Cosmetic Surgery, Puritanism and Misguided Vandalism
Posted Under: Feminism,Puritanism
If like me you travel a lot on the underground, you will have noticed the mass of posters that have gone up advertising plastic surgery. You will have also noticed that a vast number of the posters have been vandalised with stickers and scrawlings. A few years ago I would applauded such attacks on an industry widely regarded as reflecting the worst and most oppressive aspects of our culture.
Yet I’ve become increasingly uncomfortable with a great deal of anti-plastic surgery rhetoric. Often one encounters a kind of fetishisation of the natural, a sense that people are, and in fact must be, most beautiful in their natural states, and that messing around with your body is just plain wrong. If you happen to believe in god as the creator humankind, then there may be some mileage in this. If you believe we have evolved through a set of fairly random chemical processes this is primitivist bollocks.
Perhaps more prominent – especially in scrawlings on posters mentioned earlier – is the idea that the plastic surgery industry is oppressive to women. Such a view rather patronisingly posits women who choose to invest in plastic surgery as victims – driven to the scalpel by the pressures of society, but also of their own psychological inadequacies. Yes, there is enormous pressure on women to look good, but this is not the be all and end all. After all many men go in for it.
I would hazard a guess that appearance is one factor which determines the quality/quantity of sexual experiences available to us – no matter how many people hold on to an absurd vision of a utopia in which men and women only see ‘inner beauty’. With this in mind it is reasonable to imagine that an adult man or woman might deem the possibility of a better appearance to be worth the cost, pain and risk of cosmetic surgery.
And is there anything wrong with men and women who make such a calculation. ‘Yes’ is what many people appear to think. Intertwined with the image of victimhood described in the above paragraph is, I believe, a rather puritanical idea that it is shallow and frivolous to undergo pain and expense merely for the sake of looking better. Personally speaking I have no problem with looking like a complete tramp, and get annoyed at spending any more than a tenner on an item of clothing. But I am also able to recognise that this is simply a personal lifestyle preference, and to maintain more than a modicum of respect for those who differ. I do not consider myself more ‘liberated’ than my more sharply dressed friends.
What finally left me feeling vindicated and angry enough to write this post was a vandalised poster that I saw today. Written on it were the words ‘Stop exploiting women’. Yet in the same ink, devil horns had been drawn on the post-plastic surgery woman picture in the poster, and the word ‘Slut’ written. Perhaps this was an abomination. But perhaps it simply made explicitly some of the unjustified, and potentially misogynistic, contempt that characterises ‘well informed’ attitudes towards the industry and its participants.
Reader Comments
Good post. The reason I hate those adverts is different though – it’s because they epitomise the ‘If you buy this record your life will be better’ idea that all adverts try to portray. When your face is jammed up against one on a crowded tube, the reaction is to resent it for offering such a false notion of escape.
Most of the adverts on the Tube tend to be about travel and there are a good few about vitamin supplements and suchlike – all saying ‘It’s not healthy or enjoyable to be here – get out of this place!’ These and the plastic surgery ones target the symptoms without targeting the cause: that the way people are living and working is just too mad and tiring nowadays.
So I think part of why people hate them is not because they patronise women, but because they’re just too falsely upbeat for a depressing commute.
I agree Reuban – quite glad someone has written this!
I had the same shift in feeling also – used to have a knee jerk ‘oh god that’s terrible’ response to plastic surgery – then I interogated that a bit and realised it was a response really based on my own aesthetics rather than politics or logic. As someone who is semi heavily tattooed – how could I possibly have a leg to stand on condemning anyone else for taking needles/knives to their body for their own aesthetic goals – just because they are different and perhaps more mainstream than mine? Why is it that those who do object to plastic surgery don’t object to tattooing/piercing etc?
Because what’s happening at the moment seems to be that rather than a social argument about pressures on women, it becomes about hating / punishing women who choose to have plastic surgery – seeing them as ‘inferior’ ‘stupid’ and ‘overly sexualised’ – as the comments you saw on the underground poster would indicate.
