A young woman made headlines this week after winning breast implants in a contest in Penticton, British Columbia bar. Tiffany Freisen was one of 36 women—all of them ranging from 19 years old to their early twenties—who entered a draw to win the surgery.
Freisen says she is very enthusiastic about the possibilities of cosmetic surgery.
"I've been wanting implants for five years and winning this is so amazing because I just recently went to a consultation. It's going to be great," she told the Canadian Press.
Freison's case is part of a growing worldwide trend where cosmetic surgery—once considered the domain of movie stars and the wealthy—is increasingly finding its way into mainstream culture. Thanks largely to television shows like Extreme Makeover and The Swan, cosmetic surgeons across North America are seeing a growing number of clients hoping to look younger or to fix 'imperfections'.
Dr. Peter Selend, the registrar of ethics at the British Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons says that a year ago the college had to ban advertising of cosmetic surgery to attempt to quell the unhealthy use of cosmetic surgery.
"[Cosmetic surgery] was becoming too commercialized and it was turning patients into objects, commercial objects…" says Dr. Seland.
While many applaud the increased accessibility of cosmetic surgery as a way to level the playing field and make up for where nature may not have blessed us, some critics are concerned that more of us are turning to surgery as a quick fix to deeper internal issues.
"The second you locate self-improvement and self-esteem at the surface, you've basically confused the inside with the outside," says Dr. Virginia Blum, an English professor and author of Flesh Wounds.
Unattainable Goals
All the same, it's easy to see why more and more women feel the need to look externally for improvement.
"We all know that all the images we are surrounded by, the idealized images in magazines, in the movies and on television are all technologically changed," says Blum.
"[Models] are manipulated to look better, it can be makeup and lighting when it's on the screen, it can be airbrushing and digitizing when it's a magazine image, we know that…. Nevertheless, we want to have that done to us."
According to the Body Image Task Force, the weight and height of the average female model in 1980 was 5Ǝ", 117 lbs. Now the average models are both taller and thinner, averaging 5Ǝ"-5ཇ", 110-115 lbs. Meanwhile, the weight and height of the average American woman is 5' 1/2", 146 lbs.
According to the U.S. department of health and welfare, 70 percent of women in the normal weight range want to be thinner. The national institute for compulsive eaters says that 56 percent of women 25-45 who are dieting, and 80 percent of 10-year-old girls claim they are on a diet.
Blum, who underwent cosmetic surgery as a child at the request of her mother, theorizes that besides altering people's appearance, the widespread use of cosmetic surgery is making people increasingly concerned with their appearance, even changing the way we view our bodies.
"So it's like we have this map of our bodies and as we improve one thing, or imagine we improve one thing, we hunt around for other areas of defect…their whole body becomes a kind of field of defects."
Although many recipients of cosmetic surgery report being happy with their results, there is evidence that this happiness is of a fleeting nature; in a typical case, one who undergoes surgery once will report being pleased with it, but will soon find another part of their body that they are unhappy with.
The US Department of Health and Welfare Study mentioned above also found, for example, that nearly a quarter of underweight women wanted to be even thinner.
Staying in the Game
Some defenders of cosmetic surgery say that it is necessary in today's workforce.
A London Guildhall University survey of 11,000 33-year-olds found that women deemed attractive earned an average of 11 percent more than their less attractive counterparts (interestingly, that figure rose to 15 percent among men.
Dr. Nick Carr, head of the division of plastic surgery at the University of British Columbia, says that many of his clients get cosmetic surgery to remain competitive in the workplace. This is especially so as many baby boomers are remaining active and working up to an older age than in previous generations.
"well if you take the rejuvenation group—the group that are not trying to change their appearance or change a feature, that want to restore the way they used to look…they're looking to restore the appearance they might have had ten years ago, in many cases so they can remain competitive in the workforce. People don't like looking older than the rest of their work colleagues. They think [cosmetic surgery] gives them an advantage in terms of job propositions. I hear that quite a bit."
Gone are the days when age was synonymous with wisdom—and where the elderly were to be respected for their life experience.
In her landmark essay "The Democratization of Beauty," Christine Rosen, senior editor of the New Atlantis magazine, argues that the upsurge in cosmetic surgery reveals a great deal about the values of our modern society.
"Buried in the logic of cosmetic surgery are some disturbing truths about what our culture believes: that it is acceptable to be satisfied by the external markers of success; that the pursuit of such markers is, in and of itself, a useful and psychologically healthy goal for people; that what used to be encouraged—a lifelong process of moral education—is less useful, in the long term, than the appearance of success, health, and beauty."
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