Plastic surgery didn’t explode as an industry merely by seeking a share of an existing market that exploits female beauty. Plastic surgery became a boom industry by creating a market for this exploitation as well. Well-placed and influential ads, pictures, texts, and paid-for editorials in women’s magazines - right down to the offensive notion of plastic surgery for women’s feet – so you can fit into Jimmy Choo shoes – or the invented necessity of plastic surgery on your toes to deal with unsightly “toe-besity” – the message is continually and consistently hammered at you, that you, as a woman – have potential head to toe issues of physical self-improvement that are so “obvious” that only a surgeon’s knife can solve them! All of this of course is manufactured ‘need’ and none of it is real. But it is consciously promoted and marketed to feel real. It is marketed this way so that you no longer look ‘at’ your body in a mirror – but instead you inspect every inch of it, looking for perfections and faults that you ‘need’ to correct. And you keep yourself always under self-surveillance in comparison to the female beauty doctrine presented to you as real. Make no mistake – the cosmetic surgery “industry” is built on selling women a feeling of “terminal ugliness and dissatisfaction” with your appearance – literally from head to toe. By comparison, think about this for a minute. As one feminist writer put it, “Tell a woman she has cancer, and you do not create the disease or the agony she will have to endure to treat it. However, in our day and age, merely ‘suggest’ to a woman that she is ‘ugly’ or ‘fat’ – and the suggestion itself creates both the disease (as in dis-ease) – and the agony she ‘feels’ over this implication is just as real.”
Posted on: Sat, 12 Oct 2013 01:32:31 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015