A recent Daily Mirror headline ran ‘Mum of five dies after butt-lift treatment’. It explained how Alice Delsie Preet Webb failed to recover from an operation by an unregistered practitioner which involved injecting hyaluronic acid and dermal fillers into the backside (a so-called ‘Brazilian butt-lift’). This apparently was the first time anyone in the UK had died from this procedure. But, as confirmed in a recent article about ‘cosmetic tourism’ in the Times by Sarah Ditum, such outcomes are far more common when people (largely women) decide to take a holiday abroad and at the same time have cheap surgery done on various parts of their body they consider need improvement. She referred to a website which asks the question: ‘Why not take full advantage of the charming beaches and sunshine while sparing some time for dental treatment?’
The trouble is that it sometimes goes wrong and people end up with wonky teeth, a lopsided smile, uneven size breasts, tummy folds rather than tucks, and even worse. In fact, since 2019, as the article tells us, ‘at least 28 British medical tourists have died following treatment in Turkey’. And that’s not counting the much larger number who return home with complications which they then need to try and get fixed by the NHS. Of course, many of the thousands who do this each year are lucky and for them it works out as they would want. But it’s definitely a gamble and, according to the article, the reason women are prepared to take that gamble is that they want to be, as the article puts it ‘the best version of themselves’ and not ‘substandard’. And, given the prohibitive cost of such surgery in the UK by regulated medical professionals, they see no alternative but to seek it out more cheaply in less regulated countries – Thailand, Mexico, Slovakia or – the most common destination – Turkey.
Society of the spectacle
But why is it that people want to look different from the way they are in reality? In the late 1960s the French writer Guy Debord published The Society of the Spectacle, which presented the idea that ‘all that once was directly lived has become mere representation’. His point was that, because of the atomised and consumerist nature of capitalist society, an obsession with outward appearance (ie ‘the spectacle’) had taken the place of the authentic reality of social life and relationships. People’s lives were mediated by images of perfection which they were made to feel they had to live up to. This led them to focus on the superficial and become alienated from their fellow humans and from socially beneficial interaction.
Though this was theorised more than 50 years ago, it is surely more relevant than ever today. While it is true that, in any kind of society, people may find certain aspects of their physical being less than satisfactory, they are more likely to focus on that if other aspects of their life fail to offer them satisfaction and the ability to fulfil their natural talents and capacities.
This is precisely the case in modern capitalism where the vast majority of us are obliged to expend most of our energies working for an employer in activities we are unlikely to have chosen freely but are dictated by the needs of the market on the employer’s side and the need to keep the wolf from the door on the worker’s side. And this work, including the conditions in which it is carried out, is unlikely to represent any kind of real fulfilment of the individual’s personal needs or aptitudes. So is it any wonder if, outside working hours, workers’ minds are occupied with superficialities – sporting spectacles, stars of entertainment, the lives of royalty and other ‘celebs’, and also perceived flaws in their own physical appearance?
Life blood
Capitalism’s need to constantly find ways of supplying its life blood – profit – means that it can only seek to relentlessly sell things, to provide the means for workers to cultivate and spend money on those superficialities. So it’s no surprise that, for example, music concerts starring people’s ‘idols’ are promoted with ticket prices as high as they are likely to be able to scrape together money or credit for. Nor is it any surprise that, held back as they are from fulfilling their real talents or needs by lives dominated by wage and salary work, the feelings of powerlessness and inferiority this engenders make them easy prey to the cult, to the idol, to the hero, to the conspiracy theory, and to the cheap cosmetic procedures promised by potentially dubious practitioners.
In the society of the ‘quick buck’ we live in, tainted as it is by money and the profit system, should we therefore be surprised if the products we are offered for purchase do not serve the purpose they claim to but upset our expectations, and even – in the case of botched cosmetic procedures – make our life even more uncomfortable than we perceived it as in the first place? It’s time we got rid of the false value system that puts appearance before substance, that puts ‘looking good’ over being truly human.
Howard Moss
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