The mirror does not tell you who you are. It is an objective pane, delivering unbiased reports: here is a nose; it has two nostrils -- one of which is adorned with a ring. Here are your ears; the lobs are attached. And there are your equidistant eyes; they function as they were intended.
We disbelieve these facts. They cannot be trusted, without any of our personal skewing. The mirror cannot just show you a unibrow; the unibrow must be evaluated. It is unsightly, disgusting, cro-magnon, if left unplucked. The forehead cannot simply be present; it must be bulbous or pimpled or scarred.
We know too well the premium placed on a pleasant appearance, on a body that yields -- either by nature or the knife -- to societal expectations.
And so we want more from the mirror than its simple truths. We want it to affirm worth and to assign value.
Short of that, we'll seek our validation elsewhere. If we're fortunate, we'll find it in ourselves and in the reassurances of guileless loved ones. If we're not, there will be no end of offers; everyone will be all too eager to tell us what we deserve -- and what we should be willing to risk to attain it.
Dr. Gregg Homer of California is a part of that chorus, having recently announced his invention of a surgical method for permanently turning brown eyes blue. In so doing, he aims to convince the public that blue eyes are not just aesthetically superior, but spiritually preferable, too:
"The eyes are the windows to the soul, [there's] this idea that people can actually see into it -- a blue eye is not opaque. You can see deeply into it, and a brown eye is very opaque, and I think that there is something meaningful about this idea of having open windows to the soul."
Never mind that the soul-window trope is more romantic metaphor than incontestable fact. Set aside that there is nothing more arbitrary indicator of physical beauty than the color of a person's irises.
This surgery, which may be available in the US in as few as three years, carries the warning of significant visual impairment in the long-term. It might cause glaucoma.
Why would anyone spend time developing a cosmetic procedure that creates physical harm where none was previously present?
For the answer to that, turn to Toni Morrison. More specifically, look to her seminal 1970 work, The Bluest Eye and its tragic heroine, Pecola Breedlove:
It had occurred to Pecola some time ago that if her eyes... were different, that is to say, beautiful, she herself would be different.
She was never able, after her education in the movies, to look at a face and not assign it some category in the scale of absolute beauty, and the scale was one she absorbed in full from the silver screen.
Here was an ugly little girl asking for beauty... A little black girl who wanted to rise up out of the pit of her blackness and see the world with blue eyes. His outrage grew and felt like power. For the first time he honestly wished he could work miracles.The world is full of Pecola Breedloves. They aren't all black. They aren't all poor. But they are all desperate to change themselves, and surgeons have built an empire by preying on them.
Cosmetic surgery is an oiled rope. You cannot grasp it and remain where you are. The moment you "correct" what you perceive as an "imperfection," you are on a slide. Once you've convinced yourself that you will be "better" when you are "fixed," you will be tempted to invent other flaws in need of immediate repair.
Pecola was right about one thing: changing your physical appearance in painful and permanent ways will make you different. Whether or not those differences are positive ones is highly debatable.
See Li'l Kim. Consider Heidi Montag. Ask a Jackson.
Follow Stacia L. Brown on Twitter: www.twitter.com/slb79
Humans are evolving surgically....this is not the end...
We women (because we are the largest consumers of this stuff and societal perceptions of beauty, even if they are false or unattainable) need to support one another, building each other up, through love and encouragement. And there are plenty of men out there who think we look fabulous as we are and just want us to feel confident and sexy in our form and stop complaining about what we lack. Let's just accept the fact that being female makes us beautiful and allow ourselves to enjoy it.
Congratulations. You're trying to change what you were born with.
Thaks for playing, Stacia.
A tall, blond, blue-eyed woman alighted the stage. She was erudite looking, and she had legs that clearly had business with a personal trainer. My beer and my arms were resting on the stage. I felt alien. She was so beautiful and White in more than polar opposite to my colored-ness. I felt wanting and out of place. I’ll never forget what she said when slid over to me, spun around, exchanging a view of her vagina for her face, with golden hair tickling my arms. I expected rejection. Instead, she moved closer and while some ridiculous stripper song played she stopped and asked me about a book I had on my lap. It was a book by Toni Morrison. I went to the club, but I was taking Toni to bed later that night.
She said this: I love her! My Favorite book of hers was The Bluest Eye.
Also disgusting! To think that a DOCTOR would spend so much time (TEN YEARS), energy, and (you know a LOT of) money developing what seems to me to be the MOST insulting, unnecessary and border-line racist "procedure" sickens me. I don't even have the words to scratch the surface of my repulsion. I'm sorry but anyone who falls for his sales pitch and has this done is going to deserve all the vision (and possibly other) problems they're going to have.
Seriously, THE HELL?