Laurie Essig

Plastic surgery beauty contest and knitted vulvas

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Image by AFP/Getty Images via Daylife"][/caption]

As I finish writing a book on plastic surgery, it has become more and more obvious to me that we live in interesting times.    We live at a time when young people go to plastic surgeons with a photograph of their favorite celebrity, like J-Lo.  We live in a time when face transplants are becoming increasingly commonplace.  In other words, we live in a time when both wanting J-Lo's face and actually having J-Lo's face are possible. We also live in a time when we have beauty contests for women who've gone under the knife and their cosmetic surgeons.  Friday night, in Budapest, the Miss Plastic Hungary beauty contest took place.

"I think this competition is long overdue," said Marton Szipal, a photographer and one of the judges. "Hungarians used to laugh about plastic surgery but it's time for Hungarian women to care more about their appearance. They are the most beautiful in Europe."

The overall winner, Reka Urban, a 22-year-old hostess, won an apartment in Budapest, while the first runner-up, Edina Kulcsar, was given a new car and the second runner-up, Alexandra Horvath, took home diamond jewelery worth two million forints (£6,750). Their surgeons also received awards.

Proud to be plastic: The 'improved' beauty contest - Europe, World - The Independent.

According to the contest's website,  this was the first “plastic” beauty contest of the world and was to be about "beauty and harmony" (which may explain why one contest had to have her inharmonious toes surgically adjusted).

And just in case you were thinking this was just about the women, it's not, because their (male) surgeons were really the ones being judged:

Contestants proudly assume that the perfect body they now own and makes not only males’ heads turn is partly the work of a plastic surgeon.

Hungary, like the US, has experienced a significant economic downturn, but like the US, plastic surgery is not seeing a significant decline.  In the US, boob jobs actually went up last year. Perhaps that is because we have no choice but to go under the knife.  The human body (especially the female body since women account for anywhere between 85 and 95% of patients worldwide) cannot possibly be beautiful without heroic medical intervention. One of the fastest growing surgeries in the US is labioplasty or vaginoplasty.  These surgical interventions reshape the vagina, tuck the inner labia into the outer, tighten the vaginal canal.  They are meant to give all women what a friend once called "the twat of a tot."  Perhaps not a tot, but at least a prepubescent. Like the Miss Plastic Hungary contest, another beauty contest for vulvas is taking place.  The International Vulva Knitting Circle is busy knitting vulvas, of various shapes and sizes, to

challenge female genital cosmetic surgery (see http://www.newviewcampaign.org/fgcs.asp). Following our cosmetic surgeons’ fabulous lead, our aim is to ironically mass produce our own grass-roots line of vulvas that promotes diverse genitalia, and speaks back to the corporate regulation of our sexualities. Note we are deliberately not using a pattern for this project - encouraging people to explore real-life bodies for any anatomical and schexy details, and, most importantly, to get creative - this is ALL about diversity! (And desire, let's be honest).

I'm not really sure what "schexy"  is, but I am fairly certain, having interviewed about 70 cosmetic surgeons from around the world, that the surgeons are not being "ironic" when they reshape female genitals so they all look the same.  I am also fairly certain that the organizers of the Miss Plastic Hungary beauty contest were not being ironic (although much of the media coverage of it might be a bit tongue in cheek). What I am certain of is that we live in interesting times.  On the one hand, Beauty Capitalism allows us all to buy the perfect body including the perfect vagina.  One size fits all.  In this sense, it is an unusually "democratic" project since no one need ever look "different" or "ugly" again.  The standardization of bodies comes at a high cost- some are paying in dollars and cents, others with their lives. On the other hand, Creativity and Resistance live on in groups like the Vulva Knitting Circle.  Humans have always resisted standardization.  As Michel Foucault points out in his work Discipline and Punish, convincing humans to work at factories was not easy- getting them all to show on time was so difficult that they had to shut gates to keep latecomers out- and keeping them there for a full day's work was so difficult that they had to lock them in. Today, we can either standardize our bodies, lock ourselves into the factory, or resist or engage in both projects simultaneously (which is what most of us do, after all).  But I can't help think that the future will hold a strange mix of fully standardized bodies and some crazy knitting women refusing to submit.

Plastic surgery beauty contest and knitted vulvas

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Image by AFP/Getty Images via Daylife"][/caption]

As I finish writing a book on plastic surgery, it has become more and more obvious to me that we live in interesting times.    We live at a time when young people go to plastic surgeons with a photograph of their favorite celebrity, like J-Lo.  We live in a time when face transplants are becoming increasingly commonplace.  In other words, we live in a time when both wanting J-Lo's face and actually having J-Lo's face are possible. We also live in a time when we have beauty contests for women who've gone under the knife and their cosmetic surgeons.  Friday night, in Budapest, the Miss Plastic Hungary beauty contest took place.

