photos: Oliver Rath
Last night I had a friendly party smalltalk with a woman who is writing her thesis about vagina design. She informed me about the cultural implications of plastic surgery down under and about the latest trends of vagina aesthetics (not the biggest expert in the matter). You can read some of her ideas in the article she wrote for the Berlin newspaper Der Freitag.
What I found quite interesting is that a vagina plastic surgery could cause infertility and definitely more pain and problems during pregnancy. Interesting because a designed vagina may improve your sex life (really???) but not your procreation. Beauty trends that work against procreation are something I am really interested in. Is the prettiest cunt the one getting the most love and attention and from a Darwinist point of view has the biggest chance of survival? Why I think that might be true for Beverly Hills but definitely not for Berlin, where beauty always has something to do with destruction, after the jump.
The mainstream perspective on beauty is probably the same here in Berlin as everywhere else. Still, like in any other big city, we have the luck to have more peers following a more post-modern way of thinking and elaborate tastes than in smaller towns. The beauty theory I want to share with you is more about a certain circle of people (I am really trying to avoid any specification, but if you want to make it easy call them hipsters).
Normaly, if you want to explain what humans find beautiful in other human beings it has a lot do with evolution. We like pretty white teeth, clean skin, full hair, a muscular body because they are indicators of health and strength. Being surrounded by healthy people was in former times an important strategy of survival. Spending time with healthy people made sure that you would be healthy as well (less danger of infection and so on). Having sex with healthy people would make sure that your progeny would be healthy and hade more chance of survival as well.
The Berliners seem not very inclined to follow that theory. Looking fucked-up from last night’s party seem to enhance the attractiveness of the individual. Some of my friends repeatedly say that they are physically attracted to people who don’t look very healthy to me. Actually they look more dead then alive to me. Girls and boys skinny to their bones, with eyes big and empty like windows to a concrete-sealed backyard and a skin tone that would make Madame Tussaud’s wax figures quite jealous.
Differently from the suicide girl trend, which could be confused with that, these boys and girls are not trying to portray a fucked-up person. They simply are. And most of them are quite unhappy with the way they look. Still I wonder why so many people feel so much attraction to these Berlin zombie kids and define them as beautiful. Did photographers like Larry Clark from the 90’s form our taste of today to a degree that being fucked up is something beautiful? Or is it an antagonistic trend against the yoga and health behaviour of our parents and mainstream media? It honestly confuses me and makes me think how can I feel pretty in a city where ‘wasted’ and ‘good looking’ seem to go hand in hand. Perhaps Berliners don’t bring their cunt to a plastic surgeon but for sure they do a lot of stupid shit and they think it makes them beautiful. In a way partying three days in a row has nothing to do with having fun anymore, it’s just a paradox beauty ritual that nobody seems to be aware of.
Like in any local culture you’re are only as beautiful as the people around you, think you are.
photos: Oliver Rath
