Ad Feminem

Liposuction, Famine Victims and You

It's an arch comment, sure. Pradeep Mehta of the CUTS Centre for International Trade, Economy and the Environment, made it when suggesting that money spent in the U.S. on liposuction to remove the fatty deposits of excess consumption should instead go to aid the victims of famine.

Mehta was hitting back at U.S. claims that India's economic growth, like that of China, is to fault for the effects of resource depletion being felt around the world. That blame followed the news last week that big box stores had started rationing rice. Mehta also pointed our that if Americans ate at the rate of middle-class Indians, “many hungry people in sub-Saharan Africa would find food on their plates.”

Of course, many might argue instead that if the American middle class ate less, then it would instead convert the spare biomass into ethanol for its SUVs. But that's not the point. Instead, we do need to take a look at our willingness to blame others for our modern maladies, both real and perceived. Is our over-consumption the fault of the ads that surround us? Of the corporations that place them? Of the plastic surgeons who seek to benefit by sucking out the excess?

Just as America needs to look at its own problems before blaming India and China, individuals need to bring order to their own before blaming society. Each of us needs to resist the notion that we can only be more by owning more, that wrinkles equal sickness, that size zero should be our monolithic ideal.

So take a good long look at yourself. And love what you see. Then start thinking about what we can do collectively.

That Bathing Suit We Shouldn't Have to Die to Buy

In light of all the recent stories of women like Stephanie Kuleba, Donda West and Olivia Goldsmith losing their lives during or as the result of cosmetic procedures, I thought I'd post the following.  It's since been removed from the website, but was originally posted on the website for the Genetic Institute for Anti-Aging (an "aesthetic medicine" and cosmetic surgery clinic) when their URL was still just www.stopmyaging.com.  The GIAA no longer uses that address other than to redirect to their new URL www.getyournewlook.com, which is appropriate, if you think about the fact that in the most morbid of ways, death on the operating table is one sure way to stop aging. 

Q: Dr. Jazayeri, If I am overweight, how can I improve my figure?
A: The great news is that a great figure is very attainable with plastic surgery. We have all tried to exercise, go on never ending diets and we still can't get into that bathing suit that we are dying to buy. Procedures such as liposuction, tummy tuck, breast augmentation and breast reduction can all help you to attain that great figure. (Emphasis mine.)

Despite Jazayeri's flippant figure of speech, women truly are dying to fit into the right bathing suit.  Perhaps they're pushed along by comments like the kind made by "renowned plastic surgeon to the stars" Dr. Robert Rey while hawking his Shapewear line as an "Affordable, Painless Alternative to Plastic Surgery" on HSN.  Rey, whose obvious pride in his wife's 90-lb physique is tempered by his claim that even she looks better wearing one of his waist-cinching products, claims that every woman has an unattractive "poof" around the middle - even the 6'-tall, 120 lb supermodels he knows. 

That's right.  According to Dr. Rey, there's not a single woman alive who naturally has the "right" figure.  Not even supermodels and 90-lb anorexics are thin enough. Or shapely enough.  It's a losing battle, ladies - unless of course, you buy some Shapewear, or you lie down on the operating table.  And if you never get off that table again, or you starve yourself to death in the process - hey, look on the bright side - at least you won't be fat anymore. 

How many women have to die before we stop privileging an unnatural physique?

[get this widget]

Singapore Slings New Lipo Regulations

Earlier today, Singapore announced a long-awaited tightening of regulations on liposuction: according to draft regulations, patients will have to sit out an 15 day cooling-off period before the procedure can be carried out, and doctors will be required to meet minimum standards for specific training.

Regarding the 15 days, Health Minister Khaw Boon Wan said: "We think this period is useful, otherwise, some operators might hard sell and force the customer to go and lie down and do it immediately.”

In order to be certified to carry out the procedure, doctors would be required to undergo at least a year of general surgical training and also receive specific instruction on liposuction. While this falls well short of the board-certification requirements for plastic surgeons, it would at least improve the training levels of general practitioners posing as cosmetic surgeons.

