Every morning I have a ritual: scanning the press (American, British, French and Italian) for news about the beauty industry, mass media, and advertising. Recently, I jumped on the Google Alert bandwagon and now my job is far easier: emails about “plastic surgery,” “dieting,” “airbrushing,” and “KGOY” (Kids Getting Older Younger) neatly make their way into my inbox, sending me off in unexpected directions, making me check out sites all over the blogosphere and from small newspapers I didn’t previously know about.
This morning, I received an alert about “breast implants” that directed me to a blog – Boy Culture – which had a post about unretouched photos of Madonna from a Steven Klein photoshoot (original post here). By digging through the site’s archive, I found a previous post with more photos from the same photoshoot (you can find it here).
Now, what impressed me the most was not Madonna’s unsightly appeareance – the blog author doesn’t spare compliments, saying, ” Madonna looked like sh*t in a freezer.” I didn’t gasp at the uncomfortable poses, age-inappropriate outfits, or at her wrinkles. No. What shocked me the most about these photos was a palpable sense of vulnerability: she looked raw, exposed, weak, offering herself up to the photographer’s lens. Her eyes just about killed me. They seemed to be pleading, “I’m 50, please make me look good.”
I remember how fiery and feisty she was throughout 1990s. Then came a revolution in Hollywood and a newfound cultural obsession with teen stars. And Madonna, chamaleon-like, kept reinventing herself to appeal to a young public. And she hasn’t stopped. Now at 50, after a career of extraordinary commercial success in the music world, and iconic status for many followers, she is still selling herself as a sexual object. And looking increasingly out of place.
When I saw the photos, I though of an Ariel Levy quote (from her book Female Chauvinist Pigs):
“There is a disconnect between sexiness or hotness and sex itself. [...] Our interest is in the appearance of sexiness, not the existence of sexual pleasure. [...] Passion isn’t the point. The glossy, overheated thumping of sexuality in our culture is less about connection than consumption. Hotness has become our cultural currency.”
Why? Because I remember Madonna’s controversial statements in the 1990s, her provocative music videos, her book Sex, her album Erotica. Back then, she was talking about sexual pleasure. For marketing purposes, sure, but still, her message was about sex itself – just think about her video for the song “Justify My Love.”
Well, now I feel she is virtually indistinguishable from other musicians thumping sexuality in a completely superficial way, merely selling the appearance of sexiness for visual consumption, as Ariel Levy would say.
At 50, she should have known better.
ADDENDUM:
I’m eagerly awaiting for a day when girls will have a young positive female role model who is not a singer or an actress. Someone known for her intellectual acumen – not her body. Somebody fostering a real change in the world. (I nominate Naomi Klein).
Most depressing quote, about a 13 year old who wants to get breast implants:
(Announcer, V.O.)
And Jemma doesn’t just want bigger breasts. She wants them to look like they’re fake.
Feeling incredibly sad and outraged for 2 main reasons:
#1 – these teenage girls want to go under the knife at an age when they are not yet fully aware of the long-term repercussions of such serious surgery
#2 – for big media, who, by deciding to broadcast a program about teen plastic surgery, without the participation of experts weighing in, are essentially normalizing this behavior, making it appear a viable option. Totally irresponsible on their part. Where is Germaine Greer?
“I love the fact that you have real breasts,” Oprah gushed to Kate. Kate took this as a compliment. Oprah went on to describe the difference between what happens to real breasts when a woman lies on her back and fake breasts when a woman lies on her back.
Diana Zuckerman, president of the National Research Center for Women and Families, said the Bush administration had “finally made the device approval process so meaningless that it’s intolerable to the scientists who work there.” Ms. Zucker, a longtime critic of the agency’s device approval process, particularly as it relates to breast implants, added, “Virtually everything gets approved, no matter what.”
The F.D.A. has a three-tiered approval process for medical devices that, depending on their newness or complexity, requires varying amounts of proof.
A growing chorus of critics contends that the agency requires few devices to complete the most rigorous of these reviews and instead allows most devices to be cleared with minimal oversight. In 2007, 41 devices went through the most rigorous process, compared with 3,052 that had abbreviated reviews.
To learn more about the downsides of breast implants – and their potentially disastrous consequences for women’s health – check out Kacey’s site: Implants Out. Essential read.
“Forget facials and pedicures. Today’s new moms want tummy tucks and breast lifts.”
Excerpt:
The fact that more women are turning to plastic surgery worries Shari Graydon, author of In Your Face: The Culture of Beauty and You.
“Apparently, the pressure on new mothers to care for the every need of a completely incompetent and utterly defenceless newborn while stumbling around in a perpetual state of sleep-deprived hormonal overload isn’t enough,” she says.
Giving plastic surgery a name like “mommy makeover” is just clever marketing to women whose body image is suffering, Graydon says. “Calling cosmetic surgery, whether it happens two years or two decades after a woman gives birth, a ‘mommy makeover’ is a cynical attempt to normalize medically unjustified radical intervention.”
Graydon also says mothers who have plastic surgery send a mixed message to their children.
“You can’t convincingly tell your kids, ‘You’re beautiful just the way you are,’ if you’re risking major anesthetic yourself to remake your body after it does what it was biologically designed to do.”
While the emotional health implications of cosmetic surgery are still up for scientific debate, articles in women’s magazines such as The Oprah Magazine and Cosmopolitan portray cosmetic surgery as a physically risky, but overall worthwhile option for enhancing physical appearance and emotional health, a UBC study has found.
A key fact this “news” report unfortunately left out:
Breast implants can last anywhere from a few years to a few decades, with most making it ten to fifteen years without problems. The younger the patient, however, the more likely she will need additional surgeries over the course of her life. A woman who gets breasts implants at eighteen and wants to keep them for life may have to have surgery twice a decade for the next six decades.
“Yeah, those boiled faces!” she says, when I bring up the tricky subject of her female colleagues’ waxwork skin. “Scary. They go in [to see their doctors] saying: make me look like myself – or like myself 20 years ago. But you know, I have a movie out now and I can’t bear to watch it. I see myself up there, and it’s not normal to scrutinise your own face on a screen this big; it’s like opening a vein. So I do have some compassion for Nicole Kidman, or whoever, who has obviously looked at her face and sort of dissected it, like it’s a thing. I don’t want to be the poster child for wrinkles, and that’s what they make you if you speak out about that whole culture. So I don’t, mostly. But it has gotten so ridiculous as a job. [At the film festivals] the celebrities are dragging their movies in, going ‘look at this!’ instead of the movie being the thing, and they’re just there to support it. It’s a case of: ‘Look at my dress, at my hair, at my face and … oh, by the way, there’s a movie here, too!’ I have this character in my head. She keeps appearing places: on trains, in the city, on the highway. I see her out there. She is heroic, but not like any hero we’ve ever seen. Society makes women of a certain age invisible. It’s convenient. Remember our mothers? How inconvenient they were to us? It’s like that, on a grand scale. In the early part of my life I carried the flame for fiery women: perky women who were not dumb. And now I feel like I could be the woman to play this role: the invisible woman.” Only no one is writing these kinds of parts. “Roles for women. There aren’t any. They’ve been saying that since the 1920s, and it’s true. [My theory is that] women don’t write enough. Because who do they expect to write these roles? Men?”
