Tanning

Tanning is a body practice that has gone rampant recently. It seems that every time I turn on the television, there’s a sun kissed celebrity urging me to rid myself of my Minnesotan paleness. In our society, tan is considered beautiful and pale is considered less than beautiful. Girls now spend tons of money and time tanning their bodies in order to be considered attractive by our cultural standards. This is an example of Susan Bordo’s “docile bodies”. Girls wouldn’t feel the need to darken their skin if there were no social impulses to tell them to do so.

Tanning is an interesting “double bind” in which being tan is considered beautiful and healthy, yet doing so is in fact extremely unhealthy. It is rare to find a true “healthy tan.” Tanning is the skin cells way of letting us know that it is damaged. It baffles me that our culture values a practice that in and of itself displays damage, not health. The term “tanning” is also used to refer to a process of making animal skins into leather, which is essentially what humans do to their own skin when they tan in the sun or tanning beds for long periods of time. In the long term, tanning actually gives you thick, leathery, wrinkly skin and accelerates aging. However, our culture doesn’t appear to give much thought to this as they market tanning salon memberships to young women as if they’re doing them a favor. Now, don’t get me wrong: moderate amounts of sun exposure can be beneficial to your health because vitamin D is transmitted through the sun’s rays. However, the amount of sun exposure needed for the benefits is far smaller than the amount needed to get a truly golden tan.

I would also consider tanning to be a “pursuit without terminus” because of the nature of the skin itself. Once someone finally gets their perfect tan, they have to continue to go to the tanning salon or lay out regularly in order to maintain the tan, or it will quickly fade away. Once the skin cells heal, you’ll be pale again! You simply cannot have that. Girls who tan are quickly addicted to the process because they like how it makes them look, they like how it makes others look at them. This is part of their “other-oriented social economy,” because most girls (and guys even!) tan because it makes other people view them as attractive, and they want other people to want them.