A Penny for Sam's Thoughts

I have been watching Tiffany Ferguson’s videos lately on Youtube and I have to admit the admiration I have gained for her in so short a time. True, I don’t agree with all of her points, but that’s exactly what she isn’t aiming to do; she is opening up topics and issues to allows people to formulate their opinions to foster healthy debates on crucial concerns which, due to their novelty, escape being classified within the traditional arena  of lawmaking and jurisdiction.

Most appalling of all up till now is the ‘notion of perfection’ and how it has become a major component of advertising and marketing cosmetic procedures.

Cosmetic procedures, once born out of need and necessity, have now become whimsical. To reduce it to a means to ‘actively’ seek and gain social acceptance is to vastly dumb down its necessity and usefulness in times of extraordinary events and is again a downside of capitalist consumerism- to trick people into believing that without a certain product (here service) your success is an absolute incompletion, that one must aim to save money to ‘buy’ this and continue buying this to maintain that ‘level’ of success. I also feel that humans with their increased efficiency in technology and consequent confidence have nowadays become excessively complacent. They think they can own anything and do anything, even play God, which they are by making a human more perfect than Nature itself.

As Tiffany points out, people use these procedures to undo one or two physical imperfections in order to improve their self image and be more confident. If and only IF it would have been an individual choice i.e. dictated completely by personal volition, in turn guided by inner and not internalised desires, there would have been no need for such articles though I would still have pointed out to the huge financial gap this indicates and also the troubling trend of the rich increasingly investing more and more of their money on themselves rather than on their community i.e. the declining moral sense of being communally responsible.  

I just wanted to add my two observations to this whole issue:- 

1) That a self-image and its resultant confidence emerging from such procedures is going to be so in connection to it forever and won’t ever be able to transcend it. The confidence would be because of the procedure and would never become in spite of it. For example, one of the major things to analyse in a buildungsroman is to verify whether the protagonist’s self worth is internal or external- in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Celie’s self worth initially depends on Shug’s reciprocation. Not until she has, heart wrenchingly, learnt to live by her own and love herself without any outside influence that she could qualify her self-worth as stable and unshaken. There was also an episode in The Good Doctor on Amazon Prime where a ‘woman’ patient, even on the cusp of possible fatality from a cosmetic procedure, refuses to remove them in the fear of reverting to her old state where her husband considered her too old for love and even care and attention.

2) These procedures promote a certain ‘trendy’ type and ‘normalise’ it. This is where it gets increasingly problematic because after years of feminist movement we still encounter the doctrinated belief that women must aspire for male acceptance and therefore do the needful. We want to fit in the trend but to do so with physical intervention is taking the rhetoric WAY TOO FAR. The expectation to alter yourself is gendered and thus cosmetic procedures are problematic for me; and not just the highly expensive ones but even the relatively cheap ones like lip-plumping gloss and those sorts of things. This just increases the gendered burden on women to look perfect and be perfect, to strive for perfection and be all consumed with this thought, ensuring that they are depended on male validation and never ever confident by themselves. Such active seeking by women only gives more ‘power’ to men to ‘reject’ them on such superficial grounds- on one hand we are denouncing female objectification and on the other this is promoted by accepting and undergoing such measures. This just gives men a considerable leeway, to again, be what they wanna be, how they wanna be. And the trail of  blame leading to the man’s abominable actions get highly diluted by such measures taken on the part of the female like in the example quoted above- the woman is in the hospital because she felt neglected and this comes up only later in the end only because of how ashamed she was to admit this vulnerability.

Night always comes, despite how much human wants to broker it by lighting lamps. So must old age come and with it disintegration and we must embrace it like Ignotus Peverell.