"To what purpose are powers limited, and to what purpose is that limitation committed to writing,
if these limits may, at any time, be passed by those intended to be restrained?"
-- Chief Justice John Marshall, Marbury v. Madison, 1803

Monday, April 11, 2005

Think people in Muslim countries worry about crap like this?

HEARD of sphincter bleaching? Beauticians are billing it as the new Brazilian wax.

“In the last couple of months I’ve had a lot of requests, so I’ve started some experiments,” says Sydney beautician Anna Marsiano from The Bees’ Knees salon.

“I’ve got one client who’s a divorced woman with a couple of kids. She was looking at a Playboy magazine with her new boyfriend and he was making some comments about how clean and light the women looked. My client started to get a little paranoid.”

Marsiano says she uses a herbal brand popular in the Philippines as a facial whitener. It is applied to the dark pigmentation around women’s rectums as well as to their vaginal areas. Marsiano says the product does not damage the skin and has “rejuvenating” properties.

But another Sydney beautician, asked about her anal lightening equipment, produces a completely different product altogether. It’s a cream that clearly states it is designed to be used on hair. This beautician has treated sex workers and strippers for years, but says mainstream demand has risen sharply over the past six months. She acknowledges that her long-term clients (many of whom come in for treatments every six weeks) suffer serious skin problems. “I explain that it will give them eczema and so on, but they want it anyway,” she says.

Hard-line feminists will no doubt respond with an outraged “What will the misogynist patriarchy do to us next?” (possibly staging some sort of “reclaim the date” march). The cosmetic entrepreneurs, meanwhile, are bound to capitalise on the controversy by selling DIY backdoor bleaching kits (possibly along the lines of the personalised mouth moulds provided for teeth whitening).

As with all debates about society’s relentless pursuit of beauty, however, the answer to “how much is too much?” is hard to ascertain.

Oh, I think most people will agree that we’ve definitely crossed the “too much” threshhold here. First it was teen nosejobs, then breast implants.  Just wait until the day your little girl comes to you and asks to have her browneye bleached.  “But Dad, if a guy goes to do me up the butt and my thing is all brown and grody I’ll just die, I swear!”