We’ve normalised cosmetic surgery so much that it’s crossed over into the ‘women’s empowerment’ lane

We are living in the body-positive era. Plus-size models such as Tess Holliday post photographs of their cellulite; body-positive influencers including The Slumflower proudly show off their “saggy boobs” on Instagram, while others celebrate their unshaven legs in a staunch rejection of traditional beauty standards. In this modern culture, the prescribed “norm” of the female form is fiercely opposed. Even advertisers such as Nike, Dove and Missguided want a bite of the apple – and they’re praised when they take it.

But while influencers tell us to love ourselves, it seems that little has really changed in our self-perception. The latest poll on female body image reveals that almost a third of us are uncomfortable in our own skin – 29 per cent of women said this was because they felt “different” from other people, with a fifth citing influencers and celebrities for making them feel bad about themselves.

Perhaps this is why, alongside the rise in body positivity, we’re also seeing a sharp rise in cosmetic surgery.

The two apparently conflicting trends are thriving concurrently, as though one complements the other rather than utterly diminishing it. If you don’t proudly bare all on social media and happily prance around in this season’s cycling shorts trend, content with your rippling thighs, are you truly a feminist? Can we claim to be authentic if we don’t post a picture of our upper lip hair on Instagram?

The American Society of Plastic Surgeons revealed this year that plastic surgery has been rising at such a rate that almost 18 million people went under the knife in 2018 – around a quarter of a million more than 2017.

Naomi Wolf explored this in The Beauty Myth, in which she investigated the relationship between women’s emancipation and their required attractiveness, writing: “The more legal and material hindrances women have broken through, the more strictly and heavily and cruelly images of female beauty have come to weigh upon us.” Just as the fourth wave of feminism has seen women rise up since 2011, changing laws, protesting injustice and narrowing the pay gap, we are being imprisoned in another way.

It wasn’t that long ago that plastic surgery was considered a big deal – a bit vulgar, even. But as cosmetic procedures have advanced, they’ve also become something we’re comfortable being blase about.

Now you can barely scroll through Twitter without seeing an article about hip young women getting cheek and lip fillers during their lunch break as if it’s no more of a life-altering decision than selecting which Pret sarnie to eat that day (or 400 sandwiches, if we were to go for like-for-like on prices). Women write about their cosmetic procedures as if there’s empowerment in shaking off the stigma, as though they are embracing their liberated choices and sticking it to the man.

The appeal of many of these “injectables” is the apparent lower risk than going under the knife, the ostensible affordability of them and also, the subtle appearance changes they offer – as opposed to the dramatic plastic surgery we used to see celebrities go for. Yes, often, their impact is largely invisible to the naked eye. So, not only are women expected to shell out for these procedures, but they’re also supposed to be satisfied when they look near identical to before the fillers went in.

Of course, when it comes to beauty standards, the one most perennially thrusted upon women is that of weight – and even babies can’t seem to escape these beauty standards in the Instagram age. This week, Khloe Kardashian posted a photograph of her daughter True Thompson and Kim and Kanye’s daughter Chicago West eating Cheetos on holiday, captioning it: “I heard my mama say ‘vacation calories don’t count’.”

And last week, as I went for a hospital consultation before a colonoscopy, the nurse cheerily told me that “on the plus side,” the prep process of a 24-hour fast and drinking two litres of medical-grade laxatives could “help you lose a few pounds”.

I wonder if a man going for a colonoscopy would be told the same thing? The nurse’s insensitivity could have had serious consequences for someone suffering from bulimia, for whom bingeing and then purging with laxatives becomes normalised. Would the Kardashian children be captioned in the same way if they were boys? Of course, the idea that all women would be improved if they dropped a few pounds has governed for aeons.

And now, it seems we’re coming to expect women to go to extreme lengths to modify their bodies to appease patriarchal norms even further. We’ve started talking about cosmetic procedures as another way for women to achieve “confidence” and feel “empowered”. This is a convenient narrative for the power structures that have a vested interest in making money from female insecurity, and portraying women as being of little value beyond their physical appearance.

It means we happily ignore the fact that breast implants can cause many women lifelong pain, because their appearance matters more than their health and comfort. Even the body positivity movement is guilty of it; we can be plus size as long as it’s in the perfect hourglass figure, it’s fine to embrace vitiligo or gapped teeth but only if we look like a supermodel; we can have underarm hair as long as we post endless nude selfies to prove that we’re still sexy.

Cosmetic surgery and injectables have become so normalised that they’re almost on par with dieting as an expected way for women to keep themselves aesthetically in check. My friends and I have discussed Botox and pulled at our faces, seeing which bits would look “so much better” with a little help from a needle. And while it might seem easy to shame those that do opt for these procedures, we should really be looking at how our culture has enabled it to get to this stage – and where true aesthetic empowerment can come from.