The draft regulations have met with much debate. A notable voice in favor has proven to be that of liposuction's inventor, Professor Yves Illouz, who points out that allowing untrained doctors to carry out the procedure was a "disaster" in his native France, resulting in 65 deaths.

[get this widget]

How Old is Beautiful?

Academy Award winner Juliette Binoche has slammed the Hollywood-driven definition of beauty, deriding it as being a simple combination of "youth and big breasts. "In France," continues the Binoche, 44, "beauty is much more subtle - and there is a greater acceptance of age." She also criticizes the growth of cosmetic surgery (ab)use among American actresses of uncertain age: "Botox makes people look older. You look at women who have had it, you see the fear of ageing on their face."

Binoche's view is one that resonates not just with Europeans, but also with those taking a deeper look at the impact of Hollywood's beauty culture and its offshoots, those unreal Orange County-centric reality shows.

Maggie Little, a bioethicist at Georgetown University sums up the prevalent US definition of beauty well: “The notion of what we’re supposed to look like comes from celebrities and it’s really distorted,” she says. “As a culture, we’ve developed this very narrowed view of beauty — only one decade, the 20s.”

FHM Magazine published its list of the world's 100 sexiest women today. The average age of the top ten choices, all Hollywood actresses (could there possibly be a sexier profession?), is  26.

[get this widget]

Sticks and Stones

Plastic surgeries are turning people into freaks. 

At least, that seems to be the prevailing sentiment directing the recent discourse on cosmetic surgeries.  Both Mary McNamara's recent piece in the LA Times and Mimi Spencer's piece in The Guardian say it:  too many plastic surgeries are making people look weird.  And readers agree.  McNamara's piece engendered so many responses that she wrote another piece about the responses - which ranged from expressions of relief and gratitude for her willingness to finally discuss the elephant on the TV screen to knee-jerk responses like this one from "Frank:"

I think the shows, movies and media should humiliate and lable these cosmetic surgery freaks to encourge that you have problems if you change your apperence. They should point out that those people are fake. All the shows are doing is encourging comsmetic surgery buy not pointing it out to the public. [sic]

It's this kind of response that misses the point. Humiliating people, labeling them as freaks and weirdos, insisting that their appearance adhere to one culturally determined norm - all of these behaviors are what led us down the plastic path in the first place.  Elective cosmetic surgery rates only skyrocket among people desperately afraid to be "freaks," "weird," "fat" or "ugly," and we can only try not to be those things if we know what they look like - and if our culture relentlessly tells us that they are us.  Rather than let the discourse devolve into simple binary oppositions - ugly vs. beautiful, freak vs. normal - we need to see that setting up those binaries is what causes the damage.

As McNamara acknowledges, our discourse needs to move beyond the gotcha of "did she/didn't she?  So much of this discourse assumes that surgery is simply a matter of a woman's choice in an environment that endeavors to remove her choice in the matter altogether by casting beauty (specifically, the kind achieved through cosmetic surgery) as health, thus casting aging, or its visible signs, as sickness or disease - which of course can be "cured" through cosmetic surgery.  Physical idiosyncrasies or deviations from the ideal are also recast as congenital defects (viz. the FDA's approval for breast augmentations for under-18-year-olds "in cases of congenital defects, including asymmetry") which can also be "cured" by surgery. 

Perhaps rather than seeing these people as freaks, we should see them as wearing our culture on their sleeves - or more accurately, on their faces and on their chests.  They quite literally embody our culture, having imbibed it and inscribed it on their skins. Far from being freaky, their behavior can be seen as a reasonable response to a culture of static categories, the romanticizing of perpetual adolescence, an inevitable result of exposure to ubiquitous airbrushed images and a capitulation to advertising's constant refrain of consumer inadequacy.  Overdone plastic surgery patients like Priscilla Presley aren't weird; they're the pitiful result of all of the above.  What's weird is a culture which denies plurality, mindlessly pursues profit and condones the constant promotion of an unattainable standard at the expense of our health and our selves.

[get this widget]

Mom's Gift of Birthday Boobs

This just in courtesy of the UK's Daily Mail, serving double duty as further convincing evidence of the newspaper's slide into the tabloid gutter. The daughter of glamour model and tell-all phenom Alicia Douvall wants mom to buy her a boob job. Mom intends to oblige. The kicker?  Daughter Georgia is not yet thirteen.

