If you are at all squeamish, then you run a grave risk turning on the television these days. Hardly a night passes without some programme or other featuring ordinary folk having bits nipped, tucked, pinched, stretched or sliced out of their bodies in glorious colour. For all the criticism of the extreme make-over programme, The Swan, at least it blurs the gory bits during the operating theatre sequences, while RTE’s gruesomely compelling Desperately Seeking Surgery shows every sliver of excised human fat (it’s vivid canary-yellow in colour) and every square foot of discarded stomach skin.
It used to be just well-heeled matrons who consulted the man with the needle and scissors for a look that would hide a multitude of sins. Now almost everybody can resort to an expert to snip away all the evidence of past excesses. Too many late nights, too many tubs of Häagen-Dazs during your pregnancy, too sedentary a lifestyle, too many cigarettes? All those sagging, drooping, overhanging and wrinkled bits can be spirited away to leave you with a face and body you didn’t earn.
Which is, of course, the most irritating aspect of plastic surgery for those of us viewing the trend from the sidelines. It is sickening to hear skinny pop stars and actresses protest that their flat post-partum stomachs and pert prows are entirely due to exercise, nutrition and daily bouts of meditation when anybody can see that they’ve been tugged, stretched and pinned like bodhrans.
Anne Robinson is a hard woman who has made a fortune from cruel put-downs and, once upon a time, she had a face that reflected that nature. Thanks to surgery, though, she now has the looks of a sweet-tempered thirtysomething who would never let a sharp word cross her plumped-up lips.
Age, gravity and temperament are meant to take their toll on faces and bodies, and it seems unfair that folk who are already blessed with large fortunes and privileged lives can also thwart time and destiny with discreet surgery and expensive treatments. But, thankfully, they’re not the only ones any more.
A survey, published a few years ago, found that the overexposure of beautiful celebrities could have a depressing effect on a civilian’s self-esteem. Their perfection was considered to be unattainable, and consequently made many despair of the prospects of ever finding happiness or fulfilment in their own ordinary and unglamorous lives. It’s unlikely, though, that a similar survey today would find us quite as susceptible to celebrity-induced gloom and that has to be thanks, in large part, to the very recent democratisation of cosmetic surgery.
Almost as fashionable these days as the Botox-ed expression of permanent surprise is the expression of regret that women feel the need to look artificially young to keep the interest of their men. Endless female columnists agonise about why we apparently cannot be content to age gracefully. This is pure colonic irrigation on a number of fronts.
For a start, as a survey published last week made clear, women have cosmetic surgery to incite envy in other women, not to impress men. It is the same principle that applies when women go shopping. The purpose is to dazzle other females with your taste, style and fashion savvy, not to thrill a mere male who wouldn’t know a Juicy Couture hoodie from a hole in the ground. When, after all, did you last hear a man compliment a woman on her handbag? And yet bags are the most sought-after of fashion items.
It is hugely disingenuous to scoff at cosmetic surgery when just about everybody accepts that it is much better to look young and fresh rather than aged and tired. Youth, vigour, energy are powerfully attractive. Nobody, not even the most stringent critics of plastic surgery, would deny that they’d choose clothes that made them look smarter, fitter or younger, or that they are occasionally seduced by the promises of a face cream that offered smoother, wrinkle-free skin. So why get all sniffy about a shot or two of Botulin toxin if it irons out the creases for a few months, or a small operation that opens up tired eyes? There is little point in bemoaning the cult of glamour when we are naturally drawn towards physically attractive people, and inclined to praise and admire friends when they lose weight, get fit, get a flattering haircut or a glowing tan. For women particularly, neglect of looks and appearance is often an indicator of depression.
One of the patients featured on last week’s Desperately Seeking Surgery on RTE was a perfectly pleasant-looking middle-aged woman whose nose — once she drew your attention to it — was a tad on the large side. For many years, she said, this had made her reluctant to make eye contact with strangers and she had gone through life studying pavements and carpets in public places. If her surgery liberates her from that self-imposed subjection, who is to say it is a bad thing? Likewise, is a shot of Botox really any worse than a prescription for Prozac? Does a quick nip and tuck really take a greater toll than months and months of a depressing, soul-destroying, joyless dieting? Liz Hurley recently revealed she got her figure back by going to bed hungry each night — get thee to a decent liposuction clinic, woman.
The survey published last week, commissioned by Mother & Baby magazine, found that the vast majority of cosmetic surgery candidates were women unhappy with the after-effects of pregnancies, their stretch-marked stomachs and drooping breasts. Most of the criticism of their new shapes, it emerged, came from women friends (65%) rather than from men (35%) and yet, predictably, poor old Posh Spice got the blame again. Analysis of the survey in several newspapers concluded that celebrity mums who bounce back with washboard stomachs make the rest of us feel fat, depressed and inadequate, so we resort to surgery for comfort.
The truth is, though, that few women are thrilled with the physical toll of pregnancy. They would, in previous times, have sought to keep their bodies under wraps, out of sight of less-diplomatic female friends, and even from their husband or boyfriend. No woman ever needed supermodels in bikinis to tell her that her post-childbirth body was not as attractive as it had once been.
If celebrity example, and the rise of increasingly accessible, commonplace and cheap cosmetic surgery means you no longer have to endure that sort of spirit-crushing self-consciousness, then so much the better. Finally, perhaps, Irish women are coming round to the conclusion that we don’t have to go through life looking like Mullingar heifers with, as Terry Wogan once observed, our legs fitted on upside down.
So which is it to be: a flat new stomach, sculpted thighs and a new life in size 10 jeans, or an integrated dishwasher and smart fridge freezer that e-mails Superquinn when you run out of sausages? Tough one, that.
