The other day at work I waited on a Middle Eastern-woman who seemed pretty wealthy. She was dressed really fashionably, and also very young for her age. She looked to be about in her mid forties. She looked "good" for her age, but it was obvious that she had gone through many plastic surgery procedures to get her good looks. I could tell that she had had collagen implants in her lips, a nose job, and a face lift, or at least an upper "brow" lift. I was really surprised at the fact that a middle-Eastern woman would have plastic surgery. Most of that surprise is probably just my biases, especially the fact that I haven't really been exposed to a large number of middle-Eastern women to begin with. Most of the middle-Eastern people I see in general dress very conservatively, or are in business clothes, or are students. Some of my surprise at this woman also made me question the standards of beauty we have set in this country, and how they may apply to other countries.
We "Americans," aka, people from the United States who think we own the whole continent, are so quick to carry everything we think is "democratic" and "right" and "free" to other countries, sometimes perhaps even enforcing our values on others. Beauty, although not politics, is a very pertinent issue in the U.S., so I wonder if our beauty standards are also something we've tried to push overseas. The woman at my workplace seemed to at least like our culture's standards of beauty, whether they were similar or different from her own country's.
Just an end note: it always makes me laugh that when men show the signs of age, like gray hair and wrinkles, we call them "distinguished," and consider them wise. We admire them for their old age. But when women get older, we find their wrinkles ugly. They are no longer beautiful. They are taught to strive to be forever young...and by a man's standard, that means forever undistinguished, unwise.
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