"I think this competition is long overdue," said Marton Szipal, a photographer and one of the judges. "Hungarians used to laugh about plastic surgery but it's time for Hungarian women to care more about their appearance. They are the most beautiful in Europe."

The overall winner, Reka Urban, a 22-year-old hostess, won an apartment in Budapest, while the first runner-up, Edina Kulcsar, was given a new car and the second runner-up, Alexandra Horvath, took home diamond jewelery worth two million forints (£6,750). Their surgeons also received awards.

Proud to be plastic: The 'improved' beauty contest - Europe, World - The Independent.

According to the contest's website,  this was the first “plastic” beauty contest of the world and was to be about "beauty and harmony" (which may explain why one contest had to have her inharmonious toes surgically adjusted).

And just in case you were thinking this was just about the women, it's not, because their (male) surgeons were really the ones being judged:

Contestants proudly assume that the perfect body they now own and makes not only males’ heads turn is partly the work of a plastic surgeon.

Hungary, like the US, has experienced a significant economic downturn, but like the US, plastic surgery is not seeing a significant decline.  In the US, boob jobs actually went up last year. Perhaps that is because we have no choice but to go under the knife.  The human body (especially the female body since women account for anywhere between 85 and 95% of patients worldwide) cannot possibly be beautiful without heroic medical intervention. One of the fastest growing surgeries in the US is labioplasty or vaginoplasty.  These surgical interventions reshape the vagina, tuck the inner labia into the outer, tighten the vaginal canal.  They are meant to give all women what a friend once called "the twat of a tot."  Perhaps not a tot, but at least a prepubescent. Like the Miss Plastic Hungary contest, another beauty contest for vulvas is taking place.  The International Vulva Knitting Circle is busy knitting vulvas, of various shapes and sizes, to

challenge female genital cosmetic surgery (see http://www.newviewcampaign.org/fgcs.asp). Following our cosmetic surgeons’ fabulous lead, our aim is to ironically mass produce our own grass-roots line of vulvas that promotes diverse genitalia, and speaks back to the corporate regulation of our sexualities. Note we are deliberately not using a pattern for this project - encouraging people to explore real-life bodies for any anatomical and schexy details, and, most importantly, to get creative - this is ALL about diversity! (And desire, let's be honest).

I'm not really sure what "schexy"  is, but I am fairly certain, having interviewed about 70 cosmetic surgeons from around the world, that the surgeons are not being "ironic" when they reshape female genitals so they all look the same.  I am also fairly certain that the organizers of the Miss Plastic Hungary beauty contest were not being ironic (although much of the media coverage of it might be a bit tongue in cheek). What I am certain of is that we live in interesting times.  On the one hand, Beauty Capitalism allows us all to buy the perfect body including the perfect vagina.  One size fits all.  In this sense, it is an unusually "democratic" project since no one need ever look "different" or "ugly" again.  The standardization of bodies comes at a high cost- some are paying in dollars and cents, others with their lives. On the other hand, Creativity and Resistance live on in groups like the Vulva Knitting Circle.  Humans have always resisted standardization.  As Michel Foucault points out in his work Discipline and Punish, convincing humans to work at factories was not easy- getting them all to show on time was so difficult that they had to shut gates to keep latecomers out- and keeping them there for a full day's work was so difficult that they had to lock them in. Today, we can either standardize our bodies, lock ourselves into the factory, or resist or engage in both projects simultaneously (which is what most of us do, after all).  But I can't help think that the future will hold a strange mix of fully standardized bodies and some crazy knitting women refusing to submit.

How ' s the right handling Joe Wilson and the end of civility?

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Image via Wikipedia"][/caption]

