Scholar highlights gender, economics in plastic surgery trends

Stephanie Damon-Moore Staff Writer

Why are white women turning to surgery in order to be comfortable with their bodies? This is the question that Laurie Essig, assistant professor of anthropology and sociology at Middlebury College, addressed in her Oct. 26 lecture “Make Me Beautiful: Plastic Surgery TV and the Implantation of Surgical Desires.”

In 2006, 11 million cosmetic plastic surgeries were performed in the United States, up seven percent from 2005, and an incredible 846 percent from 1992. Women made up over 80 percent of plastic surgery patients, and Essig noted that the vast majority were white.

Essig’s research is part of a book project entitled American Plastics: Boob Jobs, Credit
Cards, and the Spirit of Our Time. “We increasingly live in a plastic time and in a plastic place,” said Essig.

Economically, plastic surgery is becoming increasingly accessible. When the Supreme Court ruled to eliminate federal caps on credit card interest rates, credit card companies could afford to give anyone a credit card. Essig described the act as “a democratization of who could get plastic surgery.” A person can now receive up to $25,000 of plastic surgery on credit. And people are taking advantage: 30 percent of plastic surgery patients now earn less than $30,000 per year, and another 41 percent earn between $31,000 and $60,000. In choosing plastic surgery, women often also choose debt, Essig said.

American demographics have changed, too. The population is getting older because of longer life expectancies, and it’s also getting heavier: 127 million adults in America are overweight or obese. Combine these physical transformations with the American emphasis on self-improvement and physical beauty, Essig argued, and you get millions of breast implants, tummy tucks, and face lifts.

But in addition to economic and material motivations, Essig cited media influence as a major factor in white America’s plastic surgery craze. She said that “prestigious imitation,” or the imitation of people in positions of power and prestige, has always affected human beings. But today, Americans are imitating not real people, but two-dimensional film and television icons. Essig maintained that this imitation of images makes us “copies without an original.” She traced this infinite regress to the coincidence of plastic surgery’s beginning in 1880 with the invention of photography, pointing out that “certain bodies look better in two-dimensional space.”

"Cosmetic surgery has become not only normalized, but increasingly seen as a good way of solving problems, economic and emotional problems," Essig said. “TV implants a desire to get to have plastic surgery, even when it’s critical of plastic surgery.”

She looked especially to the reality show Doctor 90210 and the fictional Nip/Tuck to explore the effect of these shows on America’s view of plastic surgery. She explained that in each the male patients were there because of severe abnormalities, while the white female patients suffered only from what Essig called “ordinary ugliness.” Essig said that these shows are teaching us that “everything is pathological about a woman’s body,” and that when all else fails, “beauty will save us.”