I'm looking very seriously into a facelift
I'm interested, lekvar, and would like to hear your thoughts/reasoning for considering this option, if you're willing to share.
I agree that only adults, in an ideal world, should do this--outside I suppose of reconstructive plastic surgery? (if a child has cancer or is involved in a car accident that leaves serious scars on their face, e.g., would you say it would be reasonable for a parent to choose reconstructive surgery, xk?, as I'm kind of assuming? ...) Oh, and this may be dumb, but when you included "hair" in the list of tweaking, xk, do you mean permanent laser removal? And, do I understand that tattoos are in a different class for you, xk and...ok at any age? Or for, say, teens? Is it because of their being only "surface," even though I've heard they are pretty hard and expensive to remove...I'm just generally interested and feel like I'm generationally distanced from the explosion in body modification that has happened since about the mid-1990s.
But I'm interested in the political consequences of, e.g., the fact that I read somewhere recently that the number of breast implants performed in the US have gone up 700% just since 1992--ah just found the source, Ariel Levy's Female Chauvinist Pigs, who cites the statistics provided by the American Society of Plastic Surgeons--yep: 32,607 a year in 1992; 279,073 in 2005, up by 756%. Additionally "Breast lifts" are up by 1035% in the same period. (See the "Cosmetic Plastic Surgery Trends, 1992-2005").
I did just a little snooping on that site. A few very young women are getting implants (3,500 or so last year)--but interestingly it looks like the total number of under 18 yo getting actual implants is less than the number of under-18 men getting breast reduction. (Look at the "2005 Age Distribution Cosmetic Patients" sheet...I notice if you add in "breast lifts" for under 18 women, it's a little larger than the male number).
I hear from students that it's fairly common to get a boob job as a high school graduation present--most women would be about 18 at that point. They tell me that they are just making this decision "freely" and that they don't have self-esteem issues, they just like the way it looks.
Note well: I would not say that deciding to get implants is in any way a sign that one's self esteem is somehow so much worse than anybody else's, but I am skeptical that this is such a free decision, and concerned by ... well, look at the "gender quick facts" sheet: 9 million women every year are having cosmetic surgery to 1.2 million men (and that number includes having a nose rebuilt); so women are doing this at roughly 7 times the rate of men. Male rates are going up, too (and pretty dramatically), but mostly they are no where near women's rates.
I'm old school. I know. But I do find these numbers depressing, because of what it seems, to me, to be saying about gender, standards of beauty, conformity, and social/economic class issues--and about the distribution of medical skills and resources in my country anyway, which is made almost invisible by our market approach to medical care.
To me, taken as a whole, they signal we are getting less progressive, and arguably less open to a variety of body types (yes, sure, some few of those surgeries are probably doing new and creative things but mostly, for women, it's mostly done in the hope of making us look a little more like Pamela Anderson, isn't it?)
But I honestly accept it's quite possible that there are other ways of seeing these statistics and this issue, and I welcome hearing them. |
). So, what I'd like to know is, what is the latest fashion in body modification, after all? In your respective turfs/social circles, of course, fellow 'lithians.