What is the most shocking thing you have ever seen in China?
- Source: Global Times
- [22:55 February 08 2010]
- Comments
Tiego Levine, a Brazilian student in Shanghai
Plastic surgery
I suppose the most shocking thing I've seen in China is plastic surgery. Well, to be specific, plastic surgery advertisements.
I haven't spent any time as a voyeur in the operating room, and the cosmetic work is so good that I rarely notice if a girl has had a nose job unless I vividly remember her old nose.
But the ubiquity of plastic surgery advertising does get to me. It's not unknown in Brazil, but a little more discreet.
Even the taxi ads invite women to boost their bra size, heighten their cheekbones, or flatten their eyelids.
I think Chinese women are naturally very lovely and it disturbs me that notions of fake beauty are being forced upon a diverse and delightful population.
It goes along with the pressures of dieting; a new development in a country where being fat was once a status symbol (and still is for men).
Women with perfectly healthy builds are now being forced to count calories and starve themselves into an image of fashion magazine beauty about as natural for them as blonde hair and blue eyes.
The ads that really startled me, however, were the ones for hymen reconstruction – in other words, fake virginity.
They're scattered all over the back pages of Chinese newspapers.
Fortunately for me, back in my hometown, most young women see their virginity as an unfortunate burden to be disposed of as soon as possible.
But Chinese young ladies seem to miss it once it's gone – or at least to want to fool potential husbands.
I think the entire notion that women must remain virgins while men sew their wild oats as much as they want is rank hypocricy.
The idea that some poor women are putting themselves through unnecessary surgery just to conform to an outdated. and patriarchal notion of how women should behave shocks and disgusts me.
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