This God Employs a Spinach Grinder
At a party in Miami recently, a source disclosed that she's editing, or attempting to edit, an autobiography for a local cosmetic surgeon. At this point, there's no publisher for the project, and it's a vanity project in the most literal of ways: a relatively unknown and previously unpublished man who makes his living applying Bandaids to damaged vanities with a knife has written nearly 1200 pages about himself and has a vanity so fragile in its own right that each time my source applies the editorial scalpel, he replaces the suctioned fat with more of the same silicone prose. Like many inexperienced writers, he sees her editorial decisions as personal attacks. He's not a nice man to work for, my source reports, and she's pretty sure he's a misogynist.
Flip quickly through the pages of New Beauty Magazine, the LA Weekly, or anywhere else that cosmetic surgeons advertise and you can't help but notice the obviously stratified gender roles: the doctors are (almost) always men, and the patients are (almost) always women. According to the ASPS, cosmetic patients are 91% female while doctors are more than 90% male. When men, in such high numbers, are the ones re-constructing our bodies to fit an exaggerated ideal of femininity, one has to wonder, how many of them actually like women at all, much less like them as they are? There's no way to answer that with making huge generalizations, but it's worthwhile, at any rate, to reprint a little tidbit from the history of cosmetic surgery and some of the pioneers in the field.
From Kathy Davis' wonderful 2003 book Dubious Equalities and Embodied Differences: Cultural Studies on Cosmetic Surgery:
Davis also points out that cosmetic surgery allows the surgeon to play God, creating and recreating patients in an image as they fit, an endless procession of experimental Eves. This language of a Creator is prevalent in all of the variations of slogans that promise new selfhood: "Create a New You," "Make Yourself Amazing," etc. It's not such a surprise then, that after watching himself play God every day for years, our source's client should feel prompted to pen an autobiography that matches the Bible for page count.
