God Loves Your Fat Ass

Totally with you on the chick stuff, but one small correction: reasonable people agree that the most violent horrific barbarous spectacle ever is actually urethral dilation, not lipo. Women rarely need it, it's mostly a guy thing, and it basically amounts to the firing of a harpoon up your pee-pee hole. I saw a urologist struggle heroically with one man's pee-pee, grabbing hold of it like it was an eel trying to slip away, yanking it this-way-and-that and gasping red-faced while he plunged the harpoon in-out-in-out-in-out like a piston. This is one reason you should never get gonorrhea.

Plus, we boys can look forward to an endless succession of digital rectal exams as we age. It's a joke, it could have been cooked up by bitter man-hating women. If there's one thing most of us bland vanilla-sexed men don't want it's to pay another man to coo at us and compliment us on our performance as he slides his finger up the eighth portal.

I don't understand why Hashem has cooked up all these petty medical tortures for people who just happen, through no fault or initiative of their own, to have a Y chromosome. Sometimes I seriously wonder whether we don't bully/manipulate you XXs into all these ghastly cosmetic procedures just because we're bitter about all this. No justice in that, I know.

B'shalom,

Joey

Because Hashem is an equal-opportunity Deity and some people enjoy that stuff. Tell 'em, Weiss...

I'd say voluntary surgery is always more barbaric than surgery for your health.

(Also, Elisa, having written an article about this very topic that should get published any day now, I can't believe you're trying to steal my Jewish plastic surgery refusnik thunder.)

I don't know. Maybe there's some small bit of dignity in being able to choose mutilation, rather than having it imposed on you by your failing body and by the deranged, don't-argue-with-me-I-know-what-you-need, and-right-now-you-need-my-finger-up-your-heinie paternalists of the biomedical priesthood.

It's hard to measure these things.

בשר זה רצח,

Joey

Look, nose jobs are like leisurely jogs around the park at this point in the culture. More guys get 'em than they'd care to admit. (Stop staring. Not a chance. I'm proud of my aqualine; the bump makes it a moguls' Black Diamond. Totally Exxxxtreme.) This may be because even outside the rarefied ranks of metrosexuality, body-consciousness is getting closer and closer to gender parity. Girliness be damned. Apparently, fatness is back in style for men. Women now love the chunk a la Vince Vaughn and Tony Soprano. When I read this in the NY Observer, it really did take a second look at my cholesterol count to keep the treadmill out of its locked and fully upright position. And isn't he-girth a sort of ironic form of masculine preening, one with the added joy of driving women nuts because it allows for eating lots and lots of food? Even the "jacked" look, which I'm told still attracts a handful of girls, takes more effort than convincing yourself that spending 3-hours a day at the gym is not a narcissistic tendency. "I'm just doing it to feel healthy and to challenge myself." Sure you are, pal.

It'd be nice if people could cope with how their amino acids made them. But of course they can't, any more than great personalities cause erections. I take the Dan Savage line on plastic surgery, even though this may not actually be his line, it just sounds like it would be and it's much less rationalized than anything Alex Kuczynski is going to come up with: If you can fix a body feature and thereby get laid more often, forget the homilies as to why nature beats the knife. Intellectual and psychological identities are mutable; why can't physical ones be, too? They are, if you count the adorable little interlude of Hair and Grease known as puberty.

Lipo away, male or female.

Sure, male nose jobs are on the rise. And women are probably more judgmental about male beauty than they used to be. But that doesn't mean there's any kind of gender parity here, not by a long shot.

Take comedians, for example. Can you imagine the female equivalent of Will Farrell achieving anywhere near his kind of success? Or Steve Carell? Or Jack Black? Or David Cross? Why do we demand that women have to be bombshells (or at least be Tina Fey) to be funny? If Fey or Amy Poehler or even Jane Lynch developed a Farrell-like gut, her career would be over. And I can't imagine that's because women who wear a size 4 have better comic timing than women who wear size 12.

Also, I adore Savage, but he's got a giant blind spot. Literally. He's written that he has a problem noticing women, even if he's in the same room as them -- he sees them as blurred grey dots, like witnesses in televised trials. (Fair enough: how can you condemn a sex columnist for being led around by his dick?) I think this blindness gets reflected in his writing sometimes, and this plastic surgery thing is no exception.

