Your bleached, tweezed or groomed eyebrows are deeply problematic, writes a freshman at Louisiana State University.
It sounds like a first-world problem to us, but Lynne Bunch insists that “all around the world, there is too much importance placed on the hair that sits above the eyes.”
Bunch proceeds to put far too much importance on eyebrows and “eyebrow culture,” which she says is “too intense and unforgiving” and can lead to women being “ridiculed and ostracized.”
(We can’t think of a single example of a woman being banished from society because of sub-par brows, but if you’ve got it, send it our way.)
Basically any way a woman styles her eyebrows is offensive, Bunch writes.
Aspire to full eyebrows? That’s “a prime example of cultural appropriation in the country,” Bunch says, because she thinks that “a lot of ethnic women have always had busy, harder-to-maintain eyebrows.”
On the other hand, women who pluck or bleach their eyebrows are also perhaps running culturally afoul, because some people have no eyebrows or very light ones. And heavily tweezed or lightened eyebrows might hurt their feelings, Bunch thinks.
“Whether they lost their eyebrows because of sickness, disorders or their natural eyebrow color appears nearly invisible, most women try almost everything to look ‘normal’ to those around them. … Living with no eyebrows is a constant struggle because without them, society deems women ugly or abnormal,” Bunch writes with the full confidence of someone who has not yet celebrated her 20th birthday.
She’s particularly concerned about that one time Kendall Jenner, who said she once plucked out all of her eyebrows on “a totally weird whim.”
Bunch thinks Jenner’s one-time obsession sounds like “the main symptom of trichotillomania,” a disorder causing sufferers to pull out their hair. Only 0.0006 percent of Americans suffer from this condition, according to the Mayo Clinic’s count.
Unfortunately, the clinic doesn’t keep statistics about the number of people with this condition who also be butt-hurt by someone else’s bleached eyebrows.
Nonetheless, Bunch is pretty sure that Jenner’s eyebrow-plucking, as well as her explanation for it is “insulting… because doing so is an actual disorder many people struggle with.”
We find the entire argument eyebrow-raising.
