From The Guardian UK: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/30/plastic-surgery-report-female-form
In case you missed the memo, upper arms are the new trophy female body part, the one that signifies belonging to a certain class
Hadley Freeman
The Guardian, Tuesday 30 April 2013
How, I sometimes wonder, will future generations look back on our era? I imagine there will be Ye Olde Early 21st-Centurie Tours, during which school children will be dragged down recreated pavement streets, dotted with Costa Coffees, Caffe Neros and, the non plus ultra, Starbucks as they learn about “The Great Coffee Craze” suffered by their ancestors. And they will gaze upon these model stores with the same bemusement with which we look upon tales of leeching and the bubonic plague. Perhaps, too, they’ll learn how these ancestors valued familiarity over variety, preferring their lunches to taste the same wherever they travelled and relying on things called “sandwich chain stores” so they could be assured that the brie and tomato baguette they had in Pret a Manger in Rotherham one week would taste exactly the same as the one they had in Edinburgh the next.
But something else has come to my attention that evokes a certain aspect of this modern era even better than convoluted coffees in infantalising sippy cups. The American Society of Plastic Surgeons released its latest statistics for procedures this week and reading them is like flicking through a copy of Grazia magazine without the risk of encountering any celebrity selfies or the phrase “bikini body”. For herein we see the obsession with the female body in the most brutally exaggerated form, divested of any euphemisms of the “maintenance” and “tightening” variety, as employed by the former MP Louise Mensch last week when discussing her facelift on Newsnight. (“I was asked about [my facelift] by the Guardian once and refused to answer as journalists are always trying to trivialise female politicians by talking about their appearances,” said Mensch, who was in no way trivialising herself by talking about her facelift to Jeremy Paxman.)
While it may not have the literary merit of Wolf Hall, there is plenty to occupy one in the 2012 Plastic Surgery Report, such as its use of exclamation marks (“2012 marked the highest number of botulinum toxin type A injections, with 61.m injections!”) and the identical image of the apparently naked woman on every page, suggesting that – as most of us always believed – the ultimate effect of plastic surgery is to make all women look robotic and identical (in 2012 in America, women accounted for 91% of plastic surgery procedures).
But the page I find the most enthralling is the one detailing which procedures have moved up and down the charts, pop-pickers, because it’s here that we really see what’s happening in the world of female body fixations. For example, forehead lifts are down from 2000 by 63%, helped, no doubt, by the rise of Botox, which has increased by 680%. Breast lifts and buttock lifts are (appropriately) up 69% and 114% respectively since 2000, reflecting the trend for certain parts of a woman to be higher and tighter. Once changing from stripes to polka dots marked the changing years in a woman’s wardrobe; now it’s where her body parts are on her body.
Continue reading at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/30/plastic-surgery-report-female-form
