Familiar Folly

On September 11, 1997, something happened. Mattel, an American toy-maker, turned to the law for justice. Its little plastic doll Barbie, with a figure to make the comatose gawk ($1.8 billion in sales, if not 39-18-33 in contours), had been defamed by a pop music act called Aqua, which spoofed Barbie Girl's "life in plastic".

Actually, Aqua might just have done plastic a good turn. The sway of media discourse has since moved from Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth, a rant against media-moulded notions of beauty, to Nancy Etcoff's Survival of the Prettiest, a rave review of sex-appeal-led natural selection as part of human evolution. More strikingly, plastic surgeries in the US have risen from 2.1 million in 1997 to 8.8 million in 2003. Might be 4 per 100 soon.

This, as Angelika Taschen notes in Aesthetic Surgery, has been the growth story of the decade. Techniques have evolved, costs have slid, market demand and supply have cosied up, and surgeons are sculpting bodies as if the world's about to turn into Spring Street Gallery any minute (after the next ad break).

"Humanity's search for ways to enhance physical beauty is as old as mankind itself," reassures the book, tracing the scalpel's history all the way from Pharaonic world dominance to Pam Anderson's periodic zest for globular-isation. Early surgeries were nose jobs, to overcome social stigmas. But the practice was given traction by the mid-19th century convergence of three things: "anaesthesia", "antisepsis" and the "enlightenment"...

... huh, enlighten-what? The book's not kidding: plastic surgery draws on the "cultural presupposition that you have the inalienable right to alter, reshape, control, augment or diminish your body", or whatever, "in the pursuit of happiness".

By now, if you've drawn no link between Taschen's own poetic espousal of beauty (Keats' "Truth") and the book's cover photo (La Chapelle's Make Over""a fair face grafted onto a dark body), you'd give up reading. I did. Briefly""to look for other visuals. The most arresting? "Restored Venus" a 1936 Man Ray work of art (plaster & rope).

The genius of plastic surgeons, muses Taschen, lies in their "refusal to conform to obvious aesthetic norms". Indeed, the surprise package is the somewhat iconoclastic""even artistic""views of the world's top surgeons. Beauty cannot be boxed into a statuesque framework, they chorus. Nor does it confer superlative sex.

Yet, the boom market of Brazil has just seen a sudden reversal in its female body preferences""towards bustiness, as everywhere else in the imagery-rich world.

That this Barbification should baffle the scalpel wielders is what makes them so endearing. These surgeons are earnest in their devotion to the "pursuit of happiness", and that too, with no harm done to anybody else (as Lockian liberalism demands).

Why, then, should anyone want to bash Barbie?

That depends on what constitutes "harm done". Now, liposuction in itself could be wonderful. But this story is about Barbie, an arbitrarily contoured piece of plastic that exalts itself as an ideal form""held high enough to rank all other bodies in descending order (from it) of (in)adequacy.

Sexual stratification.

Equity versus Barbie? To many who prioritize collective over individual happiness, it's a no-contest.

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AESTHETIC SURGERY

Angelika Taschen (ed)
Taschen
Price: £30; Pages: 440