Are You Happy with the Shape of Your Bikini Wax?

A response to an article I just read:
Are You Happy with the Shape of Your Bikini Wax? by Gloria Feldt

This article got me thinking, because I just read another article on this topic earlier in the week, about how women are more unhappy today than supposedly 'before'. Also, this was written by my second cousin (mother's cousin) so shout out to her too, though the article itself has nothing to do with art, it is focused on the female as consumer, which is totally relevant.

I just turned in the following long-winded comment, but it felt goooood...

The issue of woman as consumer is an issue at the heart of post-modernism and which has become an essential element in much art that came afterwards. This concept of consumerism as identity has been at the heart of the feminist art scene since Cindy Sherman's ‘Film Stills’ and Joan Jonas's 'Organic Honey', both artists were commenting on how the over-saturation of media forced confusing issues of identity onto women. Granted, identity was an issue long before the 70s, however it was the proliferation of media that evolved alongside the feminist movement that created a confusing and even hypocritical dichotomy between the opportunities available for the contemporary woman. One, the opportunity within media, i.e. visual culture, was inevitably reduced to the woman as object, while the opportunities that became available outside of this reduction, such as in the workplace or the home, gave the woman the ability to be something other-than this object. Because of media’s reduction of femaleness to a product of consumerism, women never had the chance to escape that reduction as our culture is completely and irrevocably saturated with imagery; the only way to fight this assumption is to avert our eyes, a precarious proposition.

I don’t think it is that women are unhappy about opportunities they gained through feminism, (as I often read in oblivious commentaries online) I think women are unhappy about media’s transparent position that a woman should still have the same absorption with personal presentation and being an object of sexual desire as she should saving the world.

We are not blind, women are unhappy because the media is propagating a stereotype that no-one wants, a stereotype that suggests that ‘being’ is only skin deep.