The Culture of Cosmetic Surgery - part 2

26 / The Patient’s Body other words, momentarily borrowed their prestige, my approval goes a long way toward shoring up the surgeon’s self-esteem. As Susan Bordo puts it in “Reading the Male Body,” what feminists commonly dismiss as the male objectification of women (in pornogra-phy) may not be desubjectifying at all. Quite the contrary, for the fan-tasy to thrive, the woman must be a subject who accepts the male body and its performances on any terms: The attempt is to depict a circumscribed female subjectivity that will validate the male body and male desire in ways that “real” women do not. The category of “objectification” came naturally to feminism because of the continual cultural fetishization of women’s bodies and body parts. But here it is perhaps the case that our analysis suffered from mind/body dualism. For the fact that women’s bodies are fet-ishized does not entail that what is going on in their minds is there-fore unimplicated or unimportant. Rather, an essential ingredient in porn . . . is the depiction of a subjectivity (or personality) that will-ingly contracts its possibilities and pleasures to one—the acceptance and gratification of the male.” (276) Bordo’s analysis of a male construction of female subjectivity coincides with what I experienced at the hands of the surgeons. It is not that they are just objectifying my body (and those of their patients) as so much meat for their transformational miracles. There also needs to be an ap-preciative subject of the surgery who can afterward look in the mirror and recognize the surgeon’s skill. While surgeons may be objectifying the body, they depend on the living subject who can evaluate outcome, insist upon a revision, go to another surgeon (where both patient and surgeon will pool their scorn for the “lesser” surgeon), then praise the “greater” surgeon to all her friends and family as a miracle worker. THE SURGICAL TOUCH I try to walk in prepared; if they’re published authors, I take out a pho-tocopy of at least one article they have written in order to illustrate my The Patient’s Body / 27 interest in them. Since most of the surgeons I have interviewed special-ize in cosmetic (rather than reconstructive) procedures, imagine what it must feel like to have a woman come in who is paying attention to them. He who spends his days nursing the narcissistic grievances of dozens of women suddenly takes center stage. “There are a lot of women,” one surgeon confides, “who have too much money and too little sense. In fact, I would say that the more they have of money, the less they have of sense.” He wonders how he is supposed to render beautiful a woman of two hundred pounds—what does she want from him, after all? More than one surgeon has expressed the frustration of occupying the posi-tion of handmaid to rich, idle, overweight women who imagine that a little liposuction will restore their youthful contours. Yet why shouldn’t these women be hopeful, given the proliferation of tabloid stories on astonishing body transformations? So, imagine me there, sitting in the place of the patient even as I of-fer the services of a therapist. It’s a complicated shift of the conventional daily situation obtaining in their offices. The relationship between us is so precarious, always on the verge of tipping over into the other arena, that it implies throughout the very thing it is not. I am not the patient. He is not in charge. He has something to give me that is so very differ-ent from what he gives his patients. Instead of the surgeon listening to my woes, I listen to his. To his patients he offers up (to a greater or lesser de-gree) the fantasy that they can become more beautiful. Some of them think they will come out looking like a favorite actress. Some of them are instructed to lie back and look in a mirror. “This is the best I can do for you,” the surgeon tells them regarding the face-lift surgery. They look up into the mirror to see their skin falling back into their ears— their facial contours reemerge from the flesh that has converged in the middle of their face and sloped from the jawline. Regarding younger face-lift interventions, a surgeon tells me, “I don’t want to do a surgery that the patient won’t notice. There has to be a noticeable difference in order to make it worthwhile.” It’s still not clear to me how this decision is reached. “You, for example,” he continues. “If 28 / The Patient’s Body we were to do a face-lift on you, the result would be so minimal, you would hardly notice. Let me show you.” He rises with a mirror in hand and approaches me. I have suddenly become a patient; before I even knew what was happening or could adequately prepare myself for the de-scent of those surgical hands, he has me. I ask him to stop as he begins to put his hands on my face. “I don’t think I want to do this,” a weak protest thrown up against his expeditiousness. “Why not?” he is surprised. “Don’t be silly. See here,” he very gently lifts my cheeks and jawline. “Here, look.” I see myself in the mirror with my cheeks lifted— younger-looking no doubt. But the invitation to look registers as ironi-cally hollow in the context of my feeling stripped of the ability to decide; my looking now feels as though it can only be passive and grateful. How does the woman view her future face-lift in the mirror? Consider that she is at once subject and object? I say, “It looks good.” What else could I say? Worse yet, it did look better—to me, at least. I have many friends who all ardently insist that the “natural” contours of aging always look better to them than the surgical intervention. But not to me. (Indeed, certain actresses not yet “outed” for their surgeries are always claimed to be more beautiful than the surgery junkies.) What was lower was made higher. Isn’t that what we’re supposed to want—what we do want? What I “want” for my appearance is inscribed in the culture that shows me, everywhere I turn, what is supposed to be my ideal image—from the fifteen-year-old faces advertising makeup marketed to forty-year-olds (we’re told that very young models are used because their skin tone is more regular!) to drastically underweight twenty-year-olds with enor-mous hardened silicone breast implants distending the fragile chest walls, puckering out from the sides of their sleeveless tops, stretching the buttons apart, like the taut skin beneath, barely able to contain the threatened excess. Far below the huge breasts linger the eighteen-inch waist, the thirty-inch hips—a comic strip heroine made flesh. I was startled by the surgeon’s hands as they swept up the contours of my cheek and jaw—ever so slightly, but permanently nonetheless: The Patient’s Body / 29 the glimpse of an imaginary future, seeing my face as though through cheesecloth draped over the camera lens, like the expanse of a morning beach flattened back into smoothness by the tide after being rumpled and pitted by visitors the day before . . . everyday we can start fresh. I glanced in the mirror tentatively, then turned away abruptly and pushed his hands from my face. “Yes, that looks good.” “You see that?” he asked me. He glowed. “Well, then, you would be a candidate for a face-lift. If you can see it, it means you would be pleased with the result.” This was the point he was trying to make to me—that the surgeon is dependent on what the patient “sees,” what the patient thinks is worth the surgical price in all senses of the term. He said: “What I would do now is send you in to my nurse to discuss price and set up a date for the operation.” (Like a date for the prom.) This surgeon was no monster. When he put his hands on me, he was not trying to harm me. Indeed, he was trying to illustrate for me that I would not see any difference, that I didn’t have enough sag for it to be worth my while to have surgery. He was slightly surprised that I could recognize the change. He was a nice man. He was a caring father. He talked about his daughter and her career expectations. Nevertheless, he would not have touched a male interviewer—I have no doubt about it. This does not lead me, however, to an uncomplicated revelation of the imperturb-able sexism underlying all interactions between men and women in our society. Instead, I have a heightened understanding of just how difficult it is even to evaluate let alone change a system sustained on so many differ-ent levels within the culture as well as through and within our bodies. Dismantling this system might entail a dismemberment of what we take to be the body itself. The impulse that made him rise and touch me, the retreat and submission on my own part, and then the furtive look into the mirror—even against my will, wherever that “will” might be lo-cated, which certainly wasn’t in my body, not that day, not in that sur- 30 / The Patient’s Body geon’s office, not in relation to the mirror he held up to challenge all my superior academic distance—all of these events are part of a more wide-scale social drama of how masculinity and femininity circulate through our bodies like something that feels as basic as a life force. Let’s isolate the multiple physical and psychical events that occurred within the space of sixty seconds. We were in our places on either side of the desk, and this arrangement had a visibly disorienting effect on the surgeon (as it frequently does), because I was in the patient’s chair yet the one interviewing him. You would think it would fortify the surgeon’s sense of his own place, his position in the world, his doctor’s position. Yet it seems to do the reverse. It is as though his position mocks him. His inability to truly occupy the place where he believes he belongs and the place he has earned through many years of medical school, through a thriving surgical practice, involves a disjunction between the arrange-ment of our bodies and the distribution of power, confronting him per-haps with the ultimate uncertainty of all such social spaces and the roles associated with them. Yet my aging female body beckons the roles to re-vert to the normative—for me to become the patient and him the doc-tor. There is a radical break, then, between my role as interviewing sub-ject and my body that is a perfect object for his inspection. It is my body that obligingly (despite myself ) drifts back into its familiar patient-role, where it supinely invites the surgical touch. What is it about the relationship between the plastic surgeon and the female body that allows for such instant intimacy? Beyond the simple fe-maleness of my body, on what other basis did he know me? I could have been his wife, or daughter. I could have been his patient. Lynda Nead discusses the dilemma of being simultaneously subject and object for oneself. As she puts it, “Woman [plays] out the roles of both viewed object and viewing subject, forming and judging her image against cultural ideals and exercising a fearsome self-regulation” (10). It is just this predicament of being the object of one’s own remorseless gaze that acts out most transparently in the plastic surgeon’s office. In ... - tailieumienphi.vn