The ugly truth about beauty
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Vietnam is a beautiful country with beautiful people. It is going to be very difficult to find someone to dispute this.
And as far as Vietnamese women are concerned, there is more than broad agreement among my expatriate friends that of all the places they’ve visited, in the region and beyond, that per capita beauty is the highest here.
But there is something that I find not so beautiful – an obsession with beauty – of the physical kind – that seems to have taken hold in the country. Whether it is beauty contests or modeling contests or any of the other talent contests that the reality-TV trend has thrown up, there is a lot of focus now on having the perfect figure, the perfect nose, long legs and what not.
One question that I get asked very often by Vietnamese men and women: Are Vietnamese women more beautiful than in other countries? My answer is honest: There are beautiful women in every country, just as beautiful as in Vietnam. Most of the time, I refrain from the per capita addendum.
I do not mean this to be an abstract rumination on aesthetics, although there will be elements of that, too. My concern is about Vietnamese society in general and women in particular, being held hostage by notions of beauty that need to aspire to reach. One of the most famous sayings about beauty is that “it lies in the eyes of the beholder,” but the “sciences” of public relations, marketing and advertizing have shown that the eye of the beholder can be hypnotized and made to believe what it is told to believe.
Feminists have argued for long that most of the time, the standards of beauty in a patriarchal setting (like Vietnam, where it is mixed with another powerful influence, Confucianism) are designed to sustain male dominance and rob women of the independence they are entitled to.
The beauty contests and modeling contests and the fashion magazines of today affirm this. More Vietnamese women are dissatisfied with their bodies than before and there is no stronger evidence of this than the increasing demand for surgical corrections. It is not that men are immune to this process, but that is a topic for another day.
The fact that Vietnamese parents are actively encouraging their ‘long-legged’ daughters to walk the catwalk even before they become teens indicates how far this obsession – with an already decided beauty standard – has gone.
The time and space devoted by the film, television and print media on the physical aspects of beauty, subscribing to criteria that have been uncritically accepted, is truly mind boggling. Just compare this time and space with that spent on the “hottest” issue – one on which the fate of humankind depends – climate change.
In “Aurora Dawn,” a Herman Wouk novel set in the pre-television days, the point is powerfully made that the role of advertising, in a fundamental way, is to make people dissatisfied with what they have, with who they are. I have seen that happen increasingly in Vietnam over the last two decades (I first came here in 1993). While there are many things for us to be dissatisfied about, it is unfortunate that we are led to focus on cosmetic deficiencies which are imagined, for the most part; and that are of no real significance, for the most part. Here, in Vietnam, it is the women who are victimized most by this ploy.
For instance, the image of the “independent, modern” woman is linked, subtly and more overtly, to smoking. Hence, you have new products in the market that help confirm to this image, and sure enough, more young women are taking up the habit.
What if we were to stand the currently accepted notion of beauty on its head? What if we were to understand that beauty primarily came from within – on how good a person is, how thoughtful, kind and helpful she or he is; how independent she/he is in her thought and actions? What if we reject universal, homogeneous standards of beauty as something that does not exist? What if we refuse to sell our bodies and our own aesthetic sensibilities to cultural hegemons?
We might just discover the truth of another old saying: that beauty (as sold in the marketplace) is skin deep.
Hari C. (Indian, working in media field)
