Is a boob job really all that big a deal? Ask the 300,000 women around the world who have spent the New Year period coming to terms with the fact they’ve been given breast implants made from industrial, rather than medical-grade, silicone.
A now-defunct French manufacturer, PIP, decided to pass off its implants as good enough to remain stable and sterile within the human body. In fact, the product was better suited to stuffing mattresses.
The man running the company responsible is the subject of an international arrest warrant, and the debate rages: Do the women who took a knowingly large risk to change the shape of their breasts deserve sympathy?
Even discounting the likelihood of your surgeon shoving the medical equivalent of floor-scrapings into your chest, cosmetic surgery is no run-of-the-mill procedure. The Grit was recently told by a leading light of the British Association of Plastic and Reconstructive and Aesthetic Surgeons that one in five cosmetic operations result in complications. Some leave permanent disfigurement. Some require further treatment and/or surgery. A small number are fatal.
Yet cosmetic surgery has leaped in ranking as a reason for taking out a loan, and breast enlargement is the most commonly performed cosmetic operation in the U.K.
The newspaper columnist Mary Ann Sieghart is aghast. She argues we need to act to “stem the self-hatred that leads so many women to have their bodies mutilated.”
Sieghart believes this “self-hatred” begins at a very young age. Girls who play with impossibly proportioned Barbie dolls develop neuroses about their own body proportions, which are reinforced through the constant images of female perfection used by advertisers to sell products. Mattel, the toy maker, estimates 99 percent of American girls own a Barbie doll.
The wonderful thing about an unattainable, but incredibly desirable, ideal is that there is no limit to the amount of money you can spend trying to achieve it. The pursuit of the unattainable used to entail creams, lotions, potions, pills, diets and gym class. Now it’s all of the above, plus surgery.
The U.S Department of Health explicitly acknowledges that the beauty industry encourages body image dissatisfaction in order to maximize profits, but there doesn’t seem to be anyone at the top table saying, enough is enough.
The side effect of creating this market, in Sieghart’s view, is a loathing so perfect and so deeply sublimated that something as extreme as surgical body modification is viewed as an aspiration.
Caitlin Moran, in How to Be a Woman, recalls attending an awards ceremony where she was struck by the female faces:
“As the ages creep to 35, 36, 37, the first aspects of homogeneity appear… lips that appear to puff upwards and outwards… Tight, shiny foreheads. Something indefinably—but definitely—wrong around the cheeks and jaw. Eyes pinned wide open… as you progress through the decades… the women in the room just look more and more scared. To be as privileged and as safe as they are—but to still go through such painful, expensive procedures—gives the impression of a room full of fear. Female fear.”
Now that a sustainable market share of women have been sufficiently conditioned, product designers and their marketing teams are getting to work on men. Over the past 20-odd years, with the ideal male form becoming less attainable, there’s been a proliferation of male grooming products and the inevitable corresponding rise in male body dysmorphia.
In Britain, politicians of all stripes have set up an All Party Parliamentary Group on Body Image. This winter the first ever Body Image Inquiry will be sitting in Westminster, with academics from the Centre for Appearance Research critiquing the media, fashion, diet and beauty industries, and representatives from those industries being called as witnesses. The intention is to force a debate about the subject at the highest level.
In America the lack of political debate is startling. There are plenty of academic articles, self-help websites and journalists detailing the relentless mauling of our collective subconscious and the resultant effects it has on our self-esteem. The U.S Department of Health explicitly acknowledges that the beauty industry encourages body image dissatisfaction in order to maximize profits, but there doesn’t seem to be anyone at the top table saying, “enough is enough.”
There’s nothing new about the worship, and commodification of, beauty. There’s nothing new about body alteration or adornment. What sticks in the craw is the sophistication with which the industry has got a grip on all of us and the manner in which we are blithely condemning our children to a lifetime of anxiety about their looks.
One rogue implant supplier is unlikely to change our view on plastic surgery, just as one celeb “flaunting her curves” is unlikely to change the fashion for skinny bodies. But we ought to consider what we are doing to ourselves in the name of beauty, and maybe try to be happy with who we are.
