I was but a spotty teen in 1991 when The Beauty Myth, by Naomi Wolf was released, yet I read it with interest and not a little alarm.

It said women are damaged by the pressure to conform to an idealized concept of female beauty and the beauty myth is political, a way of maintaining the patriarchal system. She claims that this system keeps women under control through their own insecurities.

Fifteen years have passed and surely Wolf must survey our current preoccupation with a homogenized beauty ideal, with alarm and also depression.

In 1991 Wolf used the example of women having cosmetic surgery as an endgame of sorts, where women so insecure with their own appearance, so afraid of the aging process, so vain, self obsessed and unhappy, resorted to the surgeon’s knife to cut themselves into the shapes society deemed as acceptable.

Her vision of women pouring dangerous chemicals on their faces to remove layers of skin, filling the place where their breasts used to be silicon and injecting their foreheads with botulism (used previously in the treatment of cerebral palsy) was apoplectic – a nightmare scenario that back in the 90s seemed a bit overblown, almost hysterical. Surely Wolf was over-egging the pudding to get a few column inches to promote her book.

But cut to 2007 and her worst fears have been realised. Invasive, dangerous and ultimately vain and pointless cosmetic procedures have been accepted and normalized through shows such as Extreme Makeover and trash-bag celebrities whose chest sizes inflate as their waist measurements contract.

There has always been the element of the freakshow about those celebrities and the makeover shows and I like to think that there’s always been an element of caution in some sections of the media in relation to plastic surgery.

That is why I watched horrified on Wednesday night as the BBC aired a show called How Young Can I Get.

It wasn’t just that the 41 year-old presenter's stomach was hung before the camera, flapping in a matter of fact way, after it had been disattached from her body in a Malaysian hospital (where surgery is half the price of an op in the UK, and yippee, there’s a 5 star holiday thrown in!) but that the person presenting the program purported to be a journalist and there is something that made me feel distinctly uneasy about seeing the journalist being cut open on camera because she was feeling fat.

There was not a whole lot of balance or caution in the program. The presenter was, in the end, delighted with her flat new stomach. Her friends cooed, and even her mother – who seemed like a sensible sort – looked vaguely approving.

It is through this process and these shows, that surgery becomes normalised. This is how an ideal of beauty becomes standardised. This is where journalism – which should be an independent, impartial and balanced arbiter of the facts, becomes perverted.

I didn’t think the journalist looked better at the end. She had botox, fillers, a chemical peel and the surgery. The smile was rictus, the eyes had a grim, desperate please-love-me gleem, and her stomach was flat. So what.

We all have a different ideal of beauty. I think the people who are the most beautiful are the least self-obsessed. This doesn’t mean that they don’t care about clothes or grooming, but they are the people who accord themselves a certain measure of energy and them have enough left over to spread around to everyone else.

It’s a simple equation. The more time people spend on Project Self (excessive amount of time, money and energy into their own appearance) the less interesting they become. I’d call them beautiful bores if I thought in any way unnecessary plastic surgery makes people more beautiful. But it doesn’t.

And it is those that have fallen most heavily for the beauty myth.

Labels: BBC, botox, Naomi Wolf, plastic surgery, vanity