Comment Archive:
Friday 5th August 2005
Western Image Propaganda
Consider this: in twenty years time purchasing cosmetic surgery will be seen as no more remarkable or comment-worthy than buying a tube of toothpaste or a packet of toilet rolls. It will be seen as the norm. So much the norm in fact that you will be seen as odd or deeply eccentric if you have not undergone a few artificial tweaks and tucks during your biological development. Synthetic enhancement will be seen as entirely natural and it will be a neglectful mother indeed who does not offer a nose job as a birthday present to her image conscious pre-teen.
Sounds far fetched? Only to those of you who have had your eyes closed to the welter of fly-on-the-wall surgical documentaries that have proliferated on our TV screens over the last five years. Cosmetic surgery is not only big business (it’s always been that) but it is now - in terms of the ultra downloadable, broadband culture we live in - the ultimate must-have plug-in. You are not an authentic citizen of the 21st Century until you have had a facelift. It is your liposuction that makes you human. And it will help if the process is televised.
Cast your mind back a mere ten years or so and the mere concept of cosmetic surgery (sounds so much more real and palatable than plastic surgery, doesn’t it?) tended to place people into two very definite camps. The drooping middle agers (usually mouldy celebrities) who feared the onslaught of decrepitude and wanted to recapture the veneer of lost youth and so thought cosmetic surgery a real boon... and the rest of us who could see that there was something damn unsavoury about being 89 years old and having tits perkier than a Page Three model at a winter photo shoot and firmer than freshly picked cantaloupes. Now though the pendulum has started to swing back the other way. Suddenly the vast majority of the population are beginning to think that cosmetic surgery is actually "quite ok really" and they’d quite happily entertain the idea of a quick nip and pull-back on their wrinkly bits while the Sunday supplements are full of A list celebrities proudly showing off their crows feet and furry cleavages whilst loudly proclaiming their pride in the au naturel look.
So what exactly is going on?
Hollywood is what is going on. Or to be really exact, the promotion of what I call the "Idealized Western Image" is what is going on and Hollywood just happens to be the prime advertising vehicle – the great global proselytizer. You see, my theory is that all these celebrities who so self righteously body swerve the notion of cosmetic surgery do so because they already conform to an insidious concept of a racial physical ideal – an ideal that has been steadily built up and promoted by the West through it’s popular movie and music cultures. In a sense a celebrity can’t even become a celebrity in the first place unless they already in some way match up to this perfectly sculpted physical ideal. The rest of us, of course - the dumpy, droopy, slumpy hoi-polloi - don’t and so we’re slowly coming round to the idea, thanks to our worship of movie and music stars, that it’s ok to have a little nip here and a little tuck there just to "pull us into line" and ensure that we look like we’re supposed to. Nicole Kidman for example already looks like she’s supposed to and so can chastely spurn the surgeon’s knife. Remember cosmetic surgery is less about remaining young looking these days and more about matching up to a physical idea of perfection that is promoted by our culture with it’s every exhalation. Hundreds of years ago a similar promotion was called colonialism. A mere 65 years ago it was called Nazism. Nowadays with our love of sound bites and snappy jargon to sanitize the unpalatable we call it body fascism.
Think I’m being extreme? Think I’m leaping to make impossible connections? Then consider this:
The latest reality docu-drama to hit our TV screens in the UK is about a Chinese beauty contest. Not just an ordinary beauty contest but an "Artificial Beauty Contest". It is open only to young Chinese women who have been surgically enhanced and beautified by the surgeon’s knife. It’s practically a human arts and crafts show.... here’s one I made earlier. It brings a sobering illumination to the idea of being "a model". The really scary thing though is that these ordinary women are undergoing major operations in order to conform to an idealized concept of Western beauty (wide cow eyes, full lips, straight noses, long elegant limbs) not a concept of traditional Chinese beauty. They have completely bought into the idea of the Western Idealized image and are willing to have their bodies hacked and spliced and remoulded in a painful effort to match up to it. You can bet your bottom dollar that this isn’t just occurring in China. It’s happening the world over including here in the UK – it’s just that it is more noticeable in non-Western countries. Here in the West we can kid ourselves that it is "just a little tuck to stay trim"... when in reality, if we are honest, it is actually a major bit of surgery to ensure that we kowtow to the huge Western cloning programme that is currently taking place the world over.
The notion of any sort of racial ideal is extremely dangerous. Nazism is still in existence and the after effects of its bigoted promotion of racial perfection 65 years ago is still blighting lives today. It was and is a MODERN event. The Holocaust owes its existence in part to the fanatical promotion of a Western physical ideal – the blond, blue eyed, superman. If cosmetic surgery of the sophistication we enjoy today had been available in Germany in 1939 can you imagine what would have happened?
A sad fact of this world is that it’s not always what you say or what you do that ensures your survival. Very often it’s what you look like. And you have to look right. It doesn’t matter what your ID papers say. Imagine Berlin in 1940... "I don’t care what your papers say. You don’t look German, you look Jewish..." And there you are. Condemned. You don’t conform to the ideal image.
Think that outlandish? Think that was the result of ignorant times and it couldn’t happen here and now? Consider Rwanda a mere ten years ago. Another holocaust caused by the notion of racial idealism. The Tutsis had been judged a superior race to the Hutus by the original colonials simply because they more closely adhered to the Western physical ideal – paler skinned, longer limbed, straighter nosed – they ticked all of the boxes that the Western eye looked to when determining whether a race was beautiful, intelligent and worthy enough to deserve White approval. Cue generations of envy, inferiority complexes, Hutus determined to deny their own heritage in order to become Tutsi through marriage and bloodline, the inevitable backlash, the suspicion, the needing of a scapegoat on which to blame the country’s economic failure and poverty, the anger, the hatred. Cue millions dead in a matter of months. If you looked like a Tutsi you were killed on sight – no matter that you might genuinely be a Hutu, no matter what your ID papers might say. Ironically thousand of Hutus were also killed because, by accident of birth, they looked like Tutsis and many Tutsi’s were spared because the same accident bestowed upon them the Hutu physique. This genocide wasn’t about what your blood said you were, it was about how you looked. It was about what physical traits you did or did not possess and a moral and aesthetic life value attributed to each – it was just that in this case, to possess the Idealized Western Image held you at a distinct disadvantage. Either way the haves and the have-nots – the supposed superior and the supposed inferior – were decided purely on their physical characteristics. Your worth was measured by your looks.
The ethos that lies behind the world’s currently burgeoning obsession with cosmetic surgery is not a million miles from this sort of thinking. It is body fascism in a very true and frightening sense. While plastic surgery might have the power to make the individual feel empowered and beautiful in the short term it ultimately only has the power to devalue and debase in the long. We need to seriously think about the kind of world – and the kind of people – that we are making out of ourselves.
Agree? Disagree? Got a different beef? Why not have your say? Email:
