SILICONE PEAKS AND VALLEYS : Now That the Breast-Implant Craze Has Sprung a Leak, a Moment of Reflection . . .
A day after the Food and Drug Administration suggested that it might be a good idea not to slice any more breasts open in order to slide silicone-filled plastic bags inside them, I was backstage at a hard-rock concert. If silicone could talk, the noise from the girls would have been more deafening than what was being played onstage. Should the FDA’s ruling become final, the backstage world of rock ‘n’ roll will be seriously deflated--literally.
Having a genetic defect that renders me less than hypnotized by female chestworks of circus-like proportions, I’ve long wondered why someone would consent to walking around siliconized for, one hopes, the rest of her natural life. Exclude, of course, the women who resort to prostheses or other measures in the process of recovering from disease. And, let’s be generous and exclude the young top-heavies in scanty leather parading past me that night. After all, wanting to get met by rock stars is reason enough to do anything.
Let’s focus on the rest of the female population that has subjected itself to what, if we weren’t so damned civilized, would seem like an absolutely barbaric procedure, next to which inserting a plate in one’s lower lip or having one’s neck permanently elongated by rings might seem like a harmless pastime. To question these women’s choice in Southern California is on a par with walking around the intersection of Wall and Broad streets in Lower Manhattan, wondering aloud, “What’s so good about making money?”
But I ponder the question not from the medical point of view--after all, the FDA has consumed 30 years not thinking about the subject, so why should I bother?--but more as a cultural curiosity. There was a time, not so very long ago, when the disdainful use of the word plastic was the most venerated of generational cliches. There was no more thoroughly dismissive put-down of parents, of style, of bad music, than to label them plastic. Now, we’re shoving it in our bodies as if it were a bagful of the life force itself.
Women were softened up for this cosmetic invasion by years of promotion of the Veg-O-Matic approach to flesh and bone--slicing and dicing it into more appealing arrangements. It became a short leap, aided by hundreds of ads in the pages of magazines that have the names of certain cities as their titles, from cutting stuff off to slipping stuff in.
And it would be wrong to single out females as the only people who fall for what a sterner medical establishment might call quackery. Men, being increasingly infected with the insecurity about their appearance that has long bedeviled women, are having silicone sacs implanted where they wish their pectoral muscles were, or to give their calves more definition than exercise can produce, or in other places too painful to contemplate.
Since each age gets the celebrities it deserves, we’re inspired by images of men and women who are, shall we say, works in progress, from Michael (It Don’t Make No Difference If You’re Black or White, So I’m Gonna Be White) Jackson to Joan (I Dare You to Find My Nose) Rivers. Victims of this process say that such deliberate self-mutilation makes them feel better about themselves. So, one hears, does heroin, but we no longer admire doctors who dispense that particular shortcut to self-esteem.
In fact, drug abuse provides an interesting model for the crucial question posed by gelling ourselves. In a time of health-care crisis, we hear that people no longer have the right to narcotize themselves when society may have to bear the cost of the medical consequences. Well, say that five years down the line, the FDA finally decides that walking around with a bag of silicone jiggling around inside you has grave medical consequences. Is it fair to ask the taxpayers, or your fellow insurance-payers, to foot the bill for the consequences of your out-of-control vanity?
I don’t particularly like my nose, and an all-points bulletin would have to be issued to find my pecs. But I like the idea that, if anything ever springs a leak inside me, it’ll be me. And, as for those girls backstage--if I want to look at oversized balloons, I’ll go watch the Macy’s parade.
