I Have Two Words for You: Plastic Surgery

You'd be surprised how much it costs to look this cheap!
--Dolly Parton

Put in its victory column the Obama Cult’s Visigoth-style race to sack and pillage the health care system’s bloated carcass. The parts that insurance industry greed and state regulatory incompetence haven’t already cratered, that is. I look forward to the eventual repetitive Social Security-like warnings that the system will collapse without major funding increases, rationing through tightened eligibility, and having to settle for whatever local University of Santiago-trained student health center goon that my local NHS Trust forces me to use. I am trying to look at the bright side—at least with the eventual relentlessly mediocre government care that federal budgetary needs will force upon us in the next 10-20 years, I won’t have to live long enough to suffer through the eventual Justin Bieber comeback.

But no matter how bleak the prospects now look for widespread access to anything but UK style, post office-esque, mediocre at best health care (can you say “hospital infection scandals”), things are looking up for at least one segment of the American health care industry: plastic surgery. These are sunny days indeed for the Nip/Tuck crowd. Everyone’s buying a boat and getting another girlfriend on the side.

Plastic surgery has caught a rip tide. According to the plastic surgeons themselves, surgical and non-surgical cosmetic procedures have increased by 162% since 1997. Despite the recession, plastic surgeries decreased by only two percent last year. Breast augmentation is the most popular surgical procedure; botox is the most popular non-surgical procedure. Even men are getting in on the act, accounting for nine percent of all procedures. For 2009, age-wise, 45% of all procedures were performed on persons aged 31-50, while 27% were performed on those aged 51-65. Procedures for those aged 19-30 was only 20% of the total (with breast augmentation being the most popular procedure).

More than that, popular opinions of plastic surgery and other “cosmetic procedures” has changed markedly. It started out as something you did only if you were on the FBI’s most wanted list, or a villain in a James Bond movie. Then in the 1960s, some actresses began getting face lifts to try to hang on in Hollywood (think Joan Crawford in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane), with fairly crude and pod people-looking results. But it did give Phyllis Diller a career. With advances in technique and the advent of botox, elective plastic surgery has gone from freak show to almost normal. Except for Michael Jackson. So-called health magazines prominently display plastic surgery ads. While some stars still deny obvious procedures, others openly acknowledge them and even boast about undergoing the knife. Kathy Griffin’s plastic surgery accounts for about half of her act now. Fox even developed a successful cable show, Nip/Tuck, about two sleazy plastic surgeons. Lipo, botox, and “some other work” has become a middle age rite of passage.

How did this happen? And what does it mean?

Not sure whether anyone’s noticed this or not, but we now live in a youth obsessed culture that routinely leaves the old out on ice floes to die, culture-wise. And by “old,” I mean 25. Has anyone heard from Justin Timberlake lately? Hollywood makes movies for teenagers and those in their early 20s; caring and sensitive portrayals of complicated and difficult themes may win Oscars, but they don’t make money. Hollywood makes money off explosion movies, body count movies, Pixar movies, vampire/date movies, and Miley Cyrus movies, all of which are focus group tested to induce kids to part with their allowance. Television has followed this trend, though maybe not to the same extent due to the proliferation of cable channels and corresponding development of niche programming. But American Idol, Dancing With the Stars, the Bachelor, Survivor, and a host of other shows all feature young, glamorous looking stars. Glenn Close may be on TV, but she’s like Ancient Peter Ustinov in Logan’s Run, living in the bombed out US Capitol with about a million cats, whom the rest of the cast regards as some bizarre freak. These kids don’t want to watch a bunch of corpse-like slugs sitting around complaining about their aches and pains and personal problems. That’s what “The View” is for. No, these kids want to see people their own age, or in the ballpark, working through challenging personal situations, like how to make the latest near androgynous pretty boy fall for them (for the girls), or how to blow away as many bad guys as possible in two hours (for guys). Jane Austen might make still make it on the big screen, but only if disguised in such forms as Clueless (Emma) or Bridget Jones’ Diary (Pride and Prejudice).

All that youth audience programming has to have young stars. So every couple of years or so, we must endure the latest crop of “talent” to grace the screens. Britney Spears, at 29, is over, beyond, and 20 miles down the road from the proverbial hill. Of course, that may be a bad example, based on the “its not the years it’s the mileage” theory. But she tends to prove the essential point that popular media images require young and virile looking stars to move product. Just the way print advertisements have long airbrushed photos to hide flaws, sometimes to such an extent the models look like pod people, implying you’ll look just like these preternatural beings if only you’ll buy their product. Even news and sports departments are getting in on the act, dumping women reporters and anchors as they near middle age in favor of Barbie with a Mike. Can you say “Erin Andrews”?

Making things worse, we now have an ever-growing celebrity media keeping close tabs on every celebrity body and face, grading actresses like prize heifers at the livestock show. Far more people know Jessica Simpson’s current weight or whether Demi Moore has had “work” done than know the names of any Supreme Court justices (or senators or congressmen). Banks can crash and burn, Congress can fundamentally change our health care system, and war can break out in half the Middle East without most people noticing. But let that zombie Katie Holmes display the slightest hint of cellulite and it’s a national scandal. Actually, I really worry about poor Katie. Being married to Maverick, King of the Scientologist Cult, must be like starring in your own personal version of Not Without My Daughter, or being spirited away to Dubai on the promise of landing enough high paying modeling gigs to pay your way through college only to find out that the “modeling gigs” involve being locked away in an interior room in some faux-palace being forced to serve 12 guys wearing robes, gold chains and Drakkar Noir. Except the 12 guys in Katie’s case are the Scientologists, who’ve got her kids (and Nicole’s kids too). We need to get Stallone to put together a rescue team and break her out of that compound. The kids are a lost cause.

