Certified Pre-Owned Lips?

"[Capital One] offer[s] installment loans with low, fixed rates from

1.99% APR to 25.99% APR*, or interest-free loans** for 3, 6, 12, 18,

or 24 months to qualified applicants. Either way, you'll be able to find

an option designed to fit within your budget. You'll like our flexible

payment options—we can set up a payment schedule for you, from

18 months to five years." 

For what will Capital One offer such installment or interest-free loans? 

                                    "Capital One Healthcare Finance helps make high quality cosmetic

                                    procedures—and your new look—a reality."

How is it that our bodies are turned into commodities?  Long before any surgery itself, this process is accomplished through language.  We've talked extensively on this blog about the hijacking of "health" to refer to the "cosmetic," just as Capital One does by calling this branch of their business "Healthcare Finance."  Look, however, at their website, and you'll note that both the URL and the caption say, no "healthcare," but "cosmetic."  The option to use their financing services for necessary reconstructive surgery is clearly a corporate image-enhancing afterthought.

The theory of linguistic relativity tells us that language shapes the way we we think about the world.  Consider the idea, for example that without a word for something, we can have no thought of it. Also--and forgive me for simplifying semantics here--the names we give to things change our perceptions of those things, even though the things themselves remain the same.  This idea is born out in the push to provide politically correct names for things, a recognition of the power of connotations.  It's why customers are called "guests," why wrinkles are called "laugh lines," and why failures are sometimes referred to as "deferred success."

Say, for example, that we know a man named Joe. Joe is a kind, intelligent, compassionate man, but he's also very timid.  A bully comes along, decides he doesn't like Joe, and "re-names" Joe "Loser."  Every time the bully sees or refers to Joe, he calls him "Loser," and eventually, Joe's real name is forgotten, and everyone else starts calling him "Loser" too. Through all of this Joe has been the exact same kind, intelligent and compassionate man, but everyone who knows him as "Loser" starts to interact with him as if he were not very smart and not very worthwhile. Eventually Joe starts internalizing this name, all the qualities associated with it, and the way that people react to him. At first, Joe doesn't change at all, but because the language changes, people's perceptions of him change and eventually he changes too. 

So when we start to talk about our bodies and our body parts in the same language that we use to market stereo blow-outs and used car bonanzas, the language itself changes the way we perceive our bodies.  They become commodities as salable and replaceable as the cars we trade in every few years. From there, it's a short leap from trading in a body to trading in a self.