Beauty is Pain

Last week while we were listening to the different initiation stories, I noticed that when it came to some of the initiations for women, it was to make them more beautiful.  These painful experiences these women went through, such as having their teeth chiseled and scaring of the face, was found to make them more beautiful to the men in their community.  While in our own country we may not chisel our teeth for looks, we have our own share of strange things we are willing to go through to be seen as beautiful.  All you have to do is look at the world of plastic surgery.  A few weeks back, I was browsing through Netflix at different TV shows and saw one that made me stop just by the name.  Bridalplasty.  In the show women fight each other to receive different procedures, of which you can see them while they recover.  All of these surgeries recovers looked awful.  Bruising, stitches, and pain were written across the faces of these women as they lay in bed days after receiving the procedure.  Who would ever want to receive something that would cause so much pain?  But as you look through the centuries, endured pain for the sake of beauty can be found over and over again.  Foot binding in China was thought to make a women's feet more beautiful. Lip plates in Southern Africa are inserted before a women is to be married.  Corsets were worn to give a woman a smaller waist.  Whether physically forced or not, these woman felt to pressure, just as we do now, to be involved in these practices to maintain her appearance of beauty to those around her.