I was with you until I got to the bottom of the article and saw your picture. Right or not, it's difficult to take the opinion of a skinny person on liposuction seriously. You haven't walked in those shoes, which weakens your position. Maybe pick another topic for which to condemn plastic surgery?

in a society where a woman's worth & desirability  is, regretfully,  largely dependent on her appearance  it seems extremely unfair to condemn a woman for not choosing to continue living her life in a state of inferiority & rejection. God may love fatties & bumpy schnozzes, but most men (and women ) do not.

It seems short-sighted to the plight of unattractive women to dismiss cosmetic alterations as "imaginary social acceptance." To suggest that altering one's self to look prettier or slimmer will not alleviate some of their social inadquacies is completely innacurate. I, along with just practically every girl who has been forced against their desire to pay attention to the unfairness of womanhood (which i believe is most women who arent particularly beautiful), has seen the supreme importance of beauty played out over and over.

 here are society's rules for womanhood:

1- you need to be beautiful or else youre worthless

2- but plastic surgery is too superficial and "barbaric" (ring a bell?)

sounds like quite a crappy deal for women. unless youre lucky enough to have good genes, youre totally fucked! but theres good news, ladies! theres an addendum to #2 "plastic surgery is too superficial and barbaric..... but wow, youre not ugly anymore. wanna get a drink?"  

A woman does not have control of her genes, nor she does have control of moderating society's beauty standards, but she might have control of altering herself so as not to continually be marginalized and rejected-- and you have no right to blame her.

in a society where a woman's worth & desirability  is, regretfully,  largely dependent on her appearance  it seems extremely unfair to condemn a woman for not choosing to continue living her life in a state of inferiority & rejection. God may love fatties & bumpy schnozzes, but most men (and women ) do not.

It seems short-sighted to the plight of unattractive women to dismiss cosmetic alterations as "imaginary social acceptance." To suggest that altering one's self to look prettier or slimmer will not alleviate some of their social inadquacies is completely innacurate. I, along with just practically every girl who has been forced against their desire to pay attention to the unfairness of womanhood (which i believe is most women who arent particularly beautiful), has seen the supreme importance of beauty played out over and over.

 here are society's rules for womanhood:

1- you need to be beautiful or else youre worthless

2- but plastic surgery is too superficial and "barbaric" (ring a bell?)

sounds like quite a crappy deal for women. unless youre lucky enough to have good genes, youre totally fucked! but theres good news, ladies! theres an addendum to #2 "plastic surgery is too superficial and barbaric..... but wow, youre not ugly anymore. wanna get a drink?"  

A woman does not have control of her genes, nor she does have control of moderating society's beauty standards, but she might have control of altering herself so as not to continually be marginalized and rejected-- and you have no right to blame her.

you have no clue what i look like or whether i've always looked just as i do now.  and even if i'd been "a skinny person" my whole life (which i haven't),  my opinions about the literal/cultural/historical implications of plastic surgery -- and about a particular elective surgery that made me physically sick to watch -- are valid.  what's difficult to take seriously is the opinion of a hypocrite.  maybe that's what you meant, bubbe.

you're mostly right in what you're saying, but you underestimate the power of individuals to collectively reject a paradigm that's unacceptable.  this is exactly why it blows my mind to hear women of any age reject feminist identities.  sure, it's easier to say 'alas, i was born [']ugly['] and i should fix that right up according to whatever standards the world at large sets forth for me!'  but that makes you a scary automoton, frankly.  that's, like, margaret atwood time.   if women need to alter themselves physically to (maybe!) be accepted, that acceptance is rooted in actual physical control.  does that seem like the kind of acceptance you want?  DO WHAT I TELL YOU AND THEN I'LL ACCEPT YOU?  (hint: if you're ever on a jdate and the guy says "order this and put your hair in a ponytail and then i'll love you", bolt) first off, standards of "pretty" in our society are patently fucked.  no one makes the cut.  standards of "pretty" are designed to systematically undermine everyone. secondly, the "beauty industry" is a for-profit enterprise.  they profit off your insecurities.  getting plastic surgery doesn't actually fix your self esteem.  which is why a huge percent of women who do it do it again.  and then again.   ah, shit.  okay, this is so much bigger than a blog. please go read naomi wolf's THE BEAUTY MYTH.   and then MANIFESTA (baumgardner)   and then BODY OUTLAWS (ed. ophira edut). and then we'll talk.  