So I decided to see what the Right wing is making of Rep. Joe Wilson's outburst during President Obama's healthcare speech last night before a joint session of Congress.  How would those most invested in upholding a "moral majority" of supposedly old American values of (straight) families and (Christian) God defend the complete and utter breakdown in civility that happened when Wilson called Obama a liar last night? They're handling it very well.  In fact, they're right/the Dems are wrong;  they're respectable/the Dems are criminals, and they continue to maintain the moral high ground in all matters political and personal, despite displays such as Wilson's, extramarital affairs, drug use, and deceiving the American people in order to line the pockets of the rich and  wage unjust wars forever and ever.  Amen. What the Right is saying is this: Obama is the one who had the nerve to call Sarah Palin and Sean Hannity liars.  When Obama said there were no death panels and that this is an outrageous lie about healthcare reform meant to derail it, he was clearly calling all those who spread this misinformation liars. Forget Joe Wilson: Barack Obama called Sarah Palin, Sean Hannity and Mark Levin Liars Last Night. Oh yeah, and the Dems were super rude to George Bush when they grumbled at some of his more outrageous lies during his 2005 State of the Union address  and then (gasp!) refused to give him a standing ovation. It makes sense that the Right sees nothing wrong in Wilson's actions.  It also makes sense that most of the rest of the country does.  Wilson's actions represent a true breakdown in civility. According to Norbert Elias's The Civilizing Process volume 1, what distinguishes Moderns from PreModerns is the move from being subjects of the crown and thus putting on courtly manners to being citizens of the nation state and thus engaging in civil behavior in nearly all aspects of public life. This civilizing process manifested itself in little things, like an increasing control of the body and its functions.  For instance, in courtly times, one blew one's nose in one's hand, ate with a knife, and went to the bathroom pretty much anywhere one wanted.  The introduction of increasing shame and control (from handkerchiefs to the privy to the much celebrated fork) was what the civilizing process was all about. But this internalized form of discipline that represented the modern subject was not necessarily a good thing.  In fact, as Michel Foucault lays out in Discipline and Punish, the civilizing process had a way of making us all more and more subject to state rule.  Rather than liberating us, civility imprisons us. Like all processes, the civilizing one can stop.  It clearly is stopping in American politics and maybe daily life more generally.  Not to sound too much like my mother, but bodily control (from farting to burping to habits of eating) is surely less severe than it was just a generation ago.  And this is not necessarily a bad thing. But the Right and now the Dems will act like it is.  That's because gaining political power in this country is about the ability to display "civility"- a highly disciplined self subject to the state.  This discipline is bodily (no fat Presidents), sexual (no sex outside the discipline of marriage), and behavioral (no swearing like a sailor or picking your nose or calling the President a LIAR). But it's as ridiculous to bemoan the end of the Civilizing Process as it is to bemoan the end of the corset.  If anything is universally true about humans it is that we change over time.  What is highly acceptable behavior at one point becomes utterly revolting at another (do you know Medaeval Princes were encouraged to pass wind, according to Elias, including at Court?). What the Dems ought to do is learn to respond to this breakdown effectively- not with the shock of Miss Manners witnessing a contemporary teenager eating dinner, but with the knowledge that civility is no longer what is needed to control the political debate.   In fact, civility may soon be as dated as the nation state itself.

What if Harvey Milk ' s life wasn ' t about freedom?

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Image via Wikipedia"][/caption]

Okay, everyone knows who Harvey Milk is by now.  Back in the day,  only people "in the know" or who were from the Bay Area  had seen the wonderful documentary about him, "The Life and Times of Harvey Milk."  But once Sean Penn became Harvey Milk, Milk became a celebrity in his own right.   So it isn't a huge surprise that along side Stephen Hawking, Ted Kennedy, and Desmond Tutu, Harvey Milk will be posthumously honored with a Medal of Freedom. The White House - Blog Post - 2009 Medal of Freedom Recipients. But what if Milk's incredibly brave insistence that he would live his life as an out gay man and that the very process of coming out will set gays free was a trap?  What if, without realizing it, Milk and an entire generation of gay liberationists did not increase freedom, but the sexual imprisonment of a rigid and binary sexual identity politics? These are the rather perverse questions that Michel Foucault sets out to examine in his History of Sexuality.  Foucault suggests that such "liberation" politics do not transcend oppression, but are in fact within systems of oppression.  Judith Butler continues Foucault's insistence that identity is not liberation, but  a dead end, a fracturous, disasterous dead end in her Gender Trouble. The basic point of these theorists is that identity politics are a trap- whether it's about liberating gays or women or Blacks.  Identity politics promise liberation, but in fact often just make more "real" the very categories of oppression upon which they're based. In other words, by making "gays" real, Milk helped make "straights" safe.  One is either gay or straight.  Straight men don't have to "come out" because we all know that they don't really have homoerotic desires or find the anus pleasurable or have sexual encounters with other men (even if they do).  As a group, straight people exist without outing, but also without a lot of critical analysis of what they really do and really desire.  For the most parts, straights are an unmarked category- hardly worthy of observation.  That's why when I first started teaching "Sociology of Hetoersexuality" it was considered one of the 10 stupidest courses in America by the ultra-conservative National Review.  How stupid?  There's no sociology to heterosexuality.  It's "natural" and not worthy of investigating. Further, as Butler points out, the "trouble" with identity politics as a path of liberation is that you must end up in endless wars of definition:  who gets to claim "gay" as a status?  who is a "woman" in need of feminism?  Is a gay man who is also attracted to a woman really gay?  Is a woman who was born a man really a woman? The real result of "gay liberation" has not been a sexual or gender identity liberation, but rather a locking down of categories.  In the past twenty years, Americans have returned to an earlier sexology notion of desire.  Like the Victorians, we believe no one chooses to be gay (or straight), but that such desires are written on the body- visible through genetic testing or the size of your hypothalomus or the length of your fingers.  Furthermore, heterosexual rituals and behaviors have come to dominate gay culture as well. Harvey Milk's dream that gay liberation would liberate all of us to be more open about our complicated and messy desires turns out to have had the opposite effect.  Now everyone--gay and straight-- is supposed to want to confine their sexual impulses to marriage. Perhaps Foucault and Butler were right and identity politics are the logical Yang to the Ying of oppressive sexual and gender hierarchies?  Perhaps if Milk were still around, he would have put gay liberation aside to be a radical fairie or a sexual anarchist of some sort.  I'd like to believe that he would have never succumbed to the sort of sexual repressiveness of gay marriage and monogramy as the only model for organizing desire.

