Cosmetic surgery and designer babies are, as it first seems, products of our over-indulged, hyper-active 20th century ideals. But what these poster projects reminded us was that these two practices have been around for much much longer. They have existed since the early ages of modern science. What then makes them such hot topics today? Clearly what we have now is the technology to make these two accessible to much more people. The potential for a middle class person to have cosmetic surgery or a designer baby is growing, and so is the desirability. When these surgeries and test tube babies are becoming less of a freakish thing, of course more people are going to consider it worth their money.
But all of the identity issues and ethics aside, I think these two projects bring up a provocative question, one that focuses around beauty in a different way. I'm not talking about whether blonde or brown hair is more beautiful, or whether a guy looks better in a polo. Rather, I'm interested in what seems like a morphing understanding of beauty as a whole, and how the element of "natural" has been displaced by "intentional". Beauty used to exist in the natural world as precious, almost as if it were luck. Some might even say a gift of god. Today it is extremely obvious that our culture has our eyes stuck on the skinny models and the digitally altered pictures. But we know it is fake by now, we get that barbies aren't real. Yet, we have more and more people feeding into that artificial aesthetic. Perhaps our society IS fighting for a new definition of what is beautiful, and that unrealistic air-brushed figure is something to attain. Now what do we do, when what we think is beautiful doesn't fall on luck any more? Something has to play out for an answer, but I don't believe we can go on forever "perfecting" ourselves.
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I really appreciate this post. I like how you really dive deep into the meaning of beauty. I agree that "beauty" has almost become an un-universally-identified word.. or defined differently by each person. A picture of a line could be beautiful to an artist, but not in the same way a model sees beauty in her tanned skin. I think our cultural way of defining beauty will forever be dynamic; changing with environment, culture, and society. I feel like this unrealistic image of the perfect skinny, correctly proportioned, bronzed, healthy woman has been put on this unreachable pedistool for a reason. I think that some women realize that they cannot possible acheive this look, but it's okay because it isn't real.
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