High definition only makes it worse. It reveals every little flaw—chicken pox scars, freckles, acne, that mystery blotch that looks like Abraham Lincoln’s beard…the camera really does now show everything. All those crystal clear tight shots now bring enormous risk, and scrutiny. Only this kind of bizarro world would regard Julianne Moore or Diane Lane as “old.”

To hang on, desperate actresses (and actors too) addicted to the spotlight have gone under the knife, usually with disastrous results. The roster of such plastic surgery freaks goes on and on: Priscilla Presley, Jennifer Gray, Farrah Fawcett, Cher, Burt Reynolds, Joan Rivers, Barry Manilow, Tara Reid, Janice Dickinson, Lisa Rinna, Bruce Jenner, Kathy Griffin, Melanie Griffith, and of course, the poster child for mutilation by cosmetic surgery, King of the Freaks, Michael Jackson. Botox, nose jobs, boob jobs, lip collagen injections, facelifts, chemical peels. The plastic surgery menu grows ever longer, with nary an amuse bouche in sight. But have these procedures, ever growing in Hollywood popularity, ever made the difference in whether one gets a role or not? Though a boob job may conceivably extend an actress’ career by a couple of years, when has it stemmed the tide of aging? In some cases (Jennifer Gray or Rupert Everett), even if the surgery doesn’t make things worse, it so radically changes the person’s appearance that they don’t even look like themselves anymore.

Faced with all this, my generation, instead of staging a fight back and retaking popular culture, has done what it does best—caved in and given up like the shrinking weasels that we are. For men, keeping up with youth culture has foisted upon us the bizarre spectacle of the buddy movie come to life. Lawyers and accountants in their late 40s and 50s are becoming “guys” who go on adventure outings and play pick-up basketball. Who go bungee jumping and white river rafting. And who go to clubs (where they stand out like the high school principal at the sweetheart dance) and date girls in their 20s (who either work at their company, or if you’re a PGA star, who grew up next door or were your babysitter). This latter predilection requires them to follow such inanities as the Kardashians or Entourage just to carry on a near-conversation, and to wear a goatee and untucked designer dress shirts. Beer drinking. Hell raising. Good times. Ick. They can’t just grow old; they have to retain some perpetual appearance of youth. A Portrait of Dorian Gray for the Decline and Fall of the American Empire. A nation full of Matthew McConaughey wanna-bes. Why these guys can’t just buy a Corvette and be done with it is beyond me.

With women, it’s a slightly different story. Now, this may seem brutal, but tell me you haven’t seen this story like a million times. Think of the woman who as a young girl in school was really cute. The girl all the other girls hated and all the guys wanted to date. Maybe she played volleyball or was a cheerleader. That girl probably worked hard on her tan, probably took up smoking at some point too. As she took a job she may have found herself pressed for time and eaten a lot of Jack in the Box. For fun, she’d cut loose with the girls for Margarita Wednesdays, or Champagne Thursdays, and every weekend was devoted to clubbing. Then she found and married an awesome guy at one of those clubs, had three kids in five years, quit her job and stayed home to take care of them. Life became running kids around town in the mini-van to school, lessons, practices, doctors, and tutors. In between that and her part time job as a bookkeeper, time for exercise or watching her diet was non-existent. Over these years, her dress size increased, her face has dropped, and her last proper hair appointment was 15 years ago. Life seems like a forced march. The bright eyes and smile of her high school years have long since given way to a world-weary gaze. Meanwhile, she’s noticed that at her husband’s company, there’s a lot of twenty-something little girls running around in short skirts, seemingly flirting with the managers (of whose number includes her now balding and doughy husband). She notices he seems to attend a lot of happy hours with the fellas, or goes on a lot of “adventure trips.” With images of young, athletic, and attractive women bombarding her in every magazine, TV show, shopping mall, and at parties, she begins to wonder, what can she do? That’s where plastic surgery comes in. Then, realizing everyone else is getting work done, its just a short drive down to the block to Cougar Town. Or to becoming the Octo Mom.

What’s wrong with that?

Remember that celebrity list from earlier? Which one of them looks better after plastic surgery? For that matter, who’s ever looked better after plastic surgery? Turning your real head into a construction zone, for all the so-called “advances” these last 30 years, really doesn’t work. And by “work” I mean make you look better than you would have looked without the surgery. No surgeon or doctor can make you look better than God can. The way you were made always looks better than the overhaul. Some of these people hardly resemble human beings when they’re done. These procedures just don’t work; you just look like you had something done.

But philosophically, there’s something even more objectionable about this rush to carve up and inject poison into our faces. It confirms this obnoxious idea that the “normal” look is about 25, and that aging represents some hideous fate cursing us eventually to resemble the Wicked Witch of the West (or Sarah Jessica Parker). Thanks to this despicable hatred of the normal human aging process, we now must endure such spectacles as the Real Housewives of Orange County. People can be beautiful at any age, and are much more likely to remain beautiful by healthy living habits than by turning themselves into Mr. Potato Head. Some people look markedly more beautiful as they grow older. The aforementioned Ms. Lane and Ms. Moore come to mind. Diane Keaton is far more attractive today than in her 1970s heyday. As are Candace Bergen, Jaclyn Smith, Sela Ward, and many others who have grown older naturally. This youth obsession we currently endure effectively nullifies the worth of older age living. It preaches that for most of your life, you'll have to look back in time for the good old days. That you're only desirable and attractive for a short window in your life, which happens to correspond to the time of your life when you're at your most stupid and ridiculous. That's foolish. Let's reject that. Let's reclaim the entirety of our lives as meaningful and rewarding, and not spend the last 50 years of our lives trying to relive the first 20.

Really, the most objectionable thing about plastic surgery—you risk becoming Bruce Jenner.

Next-things are looking up. No, really.