Slice of Life
Dworkin, Ronald W.
Slice of Life Transformation, mutilation, or titillation? BY RONALD W. DWORKIN Once, while I was assisting on a “nose job” in medical school, the attending surgeon asked me if I knew what...
...Cosmetic surgery is not about the woman...
...Elliott gives three explanations for the explosive growth in cosmetic surgery in Western society over the last 20 years...
...I mention this incident to illustrate the danger in writing a heady book about cosmetic surgery and culture...
...Nor can the advertising industry’s aggressiveness explain why Americans are so receptive to the cosmetic surgery message...
...It’ll save you both money and trouble, and be more likely to achieve your goal...
...The conclusion I’ve reached about cosmetic surgery is this: Cosmetic surgery is not about beauty in the way that, say, jewelry and makeup are about beauty...
...I’ve often asked this question while anesthetizing patients for these procedures...
...In the 1930s, the image of the successful man was the portly, mustached banker on the Monopoly game cards...
...Stay superfi cial...
...But a recruiter can still look at a candidate...
...He reserves special blame for aggressive advertisers who pitch beauty products to the masses...
...This change refl ects an effort on our part to judge a person’s character by scrutinizing his or her body...
...Anthony Elliott, an Australian sociologist, does so in Making the Cut...
...Which is totally unnecessary, since Elliott is not only fully tenured but also the chairman of his department...
...In his view, the consumer industry shapes our understanding of who we are and how we should look...
...Yet this is just the “beauty” argument dressed up in sociology-speak...
...In one way, cosmetic surgery culture does refl ect a new economic trend...
...People want to look good, plain and simple...
...Nor can he glean much information from references, since people writing bad references often get sued, and fi b to play it safe...
...But unless a writer wants to impute a false consciousness to these people, and suggest that cosmetic surgery patients don’t really know why they do what they do—that only the writer does—then going beyond the question of beauty is unnecessary...
...Or so the thinking goes...
...When Elliott writes that “individuals increasingly take celebrities as objects of knowledge for both the representation and the conduct of social life,” he sounds irritatingly like an assistant professor using the “language of discourse” to get tenure...
...My advice to a woman contemplating breast implants or liposuction: Buy yourself a nice pair of earrings...
...do not go deep, I said...
...After all, advertisers can’t sell low-calorie cookies...
...Personal subjectivity in the media age is more and more fashioned in the image of celebrity culture,” he writes...
...Applying market lingo to the cosmetic surgery culture is simply a continuation of this trend...
...Why doesn’t he just say that average people want to look like famous people, and be done with the issue...
...It is well known that capitalism creates a political economy of social mores, that capitalist principles infi ltrate even the personal sphere...
...I can understand a nose job for the patient who looks too Jewish...
...She is neither charming nor special...
...People in capitalist societies tend to adapt their understanding of product value—new is better than old, unused is better than used—to the body...
...judgments about other people’s characters are now made visually...
...In pre-Communist China upper-class women bound their feet, essentially crippling themselves, because small feet were thought beautiful...
...Elliott’s argument begs the question why people want cosmetic surgery and the form of beauty it creates...
...In either case, they tell men that the woman wearing these things is still full of heat and hormones, still interested in sensual things, still a part of life’s universal chase...
...Breast implants (in non-mastectomy patients) often look ridiculous...
...They worship celebrities and want to look like them...
...Not exactly what I would call romantic feelings...
...The patient has a typical Jewish nose...
...Indeed, when I was in grade school on a fi eld trip to an aquarium, I wanted to touch a dolphin to see what it felt like...
...The standard for beauty may vary from culture to culture...
...The woman herself is insignifi cant...
...The man sees the vague silhouette of sucked-out thighs and protruding breasts, and his fantasy is triggered...
...BY RONALD W. DWORKIN Once, while I was assisting on a “nose job” in medical school, the attending surgeon asked me if I knew what was wrong with his patient’s nose...
...I’ve seen women with what a Frenchman would consider perfect breasts (in the shape of a champagne glass, which was supposedly the breast size of Marie Antoinette) stuff double Ds into their pectorals...
...I was simply curious...
...And yet my complaint is not that he goes too deep, but that he simply goes where others have gone before...
...If a prospective employee is trim and well-preserved, the recruiter can infer from this that the person is self-disciplined, judicious, energetic, and well-organized—all the virtues needed to succeed in business...
...Finally, he said: “No...
...Ronald W. Dworkin, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, is the author of Artifi cial Happiness: The Dark Side of the New Happy Class...
...I carefully inspected the patient’s nose and came up with a list of diseases...
...The body has become our most moral organ...
...This is nothing new...
...If the candidate takes care of his body, he can likely be trusted to take care of a million-dollar account...
...In Elliott’s words, people “are following the cult of celebrity straight to the operating theater...
...African women lengthened their necks with stacked rings to conform to their culture’s ideal of beauty...
...the skin overlying the suckedout area sags and looks dimpled...
...Still, writers do go deeper, especially social scientists...
...Although one might come up with intricate explanations for why people get cosmetic surgery, cosmetic surgery is ultimately about beauty...
...In Victorian England, this infi ltration led to women crying, “Please, sir, stop, or you’ll ruin me,” or warning, “Nobody wants an old shoe...
...Celebrities today set the fashion the way John F. Kennedy did in his day (declining to wear a hat) or the Union general Ambrose Burnside did in his (growing his whiskers down the sides of his face, later called “sideburns...
...no such animal exists in nature...
...Elliott’s third explanation is globalization...
...In his words: “The rapid pace of economic change today shapes wider cultural imperatives concerning employment adaptability as well as fl exibility of identity...
...cosmetic surgery doesn’t invite the man to see her as an individual, let alone as a personality...
...Yet what feature of modern America has not been blamed on advertisers and consumerism...
...You must have gotten a good night’s sleep last night...
...The fi rst is the impact of celebrity culture...
...people don’t want them...
...She is a thing to poke and squeeze...
...Sometimes they bridge the divide between an ugly exterior and inner beauty...
...Afterwards they look like—well, I’m not sure what they look like...
...And yet, even if average people do want to look like famous people, the celebrity culture argument fails to explain why celebrities themselves get cosmetic surgery...
...they can’t help themselves...
...But liposuction often makes people look ill...
...I can also see the value in a good facelift, not the kind that produces the windtunnel look but, instead, makes people say: “Hey, you look well rested...
...Elliott’s second explanation for the cosmetic surgery culture is consumerism...
...Again, sociology-speak...
...It is in that spirit that I would ever want to touch a breast implant...
...A job recruiter these days is barred from asking questions about a job candidate’s family background or religious affi liation...
...A cartilage disorder...
...He shook his head each time...
...A deviated septum...
...Advertisers can only sell people what they want...
...As the surgeon’s tone was didactic, I assumed he was quizzing me...
...It’s about the man’s science fi ction fantasy of what beauty should be in the abstract...
...Today’s motto might be: “More breast for the buck...
...Today, the image of the successful man is youthful-looking and trim...
...A connective tissue disorder...
...She is the opposite of warm and sensual and alive...
...All right, if cosmetic surgery is all about beauty, then why do people think cosmetic surgery makes them look beautiful...
...Again, this angle is old...
...They invite men to see the woman in a romantic light, where she becomes charming, special, and unique...
...Sociologists have been working this angle since the 1950s, when C. Wright Mills accused slick Madison Avenue executives of manipulating people’s fears and preying on their “status panic” to get them to buy certain products...
...It’s about the man—or about the woman if it’s a man getting the liposuction...
...Jewelry and makeup adorn preexisting beauty...
...She is a form, a set of parameters, organic material with curves and bumps...
Vol. 14 • December 2008 • No. 14
