Ad Feminem

Busty Birds of Kensington

Emma Cowing of The Scotsman just reported that "the number of British teenagers having breast surgery has increased by more than 150 per cent in the past year." And we thought the American cosmetic surgery rates had gone up fast. Well, the British are following in our bra steps, and while their numbers are still well below the numbers of American teens "improving" their assets, if they keep up at the current rate, busty Kensington birds may become stereotypical than blonde California girls.

In fact, the numbers of British teenagers receiving these surgeries is still much lower than the sheer number of American teens receiving these surgeries. But Cowing goes on to report: "such is the demand among young women for plastic surgery that there is even a new clinic, Make Yourself Amazing, aimed solely at 18 to 35-year-olds." Note how the title of the clinic is yet another example of language which equates a worthwhile notion of selfhood with a surgically altered body.

Here's an idea. How about teaching young women that there is nothing amazing about going into debt (with breast augmentations going for £4,000-£5,000) so that they can look like the tabloids and the profiteers tell them they ought to look? Or how about teaching them that can make themselves amazing instead through education, art, politics or community service?

Douglas Rushkoff Spins Around in His Desk Chair

While the absurd juxtapositions produced by key-word driven advertising are hilarious precisely because they point out the shortcomings of soulless, automated systems, when the same absurdities are produced by decidedly human systems, one has to wonder at the breakdown of communication.  We've posted before about the editorial oversight of the advertising placement in the LA Weekly, hoping that it might be deliberate and subversive.  The latest example though reads like a Rushkoffian cliche of media commenting on itself, which would be wonderful if only it seemed self-conscious.

Here's an excerpt from Lina Lecaro's March 11 contribution to the Weekly's "A Considerable Town" right next to the ads that ran beside it in the hard copy of the paper:

Wrinkle-Free Fresh Faces at Fashion Week

"At the GenArt 2008 'New Garde' event  Friday night, which kicked off L.A. Fashion Week, it was hard to ignore the evening’s sponsor — sort of the wrinkle-free elephant in the room. Amid the Art Deco splendor of the Park Plaza hotel, as dolled-up fashionistas fluttered about  the visual feast of designer vignettes, young models danced under Botox-branded umbrellas that couldn’t have been more, uh, in your face. Botox’s less-than-subtle branding was everywhere, but its pitch was unexpected. The umbrellas were emblazoned with a motto touting the drug’s use as a cure for excessive sweating: “It keeps you dry.” Oh, yes, that’s what this looks-conscious crowd would use it for. Uh-huh. Nobody seemed to acknowledge the irony that GenArt, champion of the most creative and individualistic style makers in Los Angeles, has associated itself with a product that’s turned many of the city’s most intriguing faces into expressionless clones."

Is the unacknowledged irony of Botox's sponsorship of GenArt 2008 any more farcical than the Weekly pointing out the irony while not acknowledging its own sponsorship by the Botox vendors on the facing page (three of them on that page alone)?  Tu quoque, Ms. Lecaro. We agree with you, but for the sake of credibility, the Weekly's editorial and ad departments should start reading each other's work.

Inconsistency

Take a close look at this ad as it appeared in the LA Weekly. We're confused. Is this one ad for the same clinic, or is it two? We're assuming it's meant to be just one ad for one clinic because if it's two, then the top advertiser forgot to include the name of the business and any contact information -- rather egregious errors as far as advertising goes... Then again, an orphaned ad that does nothing other than remind us once again that we're not perfect seems to perfectly sum up the situation.  A floating message from the faceless universe:  You're not good enough, and don't you forget it!

More likely, this is just one ad for the Cosmetic Rejuvenation Medical Center. But just in simple terms of ad design, where's the coherence?  Do the laser treatments cost $195 or do they cost $300? Is the color scheme seductive, dark and mysterious  or is it light, bright, bubbly and beachy?  We've said it before, but if these guys can't even make their ads consistent, who's to say they can do so with our body parts?

Physical Foreclosures

BreastAugUSA, cosmetic surgery finance group, urges their clients to spend well beyond their means, exhorting them to compromise their retirement plans or ask an employer for a loan.  How entertaining to imagine convincing an employer that with just a little of his or her help you could go and get that new designer vagina that's all the rage.  Their policy is worth reprinting here:

CASH PAYMENT
Still, you may not have the means to make cash payment, or may have timing issues that make the cash unavailable when you want to have surgery. If financing makes more sense for you for these or any other reason, we offer a patient financing plan that makes it possible for you to have your cosmetic procedure today. The truth is cash payment is the best payment option for your cosmetic surgery.
Cosmetic surgery is like any product or service; you get the best price the market has to offer when you make payment in cash. Many of our customers who choose to pay cash acquire their funds through one or a combination of the following.

