A practice widely regarded not a decade ago as physically risky, morally doubtful, prohibitively expensive and socially embarrassing has been rebranded as something so innocuous and sensible as to be mundane.
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For a large part of the 20th century, patients who wanted cosmetic surgery would generally have been recommended therapy, their desires interpreted as an indication of pathology.
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When cosmetic patients talk about their bodies, dissociation is a recurring theme, as though they no longer inhabit their own skin.
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By identifying with actresses and models and pop stars – people who really are judged on their looks – women exchange a three-dimensional identity for an image, and life becomes an unending audition, involving all the anxiety and rejection of Pop Idol.
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Feminism would once have expected to offer a viable alternative, but its unresolved attitude to beauty has created an ideological vacuum.
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For all the rhetoric of “individual choice”, surgery is a symptom of something much larger than the body – of faulty self-identity and celebrity obsession, and the transfer of moral authority from disinterested health professionals to the commercial media.
It’s not a new article – it was published in 2005, but given the BBC articles that suggest breast implants are now uncritcally mainstream, I think it’s timely.