The culture of cosmetic surgery

I decided to look into cosmetic surgery to inform this assignment.
Such procedures are of interest to me, and relevant to the assignment as they are a modern development in enhancing physical appearance.
I wanted to establish whether the level of operations carried out on women was more, less or equal to the amount of procedures performed on men.
I got a book out of the library titled "Flesh Wounds - the culture of cosmetic surgery" by Virginia L. Blum

Before I even opened the book i read the back cover only to discover the following review by Fay Weldon, author of "The life and loves of a she-devil"

"I blame mirrors. If it weren't for them we wouldn't need plastic surgeons. In the meantime, anyone tempted to reshape face, body, and mind by means of knife should first read Blum's intelligent, persuasive, and absorbing book. Both enticed and alarmed, the reader will at least know whats she's doing and more importantly, why. This is a book that takes you and shakes you by the throat, and leaves you the better for it."

I was so struck by this, as before even reading any of the books content, my suspicion of cosmetic surgery being more of a woman's 'thing' was, in a way, confirmed.
I have underlined and made bold the particular sentence which i am referring to. Weldon, the writer of the particular review specifically pin points a gender to which this topic of book is directly aimed towards, she also states that it is the female readers who will discover 'what she is doing and why'.

I went onto read quite a lot of the book, as I found it so interesting, there were many points made which reinforce my ideas about beautification of women, and will support my research for this assignment.

Firstly, the book opens with a patients first hand account of her experience before, during and after her cosmetic surgery procedure.

"My first nose job was performed by an otolaryngologist (otherwise known as an ear, nose, and throat doctor) who, in concert with my mother encouraged me to have surgery." (Page 1)

Allegra Kent - The patient who's experience we read of, talks about her mothers investment in her nose job, and how this was described by her mother as  bid to invest in 'conventional beauty'.

"my experience of learning there was something wrong with my nose is inscribed in my mind (and on my body) as a story of imperfection that required correction." (Page 2)

The book then moves on to discussing how from an early age we learn that love, money and achievement  is much easier to thrive in if one if good looking.

There is a quote from a surgeon in the book - "what we do, is a very powerful magic, you go to sleep one way and wake up another, it's the stuff of fairy tales. We change peoples lives, once they look better, everything will change." (Page 5)

From reading this book, especially sections which contain quoted sentences from the surgeons themselves, i have realised that the plastic surgeons tend to justify their practice through the claim of psychological necessity. You only have to consider the way in which the NHS can provide breast alterations provided the patient is considered to be suffering emotional imbalance due to the problem.

"As we are increasingly influenced by the ubiquity of beautiful female bodies on television, in movies, on the cover of virtually every magazine in the supermarket, it is no wonder that the identification with the image of beauty itself is so compelling." (Page 19)

"Without the camera, there could be no cosmetic surgery. Because our mirror image can seem like a photograph, we might feel driven to make ourselves photographically beautiful." (Page 200)

Much alike the idea's discussed by Susan Sontag;

"So successful has been the camera's role in beautifying the world, that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful... we learn to see ourselves photographically: to regard oneself as attractive is, precisely, to judge that one would look good in a photograph"
(Page 85, On Photography)

"It is just this predicament of being the object of one's own remorseless gaze that acts out most transparently in the plastic surgeons office. In a way, he feels like an extension of me - What, after all, is the difference between his hands reshaping my face in the mirror and my own doing so? moreover, once i'm in pursuit of his skill, once i'm in the chair asking him to look at me (in the patient position), the surgery has as good as taken place." (Page 31)

I found this particularly interesting in respect to this assignment as the patient clearly refers to the surgeon as an extension of herself, a body modifying extension at that. In a way this in it's self makes the patient a cyborg as her organic being is undergoing technological improvement.

"The always want to know, 'who did you?' It's not 'Who was your surgeon?' Instead, they talk about surgeons 'doing' them." (Page 45)

I looked online to find some statistics of cosmetic procedures carried out on both men and women;
As you can see from the Graphs below, cosmetic procedures performed on men never reached more than 5,000 in the 4 years, whereas the amount of operations performed on women almost reached 40,000
Thats 8x the amount of operations recorded for men. In the diagram above this is indicated by the black and white areas, the black corresponding to men, and the white to women.