December 19, 2009 Saturday
Edition 1;
National Edition
Should we fight for our right to a facelift?;
Society expects women to look forever young. So American feminists have a point: a Bo-Tax on plastic surgery is sexist
BYLINE: Janice Turner
SECTION: EDITORIAL; Pg. 19
LENGTH: 1083 words
Whatever the subterfuge and super-size airbrush applied to Twiggy's crows' feet on that banned Oil of Olay ad, the words were 100 per cent true.
"Younger-looking eyes," read the copy, "never go out of fashion." No, sisters, they certainly don't, not in this unforgiving era when ageing is no longer seen as a natural process but a dereliction of duty. When even men - great, growly alpha bears such as George Clooney, Lord Sugar and General Sir Mike Jackson - take their scrotum-textured upper eyelids off for a snip.
The damn potions don't work. We don't need the Advertising Standards Authority to tell us. We're not dumb, but we do need to dream. We figured out all by ourselves that it wasn't Age Re-Perfect Pro-Calcium Moist - aka "cream for crones" - that meant the L'Oréal spokesmodel Jane Fonda looked pretty good for 70, but the busy scalpels of Beverly Hills.
Anyway, Cindy Crawford herself has 'fessed up. "I'm not going to lie to myself: past a certain age ... all I can really count on is vitamin injections, Botox and collagen." And there speaks a woman who made millions from her own skin care range - a brand called Meaningful.
So how are women supposed to age these days? Once, the path was clearly marked: a dress size gained per decade; grey hair pepped up with a wash of blue; breasts fused into that mighty single entity, a matronly bosom; what to wear at parties solved by a mélange of velvet scarves. Short skirts, fancy pants, the more edgy diktats of fashion were discarded with a comfortable sigh. And that is still a feasible course of action if you are prepared to risk being invisible, irrelevant, maybe even unemployed.
In America, during the debate about Obama's healthcare reforms, facelifts have turned into a feminist issue. The Senate has been discussing a proposal that cosmetic surgery operations should be taxed at 5 per cent, and that the proceeds - $5 billion (£3 billion) over a decade - be fed back into state healthcare to treat people who are actually sick. It sounds a nifty plan to me, evoking that scene in Fight Club where vats of yellow fat extracted from rich bellies by liposuction are turned into useful soap. An excise duty on vanity, how beautiful is that? A small- change reminder that good health in America has long been a privilege.
But this so-called Bo-Tax has the most unlikely of opponents. Terry O'Neill, the president of the National Organization for Women in the US, has called it "a tax on middle-aged women in a society that devalues them for being middle-aged."
Yet it is galling to remember that NOW was founded by that Old Testament feminist prophet Betty Friedan, and is the largest women's rights organisation in America. NOW practically invented feminism, or at least the saucy urban myth that women's libbers burn their bras. This started in 1968 outside the Miss America beauty contest, when its members filled a "Freedom Trash Can" with restrictive undergarments, false eyelashes and painful heels, then torched the lot. And it is NOW whose website has a downloadable PowerPoint presentation - entitled Love Your Body - on how the evil beauty and fashion industries make women feel ugly, old and inadequate, and illustrated by ads even more mendacious than Twiggy's.
But can we ever love our bodies enough to override the bombardment of messages stating that they are unloveable? Or has the right to plastic surgery become a feminist demand, like abortion and fairer dibs of housework? What Ms O'Neill, 57, demonstrates, in fact, is a new real body politic: raging against the ageist machine ain't working; if women want to remain heard, to continue to participate in society, to have incomes that don't tail off in their fifties, they must remain youthful. Television in America, unlike in Britain where it has a menopausedetecting ejector seat, features many high-profile older women, but they all understand that in order to work, they must have work done.
But, Ms O'Neill insists, in the current job market, waitresses are having anti-ageing surgery as often as anchorwomen and, given that 92 per cent of cosmetic procedures in America are bought by women, this is a sexist tariff. One commentator even railed against Bo-Tax's double bind: having suffered the pain and risk of having their boobs enlarged to titillate men, they are also expected to subsidise their healthcare.
Since America lacks our safety nets, feminism has always been solidly welded to monetary gain achieved through a perpetual and ruthless self-improvement. Refusing to be a has-been, Gloria Steinem had a facelift decades back. Our own Susie Orbach is used when lecturing abroad to being told (often by fellow psychotherapists) that she'd look better with "something done".
Only recently in Britain did plastic-surgery rates rocket: last year, 34,187 operations were performed (91 per cent on women), up 5 per cent on 2007. But that was an astounding three times more than in 2003. In just five years, fuelled by such TV programmes as 10 Years Younger, which makes cutting up your face seem as inconsequential as a new lippie, plastic surgery has changed its image from freakish to banal.
Well, you might think, let foolish women throw their life savings into the ski holidays and school fees of Harley Street surgeons. Except, increasingly, it's you who is paying. This year, the NHS spent £5.7 million on giving 471 patients liposuction and more than 1,600 patients nose jobs, tummy tucks and breast reductions. Unless there is a deformity or disfigurement, a patient must prove her offending body part is giving her great psychological distress. But a study of a typical NHS clinic showed that almost half of the requests for nose jobs were treated, along with a quarter for tummy tucks, half for breast reduction and a fifth of those who wanted breast enhancements.
So, are these patients exaggerating their misery and trauma over small breasts or a binbag-like post-baby tum to blag free surgery? Perhaps. But it could be argued that in a society fixated with the perfectibility of every body part, from fat ankles to enlarged labia, body dismorphia is not now a mental illness but an entirely sane and logical response.
And what of today's generation of thirtysomethings, primped, groomed and raised to monitor every celebrity for the first sign of liverspots. Will they, like the pragmatic broads of NOW, grow to believe that eternal youth should be delivered (perhaps by the NHS free) as a right?
This year, more than 1,600 people had nose jobs on the NHS
No comments:
Post a Comment