Reuben
13th February 2009, 00:24
From The Third Estate: www.thethirdestate.net (http://www.thethirdestate.net)
Cosmetic surgery, puritanism and misguided vandalism
If like me you travel a lot on the London 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.
Cosmetic surgery, puritanism and misguided vandalism
If like me you travel a lot on the London 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.