How to Talk About Plastic Surgery in a Culture of “My Body, My Choice”
We’ve all heard it: “my body, my choice.” This mantra, used to communicate an individual’s right over their own body within the context of female reproductive health, has been chanted by feminists in pink pussy hats and mocked by anchors on Fox News.
In the fourth-wave feminist movement, beginning in 2012, much of the intersectional discourse is centered around empowering all who identify as women to fight for and live the life that makes them happy, equal, and free.
The in-group judgment of women from generations past has waned as today’s feminist crusaders seek to live by an inclusive ideology of “women supporting women”. In this new era, the subtext of “my body, my choice” can be applied to consent, fashion, and even elective cosmetic surgery.
Today, the phrase “pro-choice” not only applies to abortion rights but also to a zeitgeist in which women have the right to choose what is right for them in nearly all contexts of life.
In this culture of fewer judgments and wider choices, many people, including myself, feel it is not constructive for women to police other women. Within this mentality, it has grown increasingly challenging to engage in critical discourse on cosmetic surgery.
The alarmist, fiery debates on cosmetic surgery among feminists in the late 1980s and 1990s have quieted to a mere white noise over the years. Although these feminists contributed revolutionary thought and meaningful literature, their perspectives, at times, isolated women who engaged in cosmetic surgery practices.
Over time, I believe that the fear of marginalizing fellow women has resulted in gross negligence in the critical discourse on the rise of elective cosmetic surgery and fillers.
However, there is a way to be critical of cosmetic surgery without being critical of cosmetic surgery recipients. After all, just because the approach of some third-wave feminists was misguided does not mean critiquing cosmetic surgery was, or is, inherently wrong.
While rates of feminist debate on cosmetic surgery have decreased over the last 20 years, the rates of cosmetic surgery and other med-spa, body-altering services for women have drastically increased.
Because of the proliferation of cosmetic surgery, I believe critical feminist thought and discourse on this phenomenon is necessary in order to make meaning of the intersection between modern beauty and modern technology.
In the moment of “my body, my choice,” the best way to think critically about cosmetic plastic surgery is not to pass judgment on those that elect to undergo procedures, but is instead to question the influences that make women unwaveringly believe that the physical and economic pain of the knife, or syringe, is worth the personal and social reward.
When I say “influences’’, I’m referring to the external forces that shape women’s perspectives of both themselves for themselves and also for others.
By examining the influences that inform women’s perspectives both on themselves and on cosmetic surgery, I’m critiquing the environments and social forces within which girls and women are socialized. This reframing allows for the analysis of cosmetic surgery without attacking those who choose to engage in these practices.
In the articles to come, I’ll focus mainly on societal influences that shape beauty norms/ideals and the role surgery, on a large scale, plays in reinforcing issues of insecurity exploitation, social validation, and both self-surveillance and female surveillance, among others. I approach these issues from a theoretical and philosophical perspective.
In this series, I will explore the following (which are subject to evolution):
- Examine the rise of cosmetic surgery from 1980-present in the context of medical innovation, evolving beauty standards, and social media technologies
- Examine how cosmetic surgery is designed, socialized, and marketed for women and, far less often, for men
- Examine insecurity exploitation and the fixation on being “fixed” in the context of accessible cosmetic surgery
- Examine the “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” bind of cosmetic surgery in the context of unrealistic beauty ideals within a largely misogynistic society
- Examine how the gendered pressure for anti-aging cosmetic surgery is reinforcing youthfulness as central to femininity
I welcome you on this journey as I challenge the industrial beauty system while removing as much blame as possible from the women who choose to participate in it.