-- Withdrawal from savings or investment accounts.
-- Loan from 401K plan.
-- Loan from life insurance policy.
-- Loan from friend or relative.
-- Advance or loan from employer.
-- Tax refund.
-- Pre-surgery installment plan. Our doctors offer this option, which is similar to a lay-away plan.
-- Credit cards. Our doctors accept credit cards as cash payment. Often, our customers secure low interest rates by moving their balances to new cards that offer special rates for balance transfers.

THE PMG PATIENT FUNDING PLAN

The truth is you probably have three questions about financing. The answers depend on two factors: your credit profile and your lender's commitment to making loans.

1. Can I get approved?
We approve more applications than any lender in the business ... bar none.
The PMG Patient Funding Plan is committed to making loans. We don't rely on a computer scoring model to make decisions, but carefully investigate each application with the intent of granting an approval.

2. What will my monthly payment be?
Your monthly payment is a function of the amount you borrow, the interest rate, and the length of the loan.

-- We help you find the best price available on your procedure, so you don't borrow more than
-- you have to.
-- We offer extended loan terms, normally, 36 or 48 months.
-- While the interest rate is largely determined by your credit profile, we work to secure the
-- best rate available.

3. How much cash will I have to put down?
In most financing transactions, the lender asks you to make a cash investment in your purchase. The amount of your out of pocket cash requirement depends on your credit profile and is generally between 10% and 25%.

In the end, what’s most distressing about this is the predatory nature of these lending practices.  If BreastAugUSA is reviewing all applications with “intent to approve” and encouraging clients to raid retirement accounts, life insurance policies and the wallets of relatives, one wonders how much these practices differ from the practices of lenders who pushed so many people into home loans they could not afford.  These loans may be on a different scale, but with foreclosures rampant and our economy in such difficulty, they’re no more ethical.  When people default on home loans, they lose their homes.   When they default on body loans, should they lose those too?

That question is far too literal, of course.  But it needs to be asked because it gets at the bigger issue underlying all of this, which has to do with the location of the “self.”  So much of the language of cosmetic surgery advertising uses words for bodies and body parts interchangeably with words for the self ("new you," "better you," "the person you've always wanted to be," etc.), and in asking such a literal question, we're only extrapolating that rhetoric to its next step.  Loans for houses, cars, jewelry, etc. are guaranteed by using the items themselves as collateral.  Default on the loan, say goodbye to the item.  Default on the loan for your breasts, say goodbye to... the new you?

Frustrating Juxtapositions

Ah, the irony of keyword-driven advertising.  How wonderful that just underneath Jodi Lipper and Cerina Vincent's body-positive article urging women to remember that confidence should not be dependent upon a surgeon's knife, there appear links to various cosmetic surgeons and cosmetic surgery financiers, including BreastAugUSA.  Just one click takes you to a slogan which says: "Confidence:  Enjoy the self-confidence that comes from looking your very best." Wait a moment and then another slogan appears:  "New You!  Take the first step in becoming the person you've always wanted to be. "  Another advertiser is DoctorsSayYes, with the slogan "Create a New You!"

Notice that the language shifts from looking your best to being your best, from getting a new body to getting a new you.  It is in the face of this kind of relentless cultural rhetoric, equating the acquisition of body parts with selfhood, that human lives are devalued.  If new selves are so easily obtained, it would seem they're just as easily discarded. 

The Nightmare of Oversized Sweaters

The fifth season of the CW's brilliantly gender-role-busting (insert sarcasm here) Beauty and the Geek premiered this week with the "gorgeous but academically impaired" beauties receiving make-unders and "put[ting] their social skills to the test by trying to secure phone numbers from unsuspecting guys at a bar" while wearing "prosthetic noses and oversize sweaters" and/or extra pounds and acne scars. The obvious and tired "beautiful women are stupid" stereotype aside here, this episode managed to be offensive in yet another way. When the "beauties" were discussing their makeunders, they made comments such as "This is my worst nightmare" and "This is the worst thing that could ever happen to me." The unextreme makeunders, however, made these women look like millions of other women naturally look. The prosthetic noses may have been crooked and the extra pounds may have been doughy, but they were certainly not deformed. How many women watched this show only to see their own faces become someone else's "worst nightmare"?