In all fairness, Alicia, already a veteran of more than 50 cosmetic surgery procedures at age 28 - including one breast implant that exploded and saline-pump valves to enable variable sizes- intends her daughter to wait until her sweet 16 for a pair of bigger breasts.  By that age, she will certainly not be alone in having the work done. Of more interest, perhaps is the casual attitude, engendered by Alicia's experiences, to elective slicing, filling and stitching displayed by young Georgia:  "I think my mum looks good. Because of her, I think it's normal to have surgery if something's not quite right."

Can anyone tell us just what "quite right" is?

Below, a photo of mother and daughter. The Daily Mail used the story as an opportunity to post various pictures of Mom in states of undress. You can go there to see them.

[get this widget]

Botox and a Breast Aug for the Big Day

A survey from British bridal magazine You and Your Wedding reveals that 7% of prospective brides plan preparing for partnership with rhinoplasty, 8% with breast augmentation and 5% with a breast reduction. 91% plan to lose weight. Wedding dress diets are nothing new, so it is not surprising to see cosmetic surgery now being considered part of the mix. How many of those 91% will resort to last-minute lipo if their diet goals prove too ambitious? Most want to lose an wholly unreasonable 20lbs...

67% said they were already unhappy with how they looked prior to getting engaged and that their wedding was just the impetus they needed to do something about it. Clearly finding a life partner, in most cases, is not enough to quieten the nagging doubts. Rather, those doubts worsen under the pressure of living up to an impossible ideal for the perfect day. And regardless of what came first--the doubts or the ads for diet plans and doctors offering quick fixes--all are now linked in a depressing spiral.

It's a spiral for which Washington D.C.-based Dr. Barry Cohen offers this handy advice: "If one's potential spouse loves them, they [sic] will be supportive of a bride's desire to be all that she can be, before or after the wedding. The most important question to ask - 'Is there enough time to fully recover before the wedding?'" (Italics ours.)

The way Cohen spins it, maybe brides should be joining the army instead. Eloping never sounded so good.

[get this widget]

Onslaught

Much love to Dove for their Campaign for Real Beauty.

Beauty Enhancement Awards

Another installment in the health/beauty language battle:  Make Me Heal is a website dedicated to "all of your cosmetic surgery and anti-aging needs."  They describe themselves as the "Myspace meets Yahoo of the anti-aging and plastic surgery world." As usual, we'll notice that healing or health is associated with cosmetic surgery.  Ostensibly, the healing in Make Me Heal's title refers to post-op recovery, but the form of the title - an imperative statement - may be read as a demand for youthfulness in an age when anti-aging is a not constructed as a luxury but as a need. This can only happen when, as we've pointed out before, aging is successfully equated with disease. 

Also, Make Me Heal sponsors the Beauty Enhancement Awards, "which is the first cosmetic surgery and anti-aging event celebrating natural beauty with enhancement."  Need we point out that they're not celebrating natural beauty at all? In fact, they're promoting the idea that beauty can only be surgically achieved and reinforcing an idealized, non-naturally attainable standard.  Their promotional materials say that contestants will compete and be judged by plastic surgeons and others.  One wonders how exactly a contestant, beyond choosing a qualified plastic surgeon in the first place, prepares for or competes in a competition with categories like "best face lift" or "best rhinoplasty."  To reward people for qualities bestowed on them by, let's face it, a fair amount of chance - it's not as if we can control our surgeon's handiwork once we've gone under anesthesia - is like rewarding people for being born with the right color of skin.  If anything, it is the surgeons who should receive the awards here, not the patients.  For further reading on this, see Susan Pawlak-Seaman's article in South Coast Today.

But we must concede one thing to Make Me Heal.  They've promised to donate the proceeds from their pageant to charities that provide reconstructive surgeries for people with congenital defects and war wounds.  And that, at least, is something to applaud.

Newly Remodeled

This ad was also in the LA Weekly.  Notice how the words "newly remodeled" appear right next to the woman's body; placing them there makes it seem as if the woman's body itself, rather than the store, has been newly remodeled.