Arnaud,
I've ordered a copy of Good Hair as well. :) There are excellent scholarly sources on [[hair straightening]] in the black community. I dropped a few on the article's talk page, but it's just the tip of the iceberg. I may do some work on the article. Any help by editors better qualified than me welcome!
I agree about the Black Girls video. My wife showed it to me a few months ago, and it's stayed with me ever since.
As for your other point, about unnecessary surgery, Sarah spotted that we had some frankly misleading before/after plastic surgery pictures in a number of articles on female genitalia (uploaded by a plastic surgeon, no less). There were also two (2) in the vulva article. I found that quite perturbing.
Best, Andreas
--- On Wed, 21/9/11, Arnaud HERVE arnaudherve@x-mail.net wrote:
From: Arnaud HERVE arnaudherve@x-mail.net Subject: Re: [Gendergap] Black skins To: "Increasing female participation in Wikimedia projects" gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org Date: Wednesday, 21 September, 2011, 0:15
On 20/09/2011 01:10, Andreas Kolbe wrote:
Not only worth watching but compulsory watching, I think. Thanks Andreas for this great link. I'll be watching the movie Good Hair next week-end.
Yes I suspect light brown caffelatte skin is becoming a sort of norm now. In fact by watching American TV series, I would not be surprised if the light brown woman is the one who's here to stay and join the team, and the dark brown woman is the one being killed during the episode, or not a recurring character.
On a more general scale, I first became aware of the dangers of unnecessary surgery by working for sports instructors a few years ago. If you imagine that sports physical enhancement will remain forever the mere injection of chemicals, well you're wrong. There is going to be carbon-fiber bones, all sorts of weird things.
Now as far as average women are concerned, there is a deadly combination of :
- the natural tendancy of women to take care of their appearance - new bio technologies - business interests eager to combine the two.
But that will create Frankenstein's monsters really. Uneducated women are going to get convinced that their shoulders are too large, their hips to narrow, their humerus too long... it will really become crazy and extend to whatever possible.
And then there is the problem of the consequences when growing older. In this case of skin whitening, even if the laboratory says it's safe, it nevertheless compulsorily means intervening in the skin as deep as the pigments, so frankly it doesn't sound that good to me.
So I would compare it to food disorders or pathological gambling. Even if adults do that of their own free will, responsible institutions should not go that way.
Arnaud
_______________________________________________ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap