Just before diving into a swimming pool last summer, I noticed that my friend no longer had hair on his chest.
I nearly belly-flopped.
My friend had apparently waxed away his nickname, Hairy Potter.
“Did it hurt?” I asked, choking on some water.
“Sure. But I read tons of articles in Men’s Health pointing out that girls prefer guys with smooth, visible abs. All the male models and celebrities are clean-shaven and buff. I thought I should get with the times.”
Unfortunately, “the times” have given my generation a perverted perception of beauty. On TV, we watch shows glorifying plastic surgery, makeovers and beauty contests. On magazine covers, we find digitally enhanced bombshells and sculpted hunks. When we buy music, we’re sold a face rather than a voice.
It should come as little surprise, given these times, that teens not only obsess about beauty, but also use extreme means to achieve it. Long ago, girls might have applied excessive makeup or pierced their ears. Now, they get breast implants and liposuctions.
According to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, 11,326 teenage girls got breast implants and more than 210,000 teenagers underwent other cosmetic procedures in 2004. Two girls I know in Colorado proudly received breast implants as high school graduation gifts last year from their parents.
Compared with the early 1990s, when fewer than 1,000 teenage girls got implants, the new millennium marks a dramatic increase in such procedures.
But teens don’t always resort to doctors when they want to dramatically alter their appearance. Instead, we sometimes take matters into our own hands. Most of the 8 million people who have eating disorders in the United States are teens. As many as 5 percent of college-aged women are bulimic. This is not natural.
Then again, neither is the media’s portrayal of beauty. MTV’s “I Want a Famous Face,” Fox’s “The Swan,” FX Network’s “Nip/Tuck,” ABC’s “Extreme Makeover,” and UPN’s “America’s Next Top Model” encourage my generation to devote ourselves to achieving physical perfection. We have become obsessed with looks and willing to use any available means to improve our appearance. When parents foot the bill, available means include liposuction, Botox injections, breast implants and rhinoplasty.
It is not the natural desire to look beautiful, but the unnatural standards of beauty that uniquely affect my generation.
These ridiculously high beauty standards have only recently been foisted upon guys, which is bad news for scrawny dudes like me. Dictionaries have even added a word to describe the growing number of males who “enhance their personal appearance by fastidious grooming, beauty treatments, and fashionable clothes”: metrosexuals.
The modern man is supposed to have “six-pack” abs and massive biceps. This often requires spending an inordinate amount of time in the gym and using steroids. Hair removal and pectoral and calf implants have also become increasingly popular among males.
According to a recent Harvard study, almost 5 percent of teenage boys use potentially unhealthy products, ranging from protein powders to injectable steroids, at least weekly to improve appearance or strength. Alison Field, a lead researcher on the study, argues that teens turn to these supplements to achieve the impossible – the sculpted physiques in advertisements that are often shaded to make the bodies look as if they have more muscle definition. “Girls’ concerns about their bodies are well known, but I don’t think it’s on a parent’s radar screen that their sons might have body [image] concerns,” Field says.
Apparently we young people don’t read Hawthorne’s classic short story, “The Birthmark,” closely enough when it’s assigned in high school. As we seek to defy the limits of natural beauty, Hawthorne’s admonition about obsessing over natural imperfections is even more pertinent today than it was 150 years ago. His tale describes the destructiveness of trying to achieve physical perfection through operations. The protagonist realizes too late the need to accept, rather than erase, minor beauty flaws.
In 2006, we shouldn’t make that same mistake.
When I next saw my friend, his chest was again covered with hair. When I asked him why, he said: “I guess it’s grown on me.”
Hopefully the rest of us can accept this natural conclusion.
Denver native Michael Koenigs (mckoenigs@hotmail.com) is a sophomore at Harvard University.
