Plastic Surgery

I'm a BIG fan of Anderson Cooper's, so, even though I often have no business, I try to catch his show (I am working on my doctorate and with a son who wakes up at 6 in the morning, do I really need to go to sleep at midnight?). This week there's a series called "What would you do for . . ." and last night's installment was about plastic surgery. He covered women who went to Central and South America for surgery with generally negative results.

I must say that I think the press, overall, has done a lousy job covering plastic surgery and what that means. So I wanted to use the blog today to sound off about this industry. Overall, many things are sold because advertisers successfully hit the spots where we feel lousy about ourselves. However, most products are not designed to take care of where we feel bad (for example, food or a car). This is not to say that anything can't be used to mollify ourselves, it's just that the purpose of the product isn't that.

That being said, plastic surgery is specifically targetted to people who feel bad about their physical selves and who can afford a quick fix for these problems (there are people who have reconstructive surgery because of accidents, etc., and I think this is a different matter). For women, this becomes particularly pernicious. Nothing in this society allows us to feel good about our bodies and we can cite any number of problems with ourselves (too thin, not curvy enough, not tall enough, fat thighs, whatever). With a magazine industry that encourages us to size up ourselves against celebrities who eat nothing but celery to maintain size zeros or who drop all of their pregnancy weight (we forget they have cooks!) and wonder what we are doing wrong. There is little questioning of whether the standards of beauty make sense and whether we, as women, should be so preoccupied with it (especially as we are fighting an insane war in Iraq and many of us in the United States have no health care). Black women face even greater challenges because we still are seriously underrepresented as possibly beautiful.

So for women to make "choices" to pay less money to visit far away lands to "fix" problems on their bodies is simply heartbreaking. We never really fought to appreciate the bodies we have. They do amazing things . . . I know mine does yoga, chases a toddler around, makes breakfast, takes a toddler to school, writes dissertation proposals, walks around New York at a brisk pace, and MANY otherthings. That is the purpose of my body, not to look vapid and sexy according to standards that are virtually impossible to meet. My body gets fruits and vegetables to eat, and gets to enjoy sweets as well.

I think we need to think of a world that admires what our bodies can do, not what they look like. While we all like people to appreciate the way we look, that cannot make that the center of everything we do. Admittedly, that's the underlying lesson I hoped to hear from "What I Would Do For" last night. Instead, I settled for yet another installment of caveat emptor, buyer beware.