So in other words….another way of punishing women (and indeed some men but both criticism and advertising seems solely directed at men)for making their own choices about their bodies.
that last line in paragraph should read (and indeed some men but both criticism and advertising seems solely directed at women)
Oops!
i think you’re right to criticize the moralistic/primitivist/fetishistic elements that often lie behind objections to plastic surgery. but i also believe that images of idealised beauty have become so ubiquitous (in the west) that it is extremely difficult for most people to resist their influence. i believe it is this influence that lies at the heart of many people’s decision to have cosmetic surgery. right as you are to draw attention to the idiocy of a sentimentalised ‘natural beauty’ (best exemplified in that fucking intolerable song by chrisina aguilera, ‘beautiful’), the fetishisation of a certain imagination of the (mostly) female form is more pernicious, and, it seems to me, revolves around money (in the entertainment and cosmetic industries, for example). this is not to say that all instances of cosmetic surgery are the direct result of all this – i’m sure that for many people the decision to have plastic surgery is an intensely personal one, and i don’t wish to condemn it off-hand – but i do see the larger influences as rather sinister, and i think most people would be a lot happier without them. am i right in thinking that your main objection is to idiotic moralising? the scribbling you described over that poster rather reminds me of the public response to the issues surrounding paedophilia (as satirised in brass eye for e.g.).
My problem with the prevalence of adverts for plastic surgery is the same one I have with those godawful ‘all your debts in one carol vorderman-endorsed easy monthly payment’ – companies preying on the vulnerable with offers of quick fix solutions to deep, difficult problems. For example, there’s some evidence to show that suicide, depression and drug abuse rates are far higher amongst women who have breast implants than amongst those who don’t (http://articles.latimes.com/2007/aug/08/science/sci-implants8), ie the desire for breast implants are indicative of underlying issues that are not solved by the surgery.
Thus the increasing accessibility and acceptance of plastic surgery as something ‘normal’ or purely aesthetic is, in my view, just a cop out from having to actually deal with the psychological problems (which may or may not come from external societal pressures) that many of the people who choose to have surgery suffer from, a cop out that happily enough brings the dollars rolling in.
I don’t know whether plastic surgeons are obliged to recommend that their patients go for some preliminary counseling before they agree to go ahead with the procedure, but I don’t think it would be a bad idea in a lot of cases.
none of that justifies scrawling slut all over the tube of course.
ps. i didnt go to cambridge but i do know dave. Don’t hold it against me
although having said that, no one has a go at angelina jolie for having had two nose jobs or whatever it is do they. But I do think that to pretend that most people who choose to have plastic surgery are perfectly emotionally-centred people who just fancy a bit more cleavage is a bit of a fallacy.
Hi Matt, I won’t hold knowing dave against you.
Anyway I checked out the article you referred, and the statistics are illuminating but not that illuminating. Yes we have information on suicide rates etc relaive the rest of the population. But it is also important to know what kind of base we are starting from. I managed to track down the research from which the suicide stats emerged (http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/326/7388/527#SEC2). Couldnt track down sources for the other stats which i am sure exist somewher on the interwebz. Anyway the study found over the 3 decades that followed the breat implant surgery 15 out of 3500 women tracked (about 1 in 250) committed suicide. In other words, those women who chose to take their own lives represent an extreme minority, and as such their actions are hardly sufficient to justify any general judgements about the psycological state of women who have plastic surgery. I have certainly have yet to see sufficient evidence tusfythe overarching statement that plastic surgery is ‘just a cop out from having to actually deal with the psychological problems’, although I recognise that a certain proportion of decisions to go for plastic surgery might be influenced by psycological problems.
I don’t agree with Reuben’s argument, mainly because he doesn’t mention the fact that all surgery (plastic or otherwise) carries considerable — sometimes mortal — risks. Doctors take the Hippocratic Oath, which states, amongst other things:’…I will use treatments for the benefit of the ill in accordance with my ability and my judgement, but from what is to their harm and injustice I will keep them.’ In what way does administering a general anaesthetic, then breaking someone’s nose, removing bone and cartilege and resetting it to make it look more Aryan, or slicing into healthy breast tissue to implant foreign material which then makes breastfeeding impossible — all for enormous sums of money — benefit the ill or keep people from harm or injustice?
Of course it is wrong to villify the individuals who fall for this scam. This is a political problem. You can tell that by the direction in which the money flows and where the power lies (and I reckon money and power are more significant than looks in determining access to sexual experience).
I think you’re right about the suicide stats, though. It’s a complicated sum but I think I’m right in calculating that the figure of 35 out of 3,500 over 30 years is slightly higher than the total national suicide rate. Maybe a statistician could look at it here: http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=1092