Abstract
At this point, much has been written about cosmetic surgery. In full confessional mode, I too wrote a book on cosmetic surgery. As is often the case, it is difficult to say something new, but Deborah Harris-Moore’s new book, Media and the Rhetoric of Body Perfection: Cosmetic Surgery, Weight Loss and Beauty in Popular Culture, manages to add to this growing body of literature by tying cosmetic surgery culture to weight loss culture.
This is a stretch and yet one that Harris-Moore makes fairly convincingly, particularly in a chapter linking Michelle Obama’s ‘Get Moving!’ campaign to decrease childhood obesity with the ‘1-800-GET-THIN’ lap band surgery advertising that was all over Los Angeles a few years ago. Harris-Moore argues fairly persuasively that both of these ‘campaigns … reveal similarities and contradictions in the rhetoric, but more importantly, the cultural obsession with thinness and the extreme methods of weight loss that have become more normalized through government and medical authorization’ (p. 31).
In a similar if less convincing move, Harris-Moore argues that resistance to transformation rhetoric can be found in extreme body modification and anorexia since she sees both as a refusal to follow the rules.
Eating disorders may seem more like plastic surgery than body modification given that they are an expression of dissatisfaction with society’s standards, a resistance to normal eating patterns, and a category of abnormal deviance. (p. 168)
I admire Harris-Moore’s willingness to link the unlinkable even when I remain unconvinced, but one of the reasons I remained unconvinced is because the evidence for most of her arguments is thin. For instance, in an effort to link cultural rhetorics to lived embodiment, Harris-Moore interviews eight individuals who have undergone some form of body modification (including tattooing). Eight is a rather small n and this might be one of the reasons that Harris-Moore misses how cosmetic surgery (and no doubt the weight loss industry) fits into large structures that shape how they happen. For instance, nearly all cosmetic procedures in the US are paid for with some form of credit, often medical credit that costs the consumer about 28.5% in interest. This debt for beauty system has allowed a large number of poor and working-class Americans to access cosmetic procedures and, like all debt mechanisms, this one has made the poorest consumers less well off because that’s how debt works. A woman like Harris-Moore, who admits that she herself went to her parents who gave her a loan to pay for cosmetic surgery (presumably without interest) might pay US$8000 for a procedure while a poorer consumer would end up paying US$8000 at 28.5% interest, plus any late fees that they might incur.
That Americans increasingly take on debt to pay for self-transformation may be a result of rhetoric, but it is also the result of changes in economic policies that allowed for the deregulation of debt (as well as political changes that allowed for the deregulation of medicine that allowed doctors to advertise).
If Harris-Moore had interviewed more than eight people, she might also have noticed that many of the (primarily white and female) Americans getting cosmetic surgery see it as an investment in their future, a way to a more secure job, marriage, life. It is not just about individual responses to rhetoric, but individual responses to structural insecurities, to the fact that the vast majority of Americans are worse off than they were 30 years ago, and that income inequality is increasing.
If Harris-Moore had interviewed some of the cosmetic surgeons, she also might have found that they are not just competitive salesmen, but are often in debt themselves from medical school loans. Many of the surgeons I interviewed had US$200,000 in student loan debt when they graduated. Breast implants were the best option they had for paying bills, getting a house, and sending their own kids to good schools. This too is part of larger economic and political structures that allowed higher education costs to explode.
Overall, the book provides some insight into how culture produces a desire for bodily transformation and control and to some extent how this is gendered. It also links the medical rhetoric of weight loss to the far more commercialized rhetoric of consumer choice and cosmetic procedures. It does not, however, provide a good sense of why surgical interventions for beauty are exploding in an economy where most of us are poorer than ever. Nor does it really account for how this explosion might be related to other desperate attempts for a more secure future – like taking on subprime mortgages or working more hours than any country on earth.