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Diamonds, Manolos or Nose?

The ads for cosmetic surgery have gone national. Here at Ad Feminem, we spend considerable time and energy analyzing the local cosmetic surgery ads; while we have our problems with them, these ads did seem to be relatively unique to SoCal culture. The response we've heard to this blog, from people in other parts of the country, has so often been, "I had no idea. I've never seen any of those kinds of ads in Indiana/Ohio/Oregon/etc." But upon going to Greenwood, Indiana, for the holidays this year, we noticed the ads popping up in the local Greenwood papers. They were, apparently, a recent development. Another and bigger recent development is the running of cosmetic surgery ads in national magazines like Elle; unfortunately, these ads take the commodification of our body parts to same level as LA's local radio ads. This time, it's not used car shopping - it's like shopping for diamonds (ostensibly) or footwear.

P.S. Thanks to Lisa Jervis at Bitch Magazine for posting about this.

Undo-plasties on the Rise

An extensive article in the London Times addresses the booming market for reversing cosmetic surgery procedures. Be they eyebrow raises that result in an expression of permanent surprise, nose jobs that take out all but a thin rail of cartilage or facelifts that result in that windswept look, the UK's cosmetic surgeons report surging demand for repairs and modifications to existing work: the undo-plasty.

The underlying buyer's remorse seems to indicate, in many cases, not just dissatisfaction in the surgical outcomes. Instead, there appears to be a post-operative realization that buying the same straight nose and 36 C/D boobs as everyone else was not in fact the right way to deal with more profound psychological maladies:

“To some extent,” says Linda Blair, a clinical psychologist and spokesperson for the British Psychological Society, “there is probably a backlash against identikit looks and the sameness of appearance that many people who have had facial alterations possess. Erasing wrinkles can iron out facial expressions, a mark of individuality and a conveyor of someone's characteristic personality traits.

“People who care enough about their appearance to change it could be deeply affected by the realisation they look like everyone else,” she says. “They think that their appearance defines them and so they enter into this seductive process trying to put everything 'right'.”

Having surgery to correct what was usually an unnecessary operation in the first place is part of what she calls the “redecorating effect”. “When you decorate a room in your home, the rest of the house looks a lot shabbier,” she says. “It can be the same with cosmetic work. You have one op and then you are not happy with something else so have that done. Then you become disillusioned with what you had done first.”

Blair thinks there are additional psychological underpinnings for the trend in cosmetic revision. “Cosmetic surgery has its place if people are doing it for the right reasons,” she says. “I guess that a lot of those who go back to change their original operations initially had work done because they thought it might change their career, fortune or relationship. Anyone who has surgery for those kinds of reasons is likely to end up dissatisfied with the result.”

It should be noted that The Times ran the article in its Women / Style section. Without any apparent sense of irony, next to the article were the following oppressively inaccessible images of "beauty" erm links to other Times articles. And where exactly does The Times think people get the idea that everything will be alright, if they can just improve their looks?

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Onslaught

Much love to Dove for their Campaign for Real Beauty.

Venial Botox, Mortal Breast Augs?

There's a flurry over blogging over the list of new social sins just released by the Vatican. The ones that are most interesting to us here at Ad Feminem are high on the list: bioethical violations such as birth control and "morally debatable" experiments such as stem cell research, cloning, genetically engineering "designer babies." Each of these suggest a real concern over tampering with our natural bodies. If each of us is made in the image of God, as the Catholics believe, then this attempt to alter our bodies is an attempt to alter the image of God. So the natural extrapolation, it seems, would be to questions of cosmetic surgery. What is the Vatican's stance on elective cosmetic surgery? Does it qualify as a social sin under the guise of "bioethical violations?" According to the logic of the new social sins, surely elective cosmetic procedures equal aftermarket tinkering with the image of God just as much as genetic engineering equals elemental tampering with it. Further, if indeed surgery will now be in this category, how will one determine the severity of the sin? Will Botox be venial, breast augs mortal? Or is all this already covered by the original injunction against vanity? It will be interesting to see where the Catholic Church draws the line on this.