fem-lit - Tumblr blog

[fem-lit]

Cosmetic surgery is not “cosmetic,” and human flesh is not “plastic.” Even the names trivialize what it is. It’s not like ironing wrinkles in fabric, or tuning up a car, or altering outmoded clothes, the current metaphors. Trivialization and infantilization pervade the surgeons’ language when they speak to women: “a nip,” a “tummy tuck.” Rees writes, describing a second-degree acid burn over the face: “Remember when you were in school and you skinned your knee and a scab formed?” This baby talk falsifies reality. Surgery changes one forever, the mind as well as the body.

— Naomi Wolf (1990) The Beauty Myth

[fem-lit]

Surgery hurts, it hurts. They hold you underwater just long enough to stop you struggling. You breathe with newly cut gills. They haul you out again, logged and twisted, facedown on a bank with no footprints. Your spirit held in suspended animation, they drive a tank carefully over your ignorant body.

Waking up hurts, and coming back to life hurts horribly. A hospital, though it is called “luxurious” or “caring,” degrades: Like a prison or a mental institution, wherever the old identity meant trouble, they take away your clothes and give you a numbered bed.

For the time you were under, you lose your life, and you never regain those hours. Visitors come, but you see them through the waters that have closed over your head, another species: the well. Once you have been cut into, no amount of good living can ever erase what you know about how easy, how accommodating death is.

— Naomi Wolf (1990) The Beauty Myth

[fem-lit]

WARNING! This post contains potentially upsetting, very detailed, graphic text descriptions of a chemical face peel.

Excerpt from The Beauty Myth (1990) by Naomi Wolf:

A “scalpel slave” in She magazine describes a face peel:

“Essentially, it is no different from a second-degree burn…. [It] makes you go brown and crispy, then a scab forms and drops off … [it] takes several hours because it is so poisonous and you can’t risk getting it into the bloodstream.” Dr. Thomas Rees minces no words: “Abrasion and peeling traumatizes [sic] the skin … with either procedure, the skin can be removed too deeply and result in an open wound …. deaths [from cardiac arrest] have followed a chemical peel … the skin is frozen [for dermabrasion] until it assumes a boardlike quality that facilitates the abrasion from a rotating wire brush impregnated with diamond particles.” (“Skin planing,” he informs the reader, “originated in World War II, done with sandpaper to remove shrapnel embedded in the skin.” Plastic surgery developed after World War I in reaction to wartime mutilations never witnessed before.) A woman who has witnessed skin planing said to an interviewer, “If we found that they were doing that to people in prison, there would be an international outcry and [the country] would be reported to Amnesty International for torture of the most horrific kind.” Chemical peeling, that “torture of the most horrific kind,” is up, according to Rees, 34 percent.

It is not easy to describe physical pain, and the words we agree on to convey it are rarely adequate. Society has to agree that a certain kind of pain exists in order to ease it. What women experience in the operating theater, under the mask of acid, laid out open to the mouth of the suction machine, passed out cold in wait for the bridge of the nose to be broken, is still private and unsayable.

[fem-lit]

Pain is real when you can get other people to believe in it. If no one believes it but you, your pain is madness or hysteria or your own unfeminine inadequacy. Women have learned to submit to pain by hearing authority figures—doctors, priests, psychiatrists—tell us that what we feel is not pain.

— Naomi Wolf (1990) The Beauty Myth

[fem-lit]

If anything on a woman’s body can be changed, something revolutionary—or demonic—has come about in the alternate world of the beauty myth. Does it mean the cruel old economy is blasted apart? That science has indeed opened up a horizon of beauty for all women who can afford it? Does it mean the bitterly rankling caste system, in which some are born “better” than others, is dead, and women are free?

That has been the popular interpretation: The Surgical Age is an unqualified good. It is the American dream come true: One can re-create oneself “better” in a brave new world. It has even, understandably, been interpreted as a feminist liberation: Ms. magazine hailed it as “self-transformation”; in Lear’s, a woman surgeon urges, “Voilà! You are led to freedom.” This hopeful female yearning for a magic technology that destroys the beauty myth and its injustice—with a “beauty” that is almost fair because you can earn it with pain and buy it with money—is a poignant, but shortsighted, response.

Whether or not a woman ever undergoes cosmetic surgery, her mind is now being shaped by its existence. The expectation of surgery will continue to rise. Since the beauty myth works in a mappable balance system, as soon as enough women are altered and critical mass is reached so that too many women look like the “ideal,” the “ideal” will always shift. Ever-different cutting and stitching will be required of women if we are to keep our sexuality and our livelihood.

— Naomi Wolf (1990) The Beauty Myth

[fem-lit]

WARNING! This post contains potentially upsetting, extremely detailed, graphic text descriptions about the effects of cosmetic surgery.

Excerpt from The Beauty Myth (1990) by Naomi Wolf:

That apathy is the real issue: The global numbing effect is under way. With every article on surgery that details the horrors of it, as many do, women, ironically, lose a bit more of our ability to feel for our own bodies and identify with our own pain—a survival skill, since with each article, social pressure to undergo those very horrors will have mounted. Women know about the atrocities; but we cannot feel them anymore.

