1. “There is no public empathy or advocacy for the cosmetic surgery patient. When something consistently goes wrong in other areas of medicine or on the consumer market, there’s a big outcry, and regulations are passed to protect the patient and buyer. Yet when the worst possible scenario happens to someone getting liposuction or a butt lift, it’s all too common to hear people essentially say, ‘She got what was coming to her’.”

   There’s little public advocacy for cosmetic surgery and it’s patients for the same reason there is little public advocacy for used cars or Walmart – because the private interests that profit from it can advocate perfectly well for themselves.I wonder if Ms Gold got a kickback or discount from her surgeons for her article. If not she should have been a bit sharper – you can bet the surgeon didn’t cut his/her fee because she wanted to be like Marilyn Monroe ‘instead’ of attracting men.

   It seems to me that there often is an outcry when things go badly wrong – against both the practitioners and the patients. That’s because vanity cosmetic surgery (as opposed to the reconstructive kind) is voluntary and there is plenty of info out there about the risks. I suspect most people consider it a case of letting the buyer beware. To attempt to equate it with other medical procedures simply reinforces the notion that patients are self-obsessed and using up medical resources for nothing more than their own vanity (often it’s the public medical system that has to come to the rescue when things go wrong). Whether they want to look like Marilyn or because they want to attract men it’s all about vanity, not medical need.

   Should their also be public advocacy in favour of men who take stupid risks while big-noting themselves in order to gain access to power? How about if they’re from a discriminated against group?

   Yep, women should be allowed to appear in public however they please. Feminists should no more vilify boob job clients than those who wear the burqa or those who stand on street corners in fishnets. But there are much better causes for advocacy out there I reckon.

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   • Thanks for reading and discussing my story. Just want to clarify that I didn’t receive a “kickback” by anyone (plastic surgeon, implant manufacturer, etc) for writing this piece. xoJane pays all writers a very modest rate for essays.

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     • Grace — thanks for the information! It’s great to hear from you.

       Solidarity,
       Joy

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     • Hi Ms Gold.

       I am sorry if my suggestion that you had financial motives for writing your article offended, but for the life of me I can’t see what the point of your essay was.

       It’s not as if there is a lack of information about the risks of cosmetic surgery out there. In fact negative outcomes have been such a media staple for so long that a 1970s San Francisco punk band named their first album Plastic Surgery Disasters. Speaking personally, I had never even heard of butt jobs until horror stories of what could go wrong hit the press.

       Nor am I sure what kind of advocacy you are proposing or what you expect it might achieve. While increased government regulation might have the salutary effect of forcing the worst of the shonks across the Mexican border and pushing vanity surgery beyond the means of many due to reduced supply and increased compliance costs it seems to me that the principle applies to all dubious medical services and products and efforts would be better directed towards something more general that might save money, injury and lives for a greater range of vulnerable people.

       Alas, medical advocacy groups are all too often the target of astroturfing by those who profit from snake oil and it seems more than likely to me that vanity surgery advocates would quickly be neutralised or co-opted by such tactics. Please forgive me for suspecting your article was an example of this.

       I would think there is a very simple answer for those worried about what can go wrong with vanity medical procedures, from botox to boob jobs. Don’t.

       Unfortunately those seeking help for disabling or potentially fatal conditions have no such luxury while those stigmatised as ‘mentally ill’ can be forced to undergo potentially dangerous treatment of very dubious merit. So those are the areas I will continue to direct my own advocacy towards.

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2. I agree that women who seek cosmetic surgery should not be stigmatized, and I think the previous comment by cabrogal raises interesting questions about the tensions between consumer choices and political choices. Cosmetic surgery may be both, but it’s not an easy balance.

   Gold poses the following question: “For those who do choose to change something ‘permanently,’ why is it automatically thought of as some kind of sell-out and not simply another choice a woman decides to make about her body?” Gold’s partial answer is that breast augmentation in particular is controversial because it is sexualized and associated with an assumed emotional imbalance–which could occur on a wide spectrum from a lack of self-confidence or a mental disorder.

   But it seems to me that Gold does not spend enough time talking about normative images of women’s bodies. Although I take women’s agency to make those choices safely seriously, I think it is worth considering what kind of body image is the one many people pick out as promoting self-esteem. I suspect that the kind of bodies taken to be ideal lack the diversity of body shapes that exist. And although I suspect cosmetic surgery can be undertaken without “selling out,” it will always be political an not “simply another choice” as long as their are patriarchal and racial norms shaping what bodies are valued and what bodies are not.

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   • I agree that women who seek cosmetic surgery should not be stigmatized, and I think the previous comment by cabrogal raises interesting questions about the tensions between consumer choices and political choices.

     Exactly.
     Breast augmentation is no more about female empowerment than is smoking Virginia Slims. You haven’t really come such a long way, ‘baby’.

     But it seems to me that Gold does not spend enough time talking about normative images of women’s bodies.

     Excellent point.

     Whatever ‘power’ accrues to women with socially valued breasts is not wrested from the patriarchy. It comes at the expense of their less well endowed (or well enhanced) sisters. The more people like Ms Gold succeed in normalising breast augmentation the more pressure other women will come under to have it done, particularly those in the sex and entertainment industries. Mind you, you could make similar points regarding burqas, big hair or bad shoes.

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3. When a woman decides to conform to certain beauty standards within that patriarchal society, she is simply trying to gain access to power in a way that is available to her, when there exist many other routes that may seem – or may very well be – unavailable.

   Just to clarify my own position.

   To me, seeking advancement within patriarchal power systems at the expense of one’s sisters while actually reinforcing standards that oppress many women (e.g. valuing women for their conventional ‘beauty’) is what I call ‘equal opportunism feminism’.

   While those who submit to or even endorse such paradigms in the name of feminism should not be personally vilified their arguments should be utterly rejected.

   Cosmetic surgery is essentially contemporary footbinding for the relatively well off and should not be represented as feminist regardless of motives.

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