My first inclination when seeing this thread was to post something stupid like: "You mean women over 25 are actually NAKED under their clothes?? EEEEEWWWWWWWWWW!!!"
Living in America (or any western country, for that matter) nowadays is to be fed a daily diet of crap that would lead a space alien, attempting to learn about us through only our media, to believe that the entire population consists of anorexic blondes and ripped GQ centerfolds under the age of 30.
How boring.
Whilst nursing my New Year's hangover yesterday afternoon I took advantage of the "Twilight Zone" marathon on the Sci-Fi channel...ever see the episode called "Number 12 Looks Just Like You"? The premise is that sometime in the future (Rod Serling makes it the year 2000--droll, innit?) when people reach maturity they will be "transformed" into perfect specimens according to the aesthetic standards of their society; they basically pick one of several available models from a catalogue & then go about wearing badges so people will know it's their mother & not the lady next door, etc.
It was pretty amusing, not least because the aesthetics of this high-tech future bore a striking resemblance to those of, oh, 1962, but the point was nevertheless taken that when we narrow our idea of what is beautiful, or even acceptably "attractive" to such an artificial, shallow & superficial degree, we risk a pretty homogenized (and dull as hell!) world.
In this day, when a television program like "Extreme Makeover" has people literally competing to be surgically altered to better resemble the artificial images force-fed us by Madison Avenue, the notion doesn't seem too sci-fi, does it?
For my part, I had the opportunity to see Vanessa Redgrave play Prospero(!) in a production of "The Tempest" at the new Globe Theatre a few years ago, and as groundlings we were literally 10 feet from her...the woman's face is so arresting, so full of character & intelligence, so BEAUTIFUL, that the notion of wanting to exchange it for that of someone without a tenth of her wisdom or experience is nothing short of obscene, not to say just plain dumb.