Though I personaly make a difference between something people do because of historical and cultural reasons out of traditions or if some stupid slut with one braincell wants to increase her tits to give someone a boner or pumping their face full of botox to follow some twisted vision of beauty. Not that I really understand cultural body-changes, and I think it would be better if they would simply drop them, but well, at least those are understandable. Someone blowing up his lips or throwing silicone in his chest? Those have usually other reasons, like mental problem or such things. They would rather need a good therapist then a surgery.
Uh... not to be a jackass, but why, if not for cultural reasons, do you think anyone
does go in for cosmetic surgery? No one is born wanting ridiculously pale skin or eerily perfect teeth or cleavage NASA could land a rover in. That's all inculcated through cultural osmosis. People tend to get myopic about culture-- modern culture is superficial and frivolous and arbitrary, whereas
older cultures were...? Superficial, frivolous, and arbitrary-- BUT-- they should be respected. Because reasons.
I've been accused of bordering on Tumblr levels of retardedness when it comes to being open-minded, but I've still never been able to understand that line of thinking. Cultural relativity exists, but sometimes, shitty is shitty and stupid is stupid, period. Doesn't matter if people have been doing it for hundreds or even thousands of years. Doesn't matter if it's demanded by your God or it was venerated by the founders of your country. Doesn't matter if it happens half a world away in a culture I'm not a part of and it made sense back when people started doing it and the people who've been inured to it over a cycle of generations are kinda sorta okay with the shittiness. And calling it out certainly doesn't imply that you think your own culture is, on the whole,
less shitty.
So. Yeah. Tangent. On topic, plastic surgery mostly creeps me out, but I'm inspired by the fact that we've reached an age advanced enough in both its technological and ideological development to allow people such a high degree of agency over the physical aspects of their being. If it was cheaper and didn't tend to look so eerily wrong when done poorly, most of the stigma attached to it would dissipate overnight, and that's precisely what's going to happen. Unless there's some kind of knee-jerk culture shock reaction because it comes on too fast, gene finagling and biosculpting are likely to be as common as laser eye surgery sometime within our grandchildren's lifetimes anyway, if not our childrens'. As minor procedures come down in cost and increase in effectiveness, the beauty standard will move on to something less attainable by the masses as it always does, and we'll be left with bored teenagers working part time jobs at ear-piercing-and-nose-reshaping booths in front of Hot Topics in malls across the western world.