What if Harvey Milk ' s life wasn ' t about freedom?

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Image via Wikipedia"][/caption]

Okay, everyone knows who Harvey Milk is by now.  Back in the day,  only people "in the know" or who were from the Bay Area  had seen the wonderful documentary about him, "The Life and Times of Harvey Milk."  But once Sean Penn became Harvey Milk, Milk became a celebrity in his own right.   So it isn't a huge surprise that along side Stephen Hawking, Ted Kennedy, and Desmond Tutu, Harvey Milk will be posthumously honored with a Medal of Freedom. The White House - Blog Post - 2009 Medal of Freedom Recipients. But what if Milk's incredibly brave insistence that he would live his life as an out gay man and that the very process of coming out will set gays free was a trap?  What if, without realizing it, Milk and an entire generation of gay liberationists did not increase freedom, but the sexual imprisonment of a rigid and binary sexual identity politics? These are the rather perverse questions that Michel Foucault sets out to examine in his History of Sexuality.  Foucault suggests that such "liberation" politics do not transcend oppression, but are in fact within systems of oppression.  Judith Butler continues Foucault's insistence that identity is not liberation, but  a dead end, a fracturous, disasterous dead end in her Gender Trouble. The basic point of these theorists is that identity politics are a trap- whether it's about liberating gays or women or Blacks.  Identity politics promise liberation, but in fact often just make more "real" the very categories of oppression upon which they're based. In other words, by making "gays" real, Milk helped make "straights" safe.  One is either gay or straight.  Straight men don't have to "come out" because we all know that they don't really have homoerotic desires or find the anus pleasurable or have sexual encounters with other men (even if they do).  As a group, straight people exist without outing, but also without a lot of critical analysis of what they really do and really desire.  For the most parts, straights are an unmarked category- hardly worthy of observation.  That's why when I first started teaching "Sociology of Hetoersexuality" it was considered one of the 10 stupidest courses in America by the ultra-conservative National Review.  How stupid?  There's no sociology to heterosexuality.  It's "natural" and not worthy of investigating. Further, as Butler points out, the "trouble" with identity politics as a path of liberation is that you must end up in endless wars of definition:  who gets to claim "gay" as a status?  who is a "woman" in need of feminism?  Is a gay man who is also attracted to a woman really gay?  Is a woman who was born a man really a woman? The real result of "gay liberation" has not been a sexual or gender identity liberation, but rather a locking down of categories.  In the past twenty years, Americans have returned to an earlier sexology notion of desire.  Like the Victorians, we believe no one chooses to be gay (or straight), but that such desires are written on the body- visible through genetic testing or the size of your hypothalomus or the length of your fingers.  Furthermore, heterosexual rituals and behaviors have come to dominate gay culture as well. Harvey Milk's dream that gay liberation would liberate all of us to be more open about our complicated and messy desires turns out to have had the opposite effect.  Now everyone--gay and straight-- is supposed to want to confine their sexual impulses to marriage. Perhaps Foucault and Butler were right and identity politics are the logical Yang to the Ying of oppressive sexual and gender hierarchies?  Perhaps if Milk were still around, he would have put gay liberation aside to be a radical fairie or a sexual anarchist of some sort.  I'd like to believe that he would have never succumbed to the sort of sexual repressiveness of gay marriage and monogramy as the only model for organizing desire.