Buccal fat removal is just the latest in a long line of harmful cosmetic surgeries popularized by influential people through media and the internet. There is a flood of videos on the internet about people, primarily women, getting their buccal fat removed. They tell you how this contributed to enhancing their beauty, easing their insecurities, and how this act promotes feminism.
They reason that as women take charge of their own bodies and alter their physique to appeal to themselves, they propagate the values of feminism. The problem with this approach is that they do this because they want to appeal to an external beauty standard created by systems of oppression. The systems being: the patriarchy and capitalism.
Some will argue that women ‘choose’ plastic surgery for themselves, but the real question is, would they have done so if they weren’t constantly assaulted by a sense of unworthiness sustained by society’s stubborn notion of beauty? The people doing this don’t realise that by using cosmetic surgeries to remove all their ‘flaws’ (a new one crops up every once in a while; some new procedure to get rid of some inconsequential body feature), they are, in turn, fuelling the insecurities of the millions of women watching their videos. They make people otherwise comfortable in their bodies feel as though they are not enough and that feminism is catering to an ever-changing beauty standard. Contradictorily, feminism is empowerment, and this is not empowering. It’s dehumanizing.
Catering to the male gaze is something that should be in the process of being discarded as a relic of the past, but it is still very much alive. The patriarchal world we live in, which punishes women for being uptight and too progressive, plays a huge role in plastic surgeries and anti-aging products and procedures. It holds up the image of a perfect woman and asks every woman looking at it to be ashamed because they could never reflect that. Thus begins the self-altering race to be the new benchmark of the demonizing beauty standard. As Margaret Atwood wrote in The Robber Bride, “Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it is all a male fantasy: that you're strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren't catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you're unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.”
Corporate greed runs this show. The beauty industry’s existence depends on people feeling as though the body they inhabit is somehow less than what it should be, that it is something to be ashamed of, and how you can always be more beautiful than you are right now. They create this lack for their own gain. They want people to be in a perpetual state of insecurity, and they will do anything to fuel it.
Feminism should operate on a love ethic. An ethic that has its foundations in compassion and community. Members of a community do not bring each other down or make each other feel bad about themselves. Also, important to note is that the principle of love is fundamentally incompatible with the principle of capitalism, a system that thrives on oppression. Therefore, it’s safe to say that feminism itself will not be fully realized as long as it operates under the pervasiveness of capitalism. I will write about these seemingly unrelated subjects of love and capitalism and their interconnectedness in a future blog.
Changing your body according to the latest trend is not empowering or feministic. Accept your humanness and accept your flaws.
– rudraksh dange
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