Chinese women have painted a new portrait of an ideal woman

"I was shocked by the fact that Chinese women today are even more dissatisfied with their bodies than residents of the United States. It allowed me to study how the recent changes in Chinese cultural life could change their attitude towards traditional and contemporary ideals of beauty, "said Chaehi Chung (Jaehee Jung) of the University of Delaware. -United).

The subjective standards of beauty and success between men and women have changed dramatically over the centuries and millennia before.

In fact, all the possible distinctive features of the appearance and character of men and women have managed to visit both the ideal of beauty, masculinity and femininity , and a pattern of ugliness and inappropriate behavior.

For example, many European women of the Renaissance did not try to lose weight and reach the "90-60-90" darlings, but instead tried to "get in shape", trying to look like the heroines of Rubens' paintings. On the contrary, their contemporaries from China sought to turn into a kind of porcelain doll, for which they mutilated their legs, dressing them with special steep shoes from their infancy and using very shiny cosmetics.

Attitudes to life have changed in the same way. In the era of bourgeois revolutions, the image of an independent and physically strong woman was popular, and at the beginning of the last century, fashion women were trying to look like everything, as " dying swan "modest and weak.

As Chun notes, equally dramatic changes have also characterized the history of the middle empire. For example, during the medieval Tang dynasty, women sought to be independent of their husbands and enjoyed a great deal of freedom, whereas traditionalist ideas dominated at the end of the imperial period.

Chun and his colleagues tried to determine how income growth, as well as the progressive penetration of Western culture and values ​​in China, had influenced Chinese women's ideas about physical and psychological ideals.

To do this, they traveled to the University of Shanghai, where they interviewed dozens of students about what they considered to be the main sign of success in their personal lives and what should look like the ideal woman. The results of these surveys have been compared by scientists to similar studies conducted in recent decades.

It has turned out that these ideas have changed a lot over the last ten years. For example, the curvaceous body and round face were considered beautiful in recent years, while angular features and a slender figure have become fashionable. Similarly, the attitude towards cosmetics and plastic surgeries has changed dramatically – today, almost all Chinese women are using or dreaming of going there.

All these changes, as Chun notes, are related to two things: the emergence of new career opportunities in the lives of Chinese women and the influence of Western culture spreading through glossy magazines. mbad media.

"Working women must constantly face the inaccessible ideals of Western beauty. This, coupled with the emergence of their economic independence and social freedom, brings huge profits to cosmetics manufacturers and often leads to the development of bulimia and other problems of typical fashionistas. We can say that the modern standards of beauty in China are absolutely unrealistic, "concludes the sociologist.