Societal Pontification

So I’ve been thinking a lot about self-image recently. It started at a dinner party, where one of the diners commented on the plastic surgery Toyah Wilcox underwent after seeing herself on reality TV immersed in the Australian outback. Said diner’s disagreement with this was that Toyah had been such a bastion of feminism and that surgery to correct aging was a betrayal and a hypocrisy. My argument was that surely cosmetic surgery is simply a more aggressive form of a good foundation.

That brought me to thinking today, as I applied eyeliner before running out the door and realising I only had one earring on, why do we, as women, wear make up? Do we wear it to enhance, or to hide behind? And if a bit of eyeliner makes you feel better, is that such a bad thing? Toyah wanted her surgery because she looked at herself and saw something that obviously her bathroom mirror didn’t reveal. The question in that is whether or not in having such surgery, she was conforming to her own ideas of beauty, or society’s – and then whether indeed those are two separate things at all in the first place.

The most interesting aspect of this to me, however, was the feminist argument. The woman making this point felt that it was highly anti-feminist to undergo such surgery, feeling that it was conforming to an ideal of women that was created by a fashion industry primarily led by men. That argument certainly has it’s merits, but that strikes me as an old argument, from when feminism was led by women who often seemed to want to be men, not be equal with them. That brand of feminism, looking back on it in hindsight, shuns one ideal of women, the ‘male-created’ utopian dream of a blonde housewife, with huge breasts and perfect teeth, who had dinner ready every night, could tuck the kids up and then do wild and crazily kinky things in the bedroom. In it’s place, however, was forced another image on women – that they had to be high achievers, that they had to want to work and bring up perfect children, that they could have one-night stands and not feel ashamed. They could have it all – being a woman shouldn’t stop them.

And that’s right – being a woman shouldn’t stop you from doing what you want. True, real feminism should be about choice. If you choose to be a housewife and you feel fulfilled doing that, what is wrong with that? What is anti-women about that, a woman who can turn around as she sees her children going off to college can say ‘I brought those children up an made them what they are’ and feel proud of that, in the same way as a woman who has made being a CEO by 40 can jump up and down in the elevator after being given her final promotion.

Where does that leave us with cosmetic surgery? It can easily be argued that, working in the media, Toyah had little ‘choice’ to undergo whatever procedure she chose, because in order to continue to work in such a field, one must present an image of infinite youth and so to continue to remain in any semblance of steady employment, she had to go under the knife.

But what if someone chooses, as Ms. Wilcox may well have done, to undergo a serious operation simply because it makes them feel better? Is that not their own prerogative? Once again, it is easy to argue that it is not really, because they are conforming to what society feels is beautiful. To think this is a modern-day phenomenon is of course ridiculous – one only has to look at the things women have done to themselves over the centuries, from lead-paint on faces which poisoned them to corsets that made their waists so small they could barely breathe or sit down, to realise this is something that has existed in our society from the dawn of time. No doubt cavewomen were sitting around their campfires trying to see who had the longest underarm hair.

The feminist argument against any modification is that it is simply pandering to men’s ideals of attraction and of course, youth is attractive because subconsciously to men it signals fertility therefore all women attempt to stop aging.

This too me is too simplistic. Many women who undergo procedures, or put on make-up or even just wear short skirts and high heels do so in spite of very loving partners who like them with small boobs, scrub-faced and short. They do it for themselves, to make themselves feel better.

And then we come back to the argument of choice. Is it really feminist empowerment to deny someone the choice to fix the nose that they’ve always hated? Or is saying ‘you must love yourself as you are’ just as bad as the fashion industry dictating you must be a hairless anorexic? I am sure that there are many women out there who fork out thousands of pounds for surgery, only to realise that their confidence problems are far more deep-seated. There are also those, however, who have always hated their slightly bulbous nose, and come out of that hospital with such self-confidence that they have never known and go on to achieve amazing things because of it. That is true empowerment.

There are those who will argue that the world should accept everyone for whom they are, and then there would be no one who felt so insecure that they had to have collagen put in strange places on their body. Those people have obviously never spent any time in a school playground. It is in human nature to shy away from things that are ‘different’ and to make fun of it. There will always be a norm, there always has been, ever since Uggette was made fun of for having hairier toes than her husband. That won’t change, and so instead we should empower people to make choices about their lives to make them happy within that norm, rather than make them unhappy forcing to be something they are not comfortable with.