Sociologist says plastic surgery a sign of the times of reinvention
By MARY McNAMARA
If you think the plastic surgery boom is just another sign that our culture is shallow, death-denying and youth-obsessed, think again.
Because according to sociologist Anthony Elliott, a "mommy job" is not just shorthand for the breast augmentation/tummy tuck many women choose to have after giving birth, it's a toxic side effect of globalization, rampant consumerism, the electronic economy and, perhaps, a worldwide epidemic of good old melancholia.
Elliott is chairman of the sociology department at Flinders University in Australia. His book is Making the Cut: How Cosmetic Surgery Is Transforming Our Lives. So you can't say you weren't warned. His purpose, and really at times it feels more like a quest, is to examine how cosmetic surgery is at once a driving force and a result of the new, international, techno-speedy, obsolescence-included economy - an almost perfect model of how capitalism not only meets consumer needs but creates them as well.
Quoting experts as disparate as Pamela Anderson and Sigmund Freud (surely this is a first), citing events as diverse as reality TV and various scandals, Elliott makes the case that millions of people are getting cosmetic surgery not because they are narcissists but because they are afraid. Not just of losing a job to a younger colleague or a spouse to a younger competitor, but of losing the chance to engage in what has become the hottest hobby in America: reinvention.
The replacement of humans with ever-refined robots is a staple of science fiction, but reading Making the Cut, one can't help but wonder if we all aren't just a few saline implants away from becoming Cylons.
Elliott argues that people, at least the old definition of people, that is, creatures whose bodies go through a set of changes called "aging," are increasingly perceived as not only a drag on the new capitalism, with its enjoyment of downsizing and corporate shake-ups (the ex-CEO with the bags under his eyes is probably tired, the woman with the pooching belly might have children who require her at home some of the time), but also a sign of limited imagination.
Why be reactive when you can be proactive?
Elliott seems particularly disturbed by the young people who view cosmetic surgery as an accessory.
"For better or worse," Elliott writes, "globalization has given rise to the 24/7 society, in which continual self-actualization and dramatic self-reinvention have become all the rage."
Now, I must warn you that this is one of the more conversational sentences to be found in Making the Cut. That Elliott is an academic is never in question; only an academic could, or would, make a statement like: "The thesis of para-social interaction takes us some distance in grasping the ubiquity of cosmetic surgical culture in our age of global communications networks."
I don't even know what that means. And this book is littered with those kinds of sentences. And that's too bad, because Elliott makes a lot of connections between the "desires" of the individual and the needs of the global economy (newer, thinner, faster) and how those things are being carved into our flesh.
By the time you get to his climactic point - that cosmetic surgery is a symptom of social melancholia in the strictest Freudian terms (brief overview of Freudian psychology included), you do wonder if he is just so overcome by the limitless tentacles of the field that he can't quite focus, or if he is just throwing things wildly to see what will stick.
Still, cosmetic surgery is a powerful cultural force, and it's good to have the sociologists on the case. Elliott's writing may be stiff, but his mind works in intriguing ways.