Low self esteem, anxiety, poor life quality and discontent with body image plague us all to different extents. These can ruin our ability to enjoy our lives. And, according to the claims of some cosmetic surgery practices, these are easily fixable problems. Reasons a healthy person chooses to undergo cosmetic surgery are complex and highly personal, but problems such as these often are cited as reasons for doing so. Scientific studies can even be trotted out to show that plastic surgery can, at least sometimes, make people happier. Even if we disregard the important evidence which acts as a balance to this, hiding behind a screen of scientific claims does not justify promoting cosmetic surgery as a positive “solution”.
Regardless of whether said surgery does improve body image or self-esteem, it sidesteps the reasons why people do this to themselves in the first place. Because we are consistently told both explicitly and implicitly that appearance is what matters, cosmetic surgery seems like the magic solution. Perhaps people do feel better after surgery, because they feel a little closer to fulfilling an absurd concept that we should value ourselves on our appearance, that we need to be “attractive” to get by, and that we should aspire to the totally unrealistic body expectations fed to us by the media.
Cosmetic surgery bypasses the question of why someone might feel unhappy or anxious because of the way they look, offering an imperfect solution to a deep-seated societal problem. Indeed cosmetic surgery is not just an imperfect solution, it actively worsens the state of affairs by suggesting that beauty is a tangible thing to be achieved.
[mm-hide-text]%%IMG%%10687%%[/mm-hide-text]
Instead of cutting ourselves to look more like an idealized, fictional and destructive concept of beauty, we need to value ourselves on more than how we look. If we learn to value ourselves for more stable and non-relative factors, we can feel good about ourselves without surgery. Also, the idea that a standardized ideal of beauty exists is not only a fallacy, but one which is actively promoted by capitalism. It encourages continued purchase of products and procedures which promise to give an end result that can never be achieved; the perfect product strategy.
It is often forgotten that these procedures do carry risk, often quite serious risk. A world which allows healthy people to endanger their lives by essentially disfiguring their bodies in order to conform to an insidious and oppressive beauty ideal is as worrying as it is saddening.
Finally, cosmetic surgery is, simply put, sexist. Although the number of men undergoing cosmetic surgery is on the rise, the majority of patients are still women. This reflects the extreme pressure put on women to “look good”, and the message that the most important thing about a woman is her appearance.
[mm-hide-text]%%IMG%%10688%%[/mm-hide-text]
It is not surprising that patients report better self esteem after surgery in some cases, given the circumstances. Cosmetic surgery is not an empowering solution to the insistence that beauty should and could be achieved. It undermines the idea that people are of worth whatever they look like. This is the case not only because they look great just as they are (since “beauty” is entirely subjective), but primarily because people are more than just their outer shell.
Instead of appeasing our anxieties by butchering ourselves, we need to think about why we continue to value appearance so highly, and still cling to the myth that “beauty” is absolute. This is not a pointless question to be pondered in the pub. People are hurting and endangering themselves because of it. We must fight against the sentiment encapsulated in that famous French proverb that “one must suffer to be beautiful”. We must fight against the idea that one must look a certain way to matter as a human being.
