{"id":22910,"date":"2016-04-13T08:06:08","date_gmt":"2016-04-13T15:06:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spijue.wpengine.com\/news\/chinese-women-getting-mixed-signals-on-beauty-roles-on-social-media\/"},"modified":"2016-04-13T08:06:08","modified_gmt":"2016-04-13T15:06:08","slug":"chinese-women-getting-mixed-signals-on-beauty-roles-on-social-media","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/news\/chinese-women-getting-mixed-signals-on-beauty-roles-on-social-media\/","title":{"rendered":"Chinese women getting mixed signals on beauty, roles on social media"},"content":{"rendered":"

BEIJING<\/strong> \u2014 Chinese women are being taken on a roller-coaster ride by social media, getting bombarded on one side by extreme expectations about physical beauty while getting support for female independence in a society where women who aren\u2019t married by their late 20s are considered \u201cleftovers.\u201d<\/p>\n

In recent months, social media here has been swept by a series of body image crazes. The \u201cA4 waist\u201d fad challenged women see how skinny they were by posting photos of their middles to show that a piece of standard copy paper 21 centimeters (8\u00bc inches) wide covered their waists.<\/p>\n

Then \u201ciPhone knees\u201d tested whether a cellphone would cover the knees, an indication of slender legs. Most recently, the \u201c100-yuan wrist\u201d had women showing they could wrap a bank note around their wrists.<\/p>\n

The online fads \u2014 slammed by women\u2019s advocates as unhealthy and emotionally harmful to women who feel like they don\u2019t measure up \u2014 come even as Chinese women are attaining higher educational, professional and economic status than ever. Yet as they try to break old barriers, women still feel pressure to meet cultural expectations about getting married in their early 20s, having children and being the main caregiver \u2014 as well as traditional notions equating slenderness with feminine beauty.<\/p>\n

\u201cMale-oriented aesthetics still dominate the mainstream, and the Internet or the new media have magnified this proclivity,\u201d said Beijing-based social scholar Wu Qiang.<\/p>\n

Taking the opposite tack \u2014 and also garnering lots of attention \u2014 has been a four-minute online ad by a cosmetics brand SK-II that depicts the struggles of unmarried women in their late 20s.<\/p>\n

The video starts with several women talking in painful tones about the pressures they face from family and society. A few parents also appear, including one father who tells his daughter he won\u2019t be able to go peacefully to his grave until she\u2019s married off. But it ends with the women speaking confidently about their right to choose their way of life, including one who says she\u2019s happy being single.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe campaign really is to inspire women to overcome their limitations, to make their own destiny,\u201d said Markus Strobel, global president for the cosmetic line, which is owned by Procter & Gamble Co.<\/p>\n

Since being posted on the brand\u2019s official microblog on April 7, the video has received nearly 5,000 likes and been shared more than 25,000 times. Altogether, the video has been viewed nearly 10 million times globally on all platforms, garnering more than 3.9 million comments, likes, shares and reposts, Strobel said.<\/p>\n

The company chose to feature \u201cleftover women\u201d in China because it\u2019s a topic much discussed, he said. All characters in the video \u2014 the women and their parents \u2014 are non-actors discussing their real-life struggles, he said.<\/p>\n

Women\u2019s rights activist Zheng Churan said she welcomed the ad despite its obvious commercial motives. Too often, however, the stereotype of the \u201cleftover woman\u201d ignores the struggles of poor, less-educated women, she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe only see white-collar, elite women in this ad, but an 18-year-old factory girl pressed into marriage still has no voice,\u201d Zheng said.<\/p>\n

Fellow advocate Li Tingting said the popularity of the video is a sign that Chinese women have become more independent.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s progress, compared to most other ads where women are expected to get married,\u201d Li said. \u201cThe fact it has gone viral shows there have been changes in women\u2019s attitudes.\u201d<\/p>\n

While seeking to empower women, the ad also speaks to how Chinese women have grown more conscious of their looks than ever. Workplace discrimination has frequently prompted women to undergo cosmetic surgery in hopes of gaining an edge in the job market, and in many cases, attracting a desirable husband.<\/p>\n

Before the most recent body image crazes, the test to pass for being slender was whether a woman could wrap one of her arms around her back to reach her navel. Then came a test to see how many coins a woman could balance on her collarbone \u2014 supposedly to demonstrate a sculpted figure.<\/p>\n

While women\u2019s attitudes are changing, those of parents and society are taking much more time. The SK-II video depicts the Shanghai \u201cmarriage market,\u201d where parents display information about their daughters in public parks in hopes of finding a suitor.<\/p>\n

Zheng Lei, a 30-year-old Beijing man, said that while women have worked hard to become attractive, they also have become too picky and demanding.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey demand the men to have money, houses, cars and urban residency permits. But there are only one thousand men who are able to meet this demand. Of course these women are left,\u201d Zheng said. \u201cSo women should lower their demands and be realistic.\u201d<\/p>\n

___<\/p>\n

Associated Press videojournalist Aritz Parra contributed to this report.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BEIJING \u2014 Chinese women are being taken on a roller-coaster ride by social media, getting bombarded on one side by extreme expectations about physical beauty while getting support for female independence in a society where women who aren\u2019t married by their late 20s are considered \u201cleftovers.\u201d In recent months, social media here has been swept […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":22911,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[65],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-22910","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-nation-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22910","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22910"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22910\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22911"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22910"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22910"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22910"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=22910"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}