As the index rises and surgical technologies become more sophisticated, this numbing process will accelerate. Procedures that still sound barbaric to our ears will soon be absorbed into the encroaching numbness.

The point is that our numbness is catching up to what the beauty index is asking of us. The reader finishes the article and looks at the pictures: The woman’s face looks as if she has been beaten across the zygomatic ridge with an iron pipe. Her eyes are blackened. The skin of the woman’s hips is a blanket of bruises. The woman’s breasts are swollen out and yellow like hyperthyroid jaundiced eyes. The woman’s breasts don’t move. The blood crusts under the sutures. The reader, two or three years ago, thought these images were alarmist. It dawns on her now, they’re promotional. She is no longer expected to react with the revulsion that she felt at first. Women’s magazines set the beauty index. They’ve given enormous coverage to surgery, partly because very little happens in the world of “beauty” that is at all new. These features have readers believe that we should balk now at nothing, since it seems that other readers, the competition, are braving it. The typical article, which details weeks of grisly pain but ends in happy beauty, provokes in women something like panic buying.

[fem-lit]

Enough pain makes people numb. Look at a “done-up” woman walking down a wintry street, branches rattling above her. She is wearing a costume, part flamenco dancer, part Carmen, a self-creation that is fragile and arresting. She painted her face for an hour, blending and shading, and now she holds her head as if it were a work of art. Her legs in black silk are numb from the windchill. The deep parting of her dress is open to a blast of wind, which raises tiny hairs on her skin. Her Achilles tendons are ground by the upward pressure of her black-red spike heels, and are relentlessly throbbing. But heads turn, and keep turning: Who’s that? Each glance is like a shot from a hypodermic. As long as the heads keep turning, she truly is not cold.

— Naomi Wolf (1990) The Beauty Myth

[fem-lit]

Medical ethics treats interference in male sexuality as an atrocity. Depo-Provera, a drug that lowers the libido of male criminals, is controversial because it is barbaric to intervene in male sexuality. But female sexuality is still treated by institutions as if it were hypothetical. Not only do factory-produced breasts endanger women’s sensual response; many other procedures harm it too. (The Pill, for example, which was supposed to make women “sexier,” actually lowers their libido, a side effect of which they are rarely informed.) A risk of eyelid surgery is blindness; a nose job risks damage to the sense of smell; numbness accompanies face-lifts. If the surgical ideal is sensual, there must be other senses than the usual five.

— Naomi Wolf (1990) The Beauty Myth

[fem-lit]

Since beauty censorship keeps women in profound darkness about other women’s real bodies, it is able to make virtually any woman feel that her breasts alone are too soft or low or sagging or small or big or weird or wrong […]

Women are not cutting their breasts open for individual men, by and large, but so that they can experience their own sexuality. In a diseased environment, they are doing this “for themselves.”

Today a woman must ignore her reflection in the eyes of her lover, since he might admire her, and seek it in the gaze of the God of Beauty, in whose perception she is never complete.

What is it about the Official Breast that makes it cancel out all other breasts? Of all shapes and sizes, it best guarantees adolescence. Very young girls, of course, have small breasts, but so do many mature women. Many mature women have large breasts that are not “firm” and “pert.” The breast that is high but also large and firm is most likely to belong to a teenager. In a culture which fears the price of women’s sexual self-confidence, that breast is the reassuring guarantee of extreme youth—sexual ignorance and infertility.

Many women’s sexuality is becoming so externalized by beauty pornography that they may truly be more excited by sexual organs that, though dead or immobile, visually fit into it.

So breast implants, even if they feel bizarre to her lover and cut off sensation in herself, may in fact “free” a woman sexually. They look official. They photograph well. They have become artifact—not-woman—and will never change, the beauty myth’s ultimate goal.

Surgeons are not expected to elicit what will make the woman beautiful in her own eyes, but to guarantee her that they will impose on her body the culture’s official fantasy.

— Naomi Wolf (1990) The Beauty Myth

[fem-lit]

The removal of the ovaries was developed in 1872. The next year, it was recommended for “non-ovarian conditions,” especially masturbation, so that by 1906 about 150,000 American women were without ovaries. “Non-ovarian conditions” was a social judgment aimed to prevent the “unfit” from breeding and polluting the body politic. “The ‘unfit’ included … any women who had been corrupted by masturbation, contraception and abortion �� from the 1890s until the Second World War, mentally ill women were ‘castrated.’”

The “Orificial Surgery Society” in 1925 offered surgical training in clitoridectomy and infibulation “because of the vast amount of sickness and suffering which could be saved the gentler sex.” Ten years ago, an Ohio gynecologist offered a $1,500 “Mark Z” operation to reconstruct the vagina “to make the clitoris more accessible to direct penile stimulation.” A common boast of modern cosmetic surgeons is that their work saves women from lives of suffering and misery.