I’m with Weiss and Beans.  We all strive for self-improvement.  The dropout who goes back to school doesn’t get ridiculed for being shallow and “intellectually-obsessed”.  I’ve done plenty of liposuction (and urethral catheter insertions, for that matter), and while brutal in execution it’s incredibly effective.  With intra-op anesthesia and post-op pain meds it’s actually quite a safe and tolerable procedure.  Perhaps Alisa comes by her figure naturally, or she is one of the few people who have struggled with obesity or lipodystrophy (stubborn fat in specific problem areas) through the more “noble” hard work of dieting.  Unfortunately, it’s a path that has proven to be ineffective for the vast majority in the long run.  

God WILL love you whether you are slender and tone or hidden beneath a two-inch layer of jiggly cellulite-laden fat.  You should love yourself no matter what you look like.  You can love yourself and HATE your breasts for being too small … or too big.  Why is coming to terms with a double-A cup more admirable than slipping in a pair of implants so you can look the way you want to.  The body is a shell anyway. 

God cares about you, your essence, your neshama.  He doesn’t give two shits about your thighs, whether they’ve been liposucked or not.  

btw, did anyone see that barf-worthy bit in the post yesterday about how your plastic surgeon may have gone to interboro?   viva la prettiness!

Shirley, I'm mostly with you -- I totally agree that when people tell women that getting plastic surgery is barbaric and superficial, they're painting them into a corner. It's ridiculous to pressure women into spending a lot of time and effort conforming to certain beauty standards, and then condemn them for being flaky when they give in to that pressure. You can't win: Either you spend your life grooming yourself and undergoing unnecessary surgery, or you put up with the fact that certain assholes are going to give you a hard time.

Both options suck, of course, but here's where I differ from you: I think the latter option is the lesser of two evils. The utter humiliation of paying someone to cut your face open (or your stomach, or whatever) seems to me a higher price to pay than the basic trials life throws at the average-looking. I wonder this about people who've undergone surgery all the time: Doesn't it destroy your self-respect? Don't you worry that if your old nose or belly came back, your friends and lovers would abandon you? How can that possibly be better, psychologically speaking, than just feeling frumpy?

Rosen, MD

"You can love yourself and HATE your breasts for being too small … or too big."

WHY do your patients, who love themselves, hate their small breasts? Let me put it another way: What do they think they'll get out of having bigger breasts? How will it improve their lives?

Mr. Doctor, quick question for you: you say that lipo is "quite safe". I know it's often described that way, but my understanding is that pulmonary embolisms, hemorrhages, and other complications of liposuction produce a mortality rate of about 1 in 5000, which seems very high for an elective surgery. It means I'm safer driving like a maniac on the L.A. freeways for one year than I am sitting down on the table for a few hours to get my ample thighs sculpted.

I may do it anyway, given the state of my thighs and the fact that I live so near the beach. But when I do so I'll be taking a fairly significant risk with my life, is that not so?

בשר זה רצח,

Joey

my thinking on plastic surgery was solidified when i was in israel, spending time at a seminary. the rabbi decided that day was a good day to teach "what the torah has to say about plastic surgery." as he went on and on, reading countless sources about how jews shouldn't put their lives at risk for no good reason (apparently, all elective surgery goes under this category), no fewer than four women erupted from their chairs, eyes flooded with tears, and left the room.
they later confessed that they had had plastic surgery at one point in time or another. one had a breast reduction, one had a breast augmentation and the other two had nose jobs... not a single woman regretted their decisions, even after listening to the rabbi's diatribe.

should i be so bold as to think that god is pleased that these four women were brave enough to take action so that they could feel more confident about their corporeal selves?

You're just scary. My opinion, therefore valid. :-)