i get the idea of plastic surgery for those people that have to have it. life is hard for someone who has been severely burned, lost a breast to cancer, accidents, injured in military service, et cetera and whatever. i get it. i even get someone that is flat-chested wanting to have breasts normal to their frame size. in no way do i confuse them with suzanne sommers or john travolta, ryan o'neal, madonna, or the slew of other idiots running around getting so much plastic surgery that they are completely unrecognizable from who they were, are, meant to be, look like...
suzanne sommers just wrote a book, a best seller, with a stupid title about staying beautiful. but have you seen this crazy b*tch? she doesn't even look like suzanne sommers in the largest stretch of the imagination now. of course, like every other idiotic celeb, she claims she's never had plastic surgery. oh yes, honey, and i've come from the planet venus, walked on mars, and definately am planning on visiting pluto in this lifetime. john travolta's eyes have been stretched so much that he looks like he is permanently playing chinese-japanese. ryan o'neal's mouth looks weird, and madonna looks more like a skeleton with skin pulled over it. (seriously, go see for yourself. i warn you that you may need to be close to a toilet--http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1202475/Madonna-reveals-protruding-muscles-bulging-veins.html) yes, while madonna's face looks "ok-ish", most of us wouldn't be able to pick her out in a crowd (ok, except for that totally nauseating body). these people have taken looking like sh*t to a whole new level.
the truth is that plastic surgery becomes an addiction for some people--just like tattoos and other forms of body modification can. it becomes a contest of who can have the most, look the best, and after a while, the payoff is that they look worse than if they'd have just left it alone. did we not see what an obsession with appearance did to michael jackson? seriously, michael jackson was probably one of the most talented artists of the last century. yet, his self esteem was obviously torn apart in the process. several nose jobs to the point of a thing that didn't even look like a nose. terribly pale white skin that even the whitest white person wouldn't want. if comparing photos of michael from the late 70s/early 80s to the end of the 1990s, we see multiple nose jobs, changes to his cheekbone and jawline structure. he wasn't a bad looking guy in the early 80s. yet by the 90s, he looked more like a plastic doll that had been too close to the stove that our mother tried to mould back so we wouldn't demand a new one. it saddens the heart to see that someone that everything to be proud of--his talent, his abilities, and even his heart--marginalized by some need to look like something that he wasn't.
it's not just celebraties though. we all know someone that went and got ridiculously large boobs just because they didn't seem to get the word "overkill". i knew a woman who got double Ds. three months later, she was whining all the time about her back, and--here's the best part--about how men only talked to her boobs. well, duh, dingbat. was she not listening to the larger chested women around her? nope, she was overcome with envy. she was desperate for attention--positive or negative--from the men around her. worse yet--it didn't change anything really for her. she was still insecure; she was still jealous. men still marginalized who she was. in fact, it bothered her that now she felt like they marginalized her more. the saddest part was that she didn't get that it was what was inside of her, and not any amount of plastic surgery could change that.
i'd argue that it's the plastic surgeons' faults. how can they not be held responsible to say "no" to someone who is looking for all this modification for all the wrong reasons? the counter-argument is, of course, it's the patient's money, and there's another plastic surgeon around the corner that will go ahead and do it--regardless of ethics, morals, patient's mental health. but, let's face it. i'm not much for blaming the other guy. it's personal responsibility. at the same time, how does someone know they don't need it if they don't get it? kunundrum. still, the kunundrum is limited to the idiots that insist on going and getting multiple surgeries--over and over and over--for the desire to look young. does anyone remember the movie "death becomes her"? in the movie, celebs were willing to die, basically become plastic, to maintain their youthful appearance. the downside was if they injured, broke in any way, shape or form, their body, there was no fixing the deformation. they'd live forevrer in the battered version. obviously, hollywood didn't learn from their own parody. sadly, perhaps, a lot of the people around us didn't learn from the pathetic appearance of some of these people. this kunundrum is really of their own making, and there's no fixing it for the people that ventured too far down the path already.
but for those that are thinking about a second or third, or so on and so on, surgery, it's time to step back and look at sally struthers (oh yes she has, no matter what she says), suzanne sommers, madonna, michael jackson, john travolta...and pause. take a deep, deep breath. ask ourselves do we want to be completely unrecognizable? look almost like cartoon characters or walking dead? the answer, i hope, i believe, is no. we don't. we already know the better care that we take of ourselves, the better our appearance. people who work out look more youthful. people who chain smoke almost always age very prematurely. there is a lot of it that is genes. so perhaps, it is easier for me to say, since youthful looking genes run on both sides of my family, but there's a poetic charm to who we are. i'm sure some would still insist on a "niptuck" here or there, but i'd hope they would remember that it's not a requirement for anyone that already loves them. as the saying goes, "youth is overrated and experience is underrated". appearance might get you somewhere, but it will only get you so far. and if that appearance change is as drastic as madonna's, well, you might flip the switch (or the niptuck) to the point that you look absolutely gross. too much of a good thing is definately not a good thing indeed.
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