Plastic Surgery

I remember reading years ago, maybe on some mainstream news site like ABC or NBC, about a gay man who was obsessed with Madonna and actually got, like, $150,000 worth of plastic surgeries in an attempt to look exactly like her. In the end, he did not look half bad. In fact I was pretty attracted, I remember, to the end result ....

A lot of people of course probably find this "problematic" and think it is strange or ought not be done, etc. My idea is...it is probably a little out there, ya... but ultimately, if it can be done, and one wants to do it, why not? Especially if you really love the artist in question - why not? I don't think it is really that much of a shame to want to look like someone else, because I don't really think that means you want to be someone else. There is a difference to me, you see, that I suppose most people do not really want to note. In a sense that guy was just taking on a mask that he wanted to wear 24 hours a day and felt would make him feel better. So he went and had surgery to get it, and it just so happened that his mask is based off of a very famous "mask" known as Madonna Ciccone. But wouldn't that be the exact mask you wanted to choose ...in a sense? It has had quite a bit of success! There's also the other point: how is what this guy doing really all that different from, say, a popular hair style or a popular make-up style, even?

Well, people will tell you, hair is temporary and makeup too.. so of course they are different! And that is true. Very true. But at the same time, its easy to see that many of us rather obsessively copy each other in any given time period, in terms of both hair and makeup, as well as clothes. Look back to pictures of the 70s and evey family seems to essentially share the exact same jokes about them: Dad has a mullet, or maybe he is wearing short shorts ..he probably has a bandana on, somewhere, or maybe he's wearing a tank top, etc. More like than not, he isn't extremely buff, since no one was then ...and maybe he's got a weird moustache -- that now you no longer see, because everyone collectively stopped doing it. And yet he never gets hit with this hammer of "why did you want to conform? and change yourself ot be like others? why?" No one ever asks him that because now he looks different. As in, now he has probably altered himself yet again to fit the style of this decade, and what people his age are doing in it. He hasn't surgically altered himself, no -- but who is to say he wouldn't ...if the costs were more affordable?

Most people, I firmly believe, would be shocked at how quickly they would probably start descending into surgical alterations, if only the price was actually affordable for commoners. I am convinced, for example, that if plastic surgery shops that worked on your face were around every Main Street like barber shops and hair salons, and it only ran you $20-25.00 to get some work done, or maybe $100 or more... (like women now pay for their hair) everyone would be popping up with facial alterations every weekend, and naturally, just like hairstyles, many of these face changes, one imagines, would follow certain trends. In the 1990s, for example, Jennifer Aniston did a certain hairstyle on Friends , I remember reading about, that became wildly popular amongst alll sorts of women...the hairstyle was everywhere. Well why would this not be with a facial alteration if said facial alteration was affordable and easy to do? If you think this sounds strange or shocking, then in my opinion you don't know much about fashion... I mean, just take a look at Instagram , and you will probably notice that it seems half, if not three quarters, of many young girls, tend to look exactly like Kendall Jenner or Kim Kardashian these days...because they do their exact makeup styles to a tee. Therefore it is only obvious that these same "copy cats" would immediately rearrange their face surgically too -- if only that was within reach. Since it is not, they make due with what they got: makeup and hair and buying up every outfit Kendall and Kimmy tell them to buy. And of course don't just think this is in the girl camp. It is also just as much in the boy camp -- it is just perhaps a bit harder to see there..

In our own time I think we still , many of us, are living wtih this idea that for some reason "natural born bodies" are better than altered ones. We live by that old Obi Wan quote from Star Wars.... "Darth Vader, Luke...he is more machine than man..." To an extent I agree with Obi Wan: I don't really mind my natural body, but obviously it has severe limitations I would start to re-arrange -- even if I did not necessarily want to re-arrange them. Like say someone accidentally damaged my nose in a very bad way. Well, I'd probably want that fixed, and I wouldn't care if the only option to fix it, at that point, was that the doctors had to give me Madonnas nose, instead of one I got to carefully select. If Madonna's nose was the only nose I could have ,instad of a destroyed one, I would obviously choose that. And I think this is important to notice because I think many people look at plastic surgery and transgender surgery, etc, as being utterly disconnected from these other types of surgical advancements. They don't seem to be able to see that each advancement the trans field or plastic surgery field makes, is another advancement for the medical field in general, and thus another step closer to us being able to give the blind back sight, or fix someones legs.... etc. They do not seem to realize that a very beautiful transgendered woman is, in fact, a marvel of modern science and medicine. They, in some sense, only see Frankenstein, or Darth Vader.

-- thoughts