There is a drive to look good in this society. In a previous age, you were compared with the prettiest girl in the village; these days the village contains several billion girls, and the prettiest one gets paid many thousands of dollars to get her picture taken so that it can be put on billboards to remind you that even if you buy that particular brand of clothing, you still won't look like that.
It's enough to make folks self-conscious of their looks. I know that when I'm looking at pictures of me, it's all "Oh, that one makes me look too fat. That one makes me look too gawky. I look like I'm abusing 'roids in that one. Oh, christ, why didn't I take a bit of time with makeup?" It makes it easy to understand the insecurity that makes some folks willing to do anything to look just a little prettier. Plastic surgeons make their Porsche payments because they offer a no-muss, little-fuss nip-and-tuck improvement that appeals to folks who feel awkward about their looks.
However.
At what point does one get the feeling that one's surgeon may not be on the up and up? I mean, there are plenty of only moderately competent docs with proper offices and I-love-me walls papered with the appropriate sheepskins (Old Joke: "What do you call the guy that graduated last in his class from med school?" "Doctor.") in every city in America, so when one is being led into the basement of a residential condominium by a guy with an accent and nary a board certification to his name, does it not get one's spider sense to tingling? Is there not a warning shiver that makes one think "This guy's going to be cutting on my face! What if something goes wrong? What if the anaesthesiologist dicks up? Where's the crash cart? What if I get sucked to death? What am I doing here?"
Apparently not. Apparently the drive to be pretty can run common sense right off the road and into a ditch...
Well, if that newspaper wrote this article the way they write about SUVs, the headline would have been "Fat Lungs Kill Woman" because of the pulmonary fat emboli found during the autopsy. There's a commercial on E! channel for this idiotic show on Beverly Hills plastic surgeons showing a vainglorious doctor pumping iron in scrubs in an exam room before performing surgery. I wonder if he does that before every procedure, or only before he's going to be filmed in action and wants to be pumped up?
ReplyDeleteIt's great to be healthy and look nice and wear nice clothing, within reason, but going into debt or having surgery for same is pitiful. People who obsess about their looks and go to extremes ultimately are just as dead as any of the rest of us, but they've spent more of their precious moments on earth around a bunch of socially irretrievable jerks. I'm just sayin'.
I look-back in the mirror ok, but take a lousy photograph - partly because the image is reversed, partly because I'm always caught in camera slack-jawed or worse.
ReplyDeleteI don't think you appreciate just how much is done in post-production. Not even the prettiest models you see on billboards look that way in real life. In fact, I'd failed to recognize a couple of my own photo subjects next week because they looked so plain in real life compared to my portraits of them.
ReplyDeleteHeh, I used to be a stripper, an assembler of final camera-art from layers and layers of halftones. We did a lot of imaginary real-estate that went into the Sunday Section of the WaPo, puffy clouds over a lake in front of building with a happy family-group - a fantasy world that nobody would recognize. Photoshop just put the layers in software.
ReplyDeleteY'see, this is why I'm proud to be selfish. I'm never going to have risky surgery just to make complete strangers pretend to like me. What this boils down to is people who care more about what other people think of them than they care about themselves.
ReplyDeleteI just go to the gym to try to undo 40 years of a typical American diet, and the main goal there is my health, not my looks...I need to live long enough to have my brain uploaded. :)
Evolution in action.
ReplyDelete"I don't think you appreciate just how much is done in post-production. Not even the prettiest models you see on billboards look that way in real life."
ReplyDeleteOh, believe me, I know.
this reminds me of a 60 minutes(TV)
ReplyDeletereport that I saw a bit ago about a "doctor" that used industrial silocone to inject in people. Some of Her victums made quasimoto luke like a cutie pie.