An Ode to Women and the Pain They Endure

Image via Christian Louboutin

For hundreds of years, women in China broke their toes, grotesquely bent back their feet, then bound them with long ribbons of silk. As time passed, arches broke further and began to fuse with their heels, often leaving girls unable to walk by themselves. The fashion was to have teeny tiny feet. Until the late 13th century, this was a status symbol among the elite, marking women as refined and desirable. 

In Victorian England, women wore corsets reinforced with whalebone, drawing them tight to create small waists. Wearing corsets frequently meant restricted breathing, created digestive issues, and even distorted the curvature of women’s ribs and spines. 

Image via Susana Aikin

Since the dawn of time, or should I say since the dawn of fashion, women have undergone painful procedures to alter their appearance to fit with the latest trends. Though the methods of torture have changed over time and permanent harm has most definitely been reduced, the pain that women are willing to endure persists. 

When I was a young girl, my mother would put my thick hair into french braids or twisted updos for special occasions. As she would brush, detangle, pull, and manipulate my hair with her deft fingers, I would inevitably cry out in pain and she would repeat the same Bulgarian adage, told to her by her mother: “endure, Baba, for beauty.” Why grandma is the subject here, I’m still not sure, but the point of the proverb is that in order to be beautiful, women must endure pain. 

Image: Hanna Hillier

In the modern world, we get lip fillers, rhinoplasty, botox, implants. Waist trainers are the modern corset (although those, thankfully, have gone out of fashion already). We strap our feet into tall stilettos; it makes us feel tall, confident, beautiful. Christian Louboutin famously said, “high heels are pleasure with pain.” 

We wear clothes that poke and prod, strangle and squeeze. We tweeze our eyebrows, undergo laser hair removal, and Brazilian waxes. We wear plumping lip glosses that burn and tingle.

When we were teenagers, we did stupid and dangerous things to mimic more expensive alterations. Who could forget the Kylie Jenner lip challenge?

Image: Dali Ma via Dali studio

How I feel about what women are willing to put themselves through is complicated. Young girls in China had their feet broken before puberty; the lack of autonomy here is horrific. There are women all over the world who are still bleaching their skin to appear whiter; the insinuation that paleness is equivalent to beauty is appalling too. 

But high heels, corsets, waxing? I mean, why not? With most beauty and fashion trends, there is a perpetuation of Western beauty standards of which I am very wary. It is only because of western standards that we feel we must remove our body hair or have straight noses. Yet, at the same time, there is something incredibly beautiful about how far women are willing to go for the sake of aesthetics. It demonstrates our strength, our resilience, our adaptability.

Image: Justin Bartels via Cosmopolitan

In Renaissance Italy, signoras put belladonna (eye drops made from nightshade extract) to temporarily enlarge their pupils in order to look like the dreamy, romantic girls in paintings, resulting in blurry vision, and in the long term, blindness. If you’ve ever had your eyes dilated at the optometrist’s office, it’s the same effect.

The pain that women have experienced through history is immeasurable. Did you know that women are designed to forget pain, to rewrite our own experiences and convince ourselves that whatever hurt us wasn’t as painful as it really was? This is a biological trait that exists to ensure that women will continue to have children, even after having experienced childbirth. 

That pain and beauty are intertwined is simply a part of our reality. Unless what we think is beautiful changes, that is a truth that we must live with. Whether or not you choose to partake is up to you, and if you choose not to, it does not mean you are any less beautiful. As someone who (usually) places the most value in comfort, I have a deep respect for those women who choose the pain of beauty.