No sooner had we gotten used to the idea of high-priced “anti-ageing” creams containing the placenta of Tibetan yak than the Botox fad hit and Hollywood has-beens and local socialites alike froze their faces into immobility with artfully placed shots of what is, essentially, muscle paralysing poison.
Well, the body beautiful machine is looming up on us again — insidiously but swiftly. Prepare for lunchtime laser-lipo, ladies. Yes, while your colleagues are expanding their waistlines with saturated fats down at the local pizza joint, you can pay someone to suck yours out and slink sveltely back to the office. Or something like that.
Truth is, I was a bit bewildered last week at the launch of Aesthetic Surgery, South Africa’s first magazine devoted to “aesthetic surgery”. Maybe it was the invitation, which featured models, heads swathed in bandages, with just a perfectly lacquered mouth or one mascaraed eye visible through a gap in the gauze, like extras from The Mummy Returns.
My sense of the surreal deepened as I sank into the suede couches of the larney hotel and listened to the magazine’s publisher proclaim “the cult of physical perfection is in full effect”, without even a smidgen of irony. Apparently his magazine is aimed at those “who care passionately about their bodies and how they present themselves” (and all these years I thought that was just called narcissism). They are, of course, just giving us the information we need to make an “informed choice”, in a manner that does not “sensationalise surgery”. It’s not quite clear what we’re meant to make of headlines like “Lunchtime lift — anchor it with barbed sutures”; “Design your own body”; and “Teenagers say yes to cosmetic surgery”.
Next up was an elderly sexologist, who told us how women are now accessing their dormant inner goddesses by reclaiming their “right to be beautiful and look good” (after a detour in the Sixties when we apparently rendered men impotent by launching the “women’s lib” movement).
And that’s when I heard it: the familiar sound of oppression being dressed up as empowerment. It seems we lucky females are so empowered today that we have the choice whether or not we will tolerate less than perky boobs or lumpy-porridge thighs. Apparently, it’s a perfectly logical progression for us to reap the benefits of our “liberation” by progressing from boring stuff like equal work for equal pay to a bit of creative body sculpturing, to really fulfil our destinies.
Now, none of this is terribly revolutionary; the advertising industry has always preyed on women’s low self-esteem, reminding us that to be pretty is to be perfect and vice versa in order to flog us their exorbitantly priced pots of wonder cream and snake-oil. The result is that our appearance, as Susan Faludi puts it, “has been domesticated … as tamed and manicured as the grounds of a gentleman’s estate”. Nonetheless, it’s a bit of a conceptual leap from painting and redecorating to rebuilding and knocking through walls.
It’s clear that the plastic surgery PR machine is no longer aimed just at the rich and the ridiculous. Their target market is expanding to include ordinary working women, like the 55-year-old whose story in the launch issue of Aesthetic Surgery tells how she was retrenched and “felt like she had been thrown on the scrap heap … she knew that finding another job meant vying with much younger candidates”. So instead of investing her retrenchment package in, say, a business venture, she spent R225 000 on crowning her teeth and having a face lift, tummy tuck and breast implants. She now plans to launch a career as a TV extra.
Surgery is being portrayed as a legitimate career-enhancing tactic, a way to get and hold on to happiness. We are encouraged to see the difficulties presented by ageing, divorce and workplace discrimination as areas of shortcoming for which we are responsible, instead of symptoms of a system that needs realigning, or a status quo that can be challenged by the progressive equality legislation at our disposal.
Nope, apparently the answer is to keep on medicalising women — seeing womanhood as a disease to be cured. A hundred years ago, they were whipping out our “hysterical” uteruses; now they’re hoovering up our wobbly bits and injecting the excess fat into our frown lines. Clearly, no variations from the ideal will be tolerated.
Ideological concerns aside, I just don’t understand how people deal with the sheer bloody pain! I’ll admit I’m a contender for the title of World’s Most Squeamish Woman, so I’ve never watched an entire episode of an extreme makeover show, but the snippets I’ve seen give me nightmares. And of the few “reveals” I’ve seen, most of them come off looking not much better than the average Oprah soccer-mom makeover, who has been given a decent haircut, a correctly fitting bra and taught to wear hipsters instead of armpit-hugging jeans.
In the interests of balance and making informed choices, I logged on to awfulplasticsurgery.com, a site dedicated to those who have strayed a snip too far along the silicone path. The site’s motto — “Remember: no one is perfect” — is great for reminding yourself that a goddess doesn’t need improving on, doesn’t need to look as if she’s smuggling grapefruit halves down her vest and definitely doesn’t need a trout pout.