Beauty, Women's Bodies and the Law - Performances in Plastic

Scutt, Jocelynne (2020) Beauty, Women's Bodies and the Law - Performances in Plastic. Springer Nature / Palgrave Macmillan, United Kingdom. ISBN 9783030279974

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Abstract

The proposition that women’s bodies can be allowed to walk daily on the street, exist in the paid workplace or appear anywhere in public without enhancement or embellishment is becoming less and less acceptable. Just as clothing maketh the woman, with employer demands that women wear high-heels to the office, renounce trousers or pants in the executive suite, behind the receptionist desk, working at a computer terminal, seated in a work cubicle or anywhere else on a business premises, so too with women’s personal attributes. Once, make-up, false eyelashes, tattooed eyeliner and false bosoms were the signature of a woman on the stage, or a signal that she haunted alleys and backstreets in hope of a paying customer, or appeared in movies labelled ‘porn’. In the 21st century, these are signifiers of mainstream woman. Hence, in 2011 a ‘team of scientists and psychologists’ from Harvard and Boston Universities in collaboration with the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, disclosed data gleaned from their study that women wearing make-up are perceived as ‘more competent, attractive, likeable and trustworthy’. The study’s finding was that this follows, whether women are made-up in a ‘natural’, ‘professional’ or ‘glamorous’ style, and whether the images are flashed before the eyes of participants in the study or are viewed by them for more lengthy periods.

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