It is important to understand and come to terms with the psychology of these practices, because then we are in a better position to know what drives us. Moreover, we need to think about the relationship between our personal practices and culturewide trends and transformations. It is true that as more and more of us begin to change ourselves surgically, our distinctions, our variations will be less obvious.
Consider, for example, a world in which, by fifty, every single one of us has had rejuvenating plastic surgery. When plastic surgery becomes the standard of what fifty looks like, what might it mean to refuse plastic surgery? In a culture where younger people have a better time in all respects, why wouldn't you want to look young given the chance? Perhaps such possibilities strike us as frightening because they are so very tantalizing.
One plastic surgeon put it all very crisply: "We live in a very competitive culture, and you start looking old and saggy, everybody stops talking to you. I did a very large liposuction two days ago on a seventy-year-old woman. She had just gotten back from a motorcycle trip. She's seventy years old going on thirty, and there are a lot of them out there.
You know, they're healthy and they're young and she's going to live to be 110. When you're seventy and you think you've got another thirty, forty years, you don't want to sit on the porch and rot. You want to stay in the game." Somehow, when he puts it this way that in order to "stay in the game," more in the world, you need to have plastic surgery it all begins to sound rather coercive. The practice I or my friends or my family engage in for our personal gratification and sense of urgency seems simply like a choice of one sort or another, albeit a choice made in the context of powerful social forces. But what happens when those social forces become so very powerful that no one dare resist them without risking total exclusion?
You will be fired from your job and replaced by someone "tidier"; you will be replaced by the youthful-looking at dinner tables; your partner will leave you for someone better maintained; your children will be embarrassed to bring their friends home to see their out-of-control parent; you will for all intents and purposes be socially dead. The rest of the crowd, who are with the program, as it were, will act as though they are among the living.
The trajectory must be from bad or okay to wonderful. Aging isn't something to look forward to, clearly. It slows you down. Youthful possibilities dry up around you, and you leave a desert trail in your wake. To travel, to move, from Old Europe to New America, where one can thrive unrestricted, change social status, be "self-made" or to venture far from your imperial and powerful world to find some "undiscovered" land, burgeoning with raw materials and land and free labor, you could make your fortune here. Stories of travel enfold and shape us.
We always head into opportunity. Cosmetic plastic surgery stories are inherently future-oriented, are by their very nature about overcoming obstacles through making a change. In the case of the aging and /or defective body, an operation on the horizon becomes a hope toward which one moves with optimism. It is forward moving, expectation generating. For someone with a defect, plastic plastic surgery can become an ongoing story of preoperative expectations followed by postoperative depression.
A prominent plastic surgeon talked to me about his early experience with cleft palate patients: "There was a mythology that was passed from patient to patient, and my group knew each other, because they would come in the summertime when school was out to have revisional plastic surgery. There was a mythology that had developed that, when you were sixteen or seventeen and fully sized, then there would be the operation that would make everything look normal. I can't tell you how many times I've had to sit with weeping teenagers and tell them that there isn't anything further that can be done which is tough." How did such a mythology arise if not through the very cultural association of plastic surgery as the story of "happily ever after"? Whatever the problem deformity, ugliness, old age you will be made anew. The end will be better than the beginning.
The fantasy that plastic surgery can transform one is enormously wrenching for people who are disfigured either congenitally or as the result of an accident. One accident victim fantasized about getting "the finest cosmetic plastic surgery, which would make her defects disappear, and that she would buy the finest artificial arm, a true ‘bionic' appendage" (Bernstein 145).
Lucy Grealy describes the story of her own obsessive pursuit of a normal face. She had numerous operations involving a range of implant methods and materials, all of which eventually resorbed. She considered abandoning further treatment: "But, again but, how could I pass up the possibility that it might work, that at long last I might finally fix my face, fix my life, my soul" (215). Ultimately, a series of operations in Scotland proved reasonably effective. Grealy describes the difficulty of beginning to live without another plastic surgery on the horizon, without "the framework of when my face gets fixed, then I'll start living".
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