— Naomi Wolf (1990) The Beauty Myth

[fem-lit]

Dr. Symington-Brown began clitoridectomies in 1859. By the 1860s he was removing labia as well. He became more confident, operating on girls as young as ten, on idiots, epileptics, paralytics, and women with eye problems. As a surgery addict says in She magazine, “Once you start, it has a knock-on effect.” He operated five times on women who wanted divorces—each time returning wife to husband. “The surgery … was a ceremony of stigmatization that frightened most of them into submission….The mutilation, sedation and psychological intimidation … seems to have been an efficient, if brutal, form of reprogramming.” “Clitoridectomy,” writes Showalter, “is the surgical enforcement of an ideology that restricts female sexuality to reproduction,” just as breast surgery is of an ideology that restricts female sexuality to “beauty.”

Victorian women complained of being “tricked and coerced” into treatment, as did the American women who in 1989 described to talk show hostess Oprah Winfrey the genital mutilations inflicted on them without their consent by a surgeon convinced he could improve their orgasms by surgical reconstruction.

— Naomi Wolf (1990) The Beauty Myth

[fem-lit]

The Surgical Age likewise reinforces women’s submissiveness to the beauty myth with the unspoken background fear: If she is not careful, she will need an operation.

— Naomi Wolf (1990) The Beauty Myth

[fem-lit]

Victorian clitoridectomy made women behave. “Patients are cured … the moral sense of the patient is elevated … she becomes tractable, orderly, industrious and cleanly.” Modern surgeons claim they make women feel better, and that, no doubt, is true; Victorian middle-class women had so internalized the idea of their sexuality as diseased that the gynecologists were “answering their prayers.” Says a face-lift patient of Dr. Thomas Rees’s, “The relief was enormous.” One of Victorian Dr. Cushing’s patients, relieved by the scalpel of the “temptation” to masturbate, wrote, “A window has been opened in heaven [for me].” “It’s changed my life,” says a rhinoplasty patient of Dr. Thomas Rees’s: “As simple as that.”

— Naomi Wolf (1990) The Beauty Myth

[fem-lit]

Imagine this: penis implants, penis augmentation, foreskin enhancement, testicular silicone injections to correct asymmetry, saline injections with a choice of three sizes, surgery to correct the angle of erection, to lift the scrotum and make it pert. Before and after shots of the augmented penis in Esquire. Risks: Total numbing of the glans. Diminution of sexual feeling. Permanent obliteration of sexual feeling. Glans rigidity, to the consistency of hard plastic. Testicular swelling and hardening, with probable repeat operations, including scar tissue formation that the surgeon must break apart with manual pressure. Implant collapse. Leakage. Unknown long-term consequences. Weeks of recovery necessary during which the penis must not be touched. The above procedures are undergone because they make men sexy to women, or so men are told.

Civilized people will agree that these are mutilations so horrible that a woman should not even be able to think them. I recoiled when I wrote them. You, if a woman, probably flinched when you read them; if you were a man, your revulsion was no doubt almost physical.

But since women are taught to identify more compassionately with the body of a man or a child—or a fetus or a primate or a baby seal—than with our own, we read of similar attacks on our own sexual organs with numbness. Just as women’s sexuality is turned inside out so that we identify more with male pleasure than female, the same goes for our identification with pain. One could protest that breast and penis are not parallel terms, and that is valid: Breast surgery is not exactly a clitoridectomy. It is only half a clitoridectomy.

— Naomi Wolf (1990) The Beauty Myth

[fem-lit]

Healing doctors respect the healthy body and invade the diseased only as a last resort; cosmetic surgeons call healthy bodies sick in order to invade them. The former avoid operating on family members; the latter are the first men to whom technology grants the ancient male fantasy of mythical Pygmalion, the sculptor who fell in love with his own creation: At least one surgeon has totally reconstructed his wife.

— Naomi Wolf (1990) The Beauty Myth

[fem-lit]

Though patients are asked to sign consent forms, it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to get accurate or objective information about cosmetic surgery. Most coverage stresses women’s responsibility to research the practitioners and procedures. But reading only women’s magazines, a woman might learn the complications—but not their probability; devoting full-time research to it, she still won’t find out the mortality rate. Either no one knows it who should, or no one’s telling. A spokeswoman for the American Society of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeons says, “No one’s keeping the figures for a mortality rate. There are no records for an overall death rate.”

— Naomi Wolf (1990) The Beauty Myth

[fem-lit]

WARNING! This post contains upsetting, graphic and gory text descriptions of liposuction procedures.

Excerpt from The Beauty Myth (1990) by Naomi Wolf:

Cosmetic surgical techniques appear to be developed in irresponsible medical experiments, using desperate women as laboratory animals: In the first stabs at liposuction in France, powerful hoses tore out of women, along with massive globules of living tissue, entire nerve networks, dendrites and ganglia. Undaunted, the experimenters kept at it. Nine French women died of the “improved” technique, which was called a success and brought to the United States.