Culture heavily impacts beauty standards because beauty standards are a social construct unique to every culture. When we think of beauty in the US, those standards are completely different from beauty standards in other places. With this being said, I also believe that there is a formation today of a global culture that creates feminine beauty standards globally as we see other cultures desire Western beauty standards. 

Feminine beauty standards are often connected to worth for women. In China, footbinding was used as a status symbol and to prove that a woman was ready for marriage because she was disciplined and obeyed orders (See, 2005). In the footbinding piece, See uses the interpretive theoretical perspective through an autoethnographic example of footbinding in China, she gives an individual’s account of a cultural aspect and explains what it means through her eyes. In doing so, she gives us an inside look at the practice, what young girls have to endure, and what happens if you disobey. See tells of one of the girls who disobey during the footbinding process. She is repeatedly told that she is worthless, gets worse care than the others and eventually dies from infection (See, 2005). Not only is this a matter of beauty, but it is also a matter of life and death. If stopped abruptly, this practice would totally change the value of women. In the See piece, women who do not bind their feet are treated as second class citizens (even more than women already are) and seen as a disgrace. I imagine that this practice stopping altogether would also create rifts between generations as See mentioned the only time her mother seemed to show care for her was around the binding ritual (See,2005). It would also take the potential for social mobility. For See, her feet were special and she was told she could have perfect feet if binding was done right and she could marry way up the social ladder (See, 2005). Without this practice, women might feel hopeless about their lot in life. 

For female circumcision, the practice also has connotations that allow women to feel worthy or not shameful of their bodies. For the women in the Sudanese villages, from one of the articles, to not be circumcised was to be an unfit Muslim woman, “if you’re Muslim you must be circumcised because circumcision is the direction to Islam,” (Newland, 2006). For the Muslim women, this went both ways — men are to be circumcised too if they are to follow Islam (Newland, 2006). This shows Newland’s feminist perspective, throughout the piece she compares male and female circumcision with a focus on the practice for females, in this way she looks at how this practice specifically impacts women. For women in the African diaspora, circumcision is a part of life but is being impacted by Western ideals. The function of this practice was never connected with decreasing sexual pleasure for women like Fuambai Ahmadu, but she states that with younger generations more women are making connections between sexual pleasure and the practice (Ahmadu, 2007). Ahmadu, too, uses the feminist perspective to examine how these practices impact women and are looked at by women from the diaspora, from Africa and Westerners. She uses this piece to really challenge the notions about female circumcision. 

In regards to plastic surgery, I think this a topic that I already see in my daily life, while not typically a vaginoplasty. Similarly to the other two practices, plastic surgery is used to change the female body into something more desirable. Unlike the other two practices, it is not something universal about a culture or that someone gets shunned for not having but it related to how women feel about themselves and how society perceives them. In the film, we see why women decide to get surgery and many of them feel like they aren’t “normal” due to their friends, the media, pornography or many other things (Leach, 2009). This film also uses the feminist perspective because it looks how we view feminine beauty, why we do certain things to uphold those standards and why women feel they need to do such a thing to be valued or feel pretty. 

The Newland piece gives us a look at what happens with there are rules to abruptly stop cultural practices such as female circumcision: the governments are put at a crossroads between allowing cultural practices to continue often among people are indigenous or who are not fairly represented in government in order to comply with Western global agencies such as the UN (2006). For the women who believe in this practice, self-worth can be impacted as well as their connection to their God. In Indonesia, the practice is so intertwined with religion that there attempts by agencies to try to logically reason that the practice outdated religion so it can’t be connected when it actuality somehow makes that claim does not understand the evolutionary aspect of culture: it is constantly changing (Newland, 2006). Additionally, I believe that practices like this would still continue even if it was banned, it would make the procedure go underground often more expensive and dangerous for women. 

Ahamdu, F. (2007). Chapter 12- Ain’t I a Woman Too?. Transcultural Bodies: Female Genital Cutting in a Global Context. Rutgers University Press. 

Newland, L. (2006). Female circumcision: Muslim identities and zero tolerance policies in rural West Java. Women’s Studies International Forum. 

See, L. (2005). Chapter 1- Footbinding. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan. New York: Random House Publishing. 

Leach, H. (2009). “The Perfect Vagina”. Retrieved from https://vimeo.com/groups/145051/videos/4704237