For a long time I couldn’t understand why I felt so angry every time I saw a woman who’d had obvious cosmetic surgery.
Pillow lips. Chipmunk cheeks. Frozen foreheads. Immobilised eyes. Blank stares. That disconcerting overall puffiness that has become so familiar.
Whether I was looking at a celebrity on a red carpet or in a photo, even a stranger standing next to me in a cafe, I could feel the fury rise up and prickle underneath my skin.
It was never a pleasant sensation.
These women didn’t deserve my anger and on an intellectual level I understood that completely. They were simply making personal choices about their faces and bodies which is the basic tenet of feminism. Their choices and their faces were none of my business.
And yet still, I seethed.
For a while, I tried to reshape my anger into empathy. These poor women. How awful to look in the mirror and feel so bad that you’d spend thousands of dollars and get your face injected, plumped up, pulled tauter and paralysed. And for the celebrities, how cruel to have your career indexed to your face and your ability to stay frozen – quite literally – around age 28.
Then I decided my anger was more about the lying; the way celebrities always insist the secret of their youthful good looks is as simple as ‘sunscreen’, ‘luck’ and ‘laughter”. Come on. That’s not playing fair. That’s like saying your hair changed colour in the sun.
Yes, it does irk me when a celebrity insults our intelligence (and our eyesight) by insisting they’re all natural when they’re very obviously not. Or by hiding behind the idea that ‘plastic surgery‘ means a scalpel and that injectibles don’t count as ‘work’. Please.
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Oh and just to add to that last post- Funny enough, I now don't feel I need a man any more to feel OK about myself- isn't that a strange and ironic outcome?
Mia, I rarely disagree with you, but this time I really do. Everyone seems to be raging against something, and plastic surgery is one of the only areas left to rage about, when it comes down to the choices other people make. This time your rage is against society. In reality It's nothing but biology going on here, and we all know there is no point raging against that. By nature women have always used whatever means available to improve their looks if that's what they really want to do. Women through history have plucked, pierced, poisoned, dyed, bleached and endangered themselves. Yes, many men judge the value of a woman by her looks, but so do other women. It's unfair, but it's biology. I am not a particularly good looking woman, I was called a 'dog' at 15 by a boy who lived down the street, and since then my looks have been a struggle for me. I'm not really that bad, I suppose, but I am plain. Now in my forties, left by my husband for another woman after 19 years of marriage a couple of years ago, I've been greeted on internet dates by men who can barely hide their contempt, some who feel it's OK to comment about my lack of looks, and none who have any interest in me. For a long time I raged, I cried, I cursed how everything else I might have going for me counted for nothing. In the end, I couldn't fight it. It's the way we are as humans, victims of our biological make-up. We like and admire good looks- we can't help it. I challenge anyone to say they don't know what I mean. When I started to understand it like that I stopped fighting it and decided to do something about it. I had some Botox, and then took it further and had a fabulous boob job and some eyelid surgery. Do I still make you angry? Do you think I want your pity like I'm some sort of sad victim? No I do not. Do I feel better now? Oh a whole lot better, like you wouldn't believe. We all have our stories, but we are not all bored, shallow and rich housewives- for many of us, it goes much deeper than you might have imagined. And if my career depended on it, as is in all probability the case with many celebrities, I would do the same thing.