High cost of quick-fix cosmetic surgery

Our fascination with physical makeovers represents the pyrrhic victory of society over biology, writes Anthony Elliott

Our fascination with physical makeovers represents the pyrrhic victory of society over biology, writes Anthony Elliott

'Most women now expect to have cosmetic surgery in their lifetime"; "40 per cent of teenage girls, and a quarter of teenage boys, have considered going under the knife"; "cosmetic surgery stories are the single most effective incentive to make women buy magazines".

What links these statements? One is that they derive from recent market research. Another is that they support other academic studies which show a dramatic rise in cosmetic surgery operations throughout such countries as the USA, the UK and Ireland, as the middle classes rush to embrace the culture of nip and tuck.

Cheaper and more widely available than ever before, cosmetic surgery is fast becoming a lifestyle choice. This social trend is nowhere more powerfully reinforced than through the current fad for television makeover shows.

READ MORE

Programmes such as the American ABC network's Extreme Makeover, which uses plastic surgery to "redesign" women, as well as various cable offerings including Cosmetic Surgery Live, The Swan and MTV's I Want a Famous Face, are creating a new emotional climate of personal vulnerability. To what extent, as a society, should we be worried by these trends? Do advances in cosmetic surgery actually promote consumer choice, as argued by surgeons and their professional associations, or are we witnessing the cultural emergence of a dangerous addiction?

There is growing evidence which suggests that the rush to undergo the knife is often at the cost of knowing about the long-term consequences of wounds and the healing process. Some studies, including my recent book The New Individualism, indicate that the emotional costs of quick-fix cosmetic surgery can ruin lives, and indeed are sometimes lethal. These negative outcomes, less often portrayed by reality TV, can be destructive: loss of personal identity, confusion, depression, breakdown and even suicide. The wider health implications for society are clearly immense.

To what extent is reality TV to blame for the growth of cosmetic surgery? Many patients acknowledge that makeover programmes have persuaded them to go under the knife. Others see the fault in celebrity obsession. However, today's reinvention craze - centred on cosmetic surgery - is symptomatic of something much larger than the influence of commercial media or celebrity culture. One key factor in accounting for the rise of surgical culture is "want-now" consumerism.

In our quick-fix society, people want change and, increasingly, they want it instantly. Cosmetic surgery offers the promise of instant transformation. More and more, cosmetic procedures - from Botox and collagen fillers to liposuction and breast augmentation - are reduced to a purchase mentality. There's an emerging generation of young people - whom I term the "plastic generation" - who treat cosmetic surgery as on a par with shopping - fast consumed and with immediate results.

Today's surgical culture promotes a fantasy of the body's infinite plasticity. The message from the makeover industry is that there's nothing to stop you reinventing yourself however you choose; but for the same reason, your surgically enhanced body is unlikely to make you happy for long. For today's reshapings of the body are only fashioned with the short-term in mind - until "the next procedure".

Even so, surgical culture is a world which combines brilliant technology with dramatic self-fashioning, medical advances with a narcissistic understanding of the self as a work of art. The current cultural fascination with cosmetic surgery represents the struggle of fantasy against reality, the pyrrhic victory of society over biology.

But there's also a deeper set of social forces at work in this branding of cosmetic surgery as a consumer lifestyle choice. The root of the problem, in my opinion, is driven by globalisation - which is creating profound new personal vulnerabilities. Globalisation, through its inauguration of the 24/7 society and the speeding up of the world, brings with it major changes to people's lives.

The economic facts of globalisation, where employment is more fluid and everything moves incredibly fast, has increased personal pressures to the point where people need to be seen to try to "improve", "transform" and "reinvent" themselves. Driven by the fear of not measuring up to such cultural ideals, people desperately attempt to "refashion" themselves as more efficient, faster, leaner, inventive and self-actualising than they were previously - not sporadically, but day-in day-out. Society in the era of surgical culture is fundamentally shaped by this fear of disposability.

Not all that long ago, anyone who wanted cosmetic surgery would have been recommended therapy in the first instance.

Today, by contrast, there is a widespread acceptance that surgical culture is beneficial and even desirable. This social transformation has not been heralded by a shift in psychological understanding; it is symptomatic of a pervasive addiction to the ethos of instant self-reinvention as well as fear of personal disposability in an age of intensive globalisation.

Advocates of surgical culture reject the charge that it is superficial. In order to criticise surgical culture for its narcissistic preoccupation with "superficial appearances" you need to have emotional depths to make a distinction, and depths went out of fashion with Sigmund Freud.

For those seduced by the promises of the makeover industry, the danger of cosmetic surgery is a form of change so rapid and so complete that identity becomes disposable. The wider social costs mean we are all debased by this soulless surgical culture.

Anthony Elliott is professor of sociology at the University of Kent. His book, The New Individualism, published by Routledge, is written with Charles Lemert