Although the beauty standard du jour has only recently become blond hair, red lips, big breasts, small waist, shaven va-jay-jay, patriarchal society has long pressured women into giving up time, money, and sanity to conform to bizaire, unhealthy standards.
Corsets may seem like a glamorous undergarment of the Victorian era and cabarets, but the phenomenon of tight lacing, or lacing a corset very tightly as to achieve the smallest waistline possible, is hardly attractive to a modern audience when the internal organs start to squish together and realign.
Oscar Wilde (his feelings on fashion grace this post's title) may be our favorite elaborately dressed, “indecent,” quick-witted gay guy, but his half-sisters weren’t so lucky. After using copious amounts of crinoline to give them those 19th century Bootylicious behinds, their underskirts caught aflame, and their burned killed them, thus illustrating the importance of being burn-less… (I never said I was as witty or tactful as Oscar.).
The media portrays Queen Elizabeth as a strong willed woman with fiery red hair and shocking white skin. Her paleness, however, was far from natural. A sick child, the grown-up Virgin Queen coated her face in white powder to cover up the marks. Empress Josephine, the go-to-gal of Napoleon, was similarly self-conscious of her hands, and constantly wore opera gloves.
When entertainment is watching women endure harsh and unsafe beauty treatments (with glue on their heads, fun!) for the mere goal of contorting their way to fame, we need to be reminded that beauty, or at least beauty as defined by society, truly can lead to pain.
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