A discussion with my roommates last night, and also with a group of female interns at IJM during lunch hour a few weeks ago, about plastic surgery and the ethics or viewpoint of Christians on the subject has made me rethink and reconsider the issue of physical appearance, a woman's body and our society's obsession with youth and beauty ("lookism").

Here are excerpts from a book written by a Christian woman:

The power of the "beauty myth" must be understood in the context of our history, the body's meaning in that history, and the concrete limits of the body itself. In all of these, there is, however, one thing we have not been able to change: our relationship to our own body and how we negotiate that relationship. In our society, what women have attained in terms of social advancement - education, money, power, status and sexual freedom through contraception and easily available abortion - is meaningless unless we can also be young and beautiful. We've ended up with a need to manipulate our physical images in order to escape reductionistic ideas about our bodies. This despite Betty Friedan's counsel: "The only way for a woman, as for a man, to find herself, to know herself as a person, is by creative work of her own. There is no other way."

....

Thoughtful writers from Naomi Wolf (The Beauty Myth) to Joan Brumberg (The Body Project) have tried to express exactly what is bugging us about our bodies - and why. Feminism has produced a wide variety of reinterpretations of woman's experience in the world. It has rightfully questioned the meaning, value, and place that women have been assigned. It has attempted to provide political and social solutions. But when we look at what has transpired over the last forty years, we find that the enemy is ourselves. We are collaborators in our own marginalization. We have bought into the male standard as the standard for our lives. Our desire to be accepted in the male world leads us to forget that we are not men. But remembering that we are women causes us to return to the same old gender paradigms, because we don't know how else to live.

...

But must we subdue the fertility of the female body and truncate our emotional life to function authentically in a male world? Must we surrender to the images and meaning that our bodies have received in culture, embracing their assigned sexual power to further our own ends? As we silence our body or manipulate its meaning, we end up more alienated than ever, live sculptures for the male gaze and caricatures of ourselves.

- Lilian Calles Barger, Eve's Revenge: Women and a Spirituality of the Body