Menopause Industry: How the Medical Establishment Exploits Women, because my mother and I had a conversation about the hormone replacement theraphy she is on. I was surprised by the fact that she (a nurse!) hadn’t heard of the alternatives: wild yam, dong quai, etc. So I went to the library on campus today and checked out several books for her. This one in particular caught my eye because of the air of radical journalism it carries. So here’s the excerpt:

The great advantage men have is that our culture allows two standards of male beauty: the boy and the man …. A man does not grieve when he loses the smooth, unlined, hairless skin of a boy. For he has exchanged one form of attractiveness for another: the darker skin of a man’s face, roughened by daily shaving, showing the marks of emotion and the normal lines of age.

There is no equivalent of this second standard for women. The single standard of beauty for women dictates that they must go on having clear skin. Every wrinkle, every line, every gray hair, is a defeat. No wonder that no boy minds becoming a man, while even the passage from girlhood to early womanhood is experienced by many women as their downfall, for all women are trained to want to continue looking like girls.

While I don’t agree with the last sentence: I find it doubtful that ‘many women’ think of their passage to womanhood as ‘their downfall’, I think the overall message is sound. That explains why so many women think Mel Gibson only gets more ‘distinguished’ with age, and why there’s a large market for ‘age-defying’ cosmetics. What’s sad is that I subscribe to this delusion also. I think we all do.

Possibly relevant posts:

• Finding a barbershop (4/2/2007)
• State of the Xenon Project (10/6/2004)
• The Eternal and Unchanging Word of God (10/27/2003)