Forever Barbie_ The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll - Lord [112]
"I identify with the patient what the aims of each particular operation are," he told me. "I mean, I don't mind patients having lots of operations. After all, I've got children to send through university." Latimer-Sayer also believes in using his time efficiently—especially with things like breast implants. "Some people fiddle about for hours—one wonders what they're doing. . . . But once you've done a few hundred, you ought to know where to cut the pocket and what size fits the pocket. In the main, operations take less time this side of the Atlantic than they do in America. Because American surgeons are looking over their shoulder for the lawyers all the time."
In talking with Latimer-Sayer, I got the sense that the hows of surgery were more important than the whys. Decisions to, say, westernize Asian eyelids should rest with the patient, not the surgeon. "If you have the double fold—what they call the European eyelid—you are considered more trustworthy, higher class, and you're more likely to do well in life," he told me. "If you have the Oriental eyelid with the thick upper lid with no fold, it's like being a second-class citizen. . . . Now if there's a little simple cosmetic operation to make somebody go from a second-class citizen on appearance to a first-class citizen on appearance, no wonder it's popular.
"If for instance, someone had developed a technique to make black people white . . . they would have been swamped, wouldn't they? Not because there's anything wrong with being black, but it's nicer to be white in a white society."
There is, however, one process he wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole: penis enlargement. "A lot of men seem to want it," he said. "You take a bit of fat from somewhere where there's a bit to spare and put it in the penis and it's fatter. But the trouble is that fat doesn't stay there; it tends to absorb, and sometimes you can get all sorts of other troubles with it. It can generally turn into a horrible mess."
Cindy concurred: "As far as I'm concerned, with men who aren't very well endowed, it's cheaper to buy a Porsche and probably more safe."
Latimer-Sayer did not install Cindy's breast implants; they were put in as part of a BBC documentary on the process. And they have begun to cause trouble. They were supposed to have been placed behind the chest muscle, but one migrated; it has also hardened, a process known as capsular con-tracture. "I'm not happy with the encapsulation of my own implants," she told me. "I'm having them out." And yet, she said, pausing, "it's better to have had them and liked them than never to have had them at all."
In her role as watchdog, Cindy is also following the class-action suits filed by unhappy implant owners against Dow Corning, a maker of silicone implants. In April 1994, about a year after she and I had dinner, The New York Times reported that the lawyers representing the patients had unearthed a 1975 study by company researchers that showed that the silicone in the implants harmed the immune system in mice. Whether this fresh detail will slow recruitment for her bionic army remains to be seen.
One thing, however, is certain: there are already a lot of bionic women out there. "I don't even think I want to walk down the street in California," Cindy told me. "They've all done what I've done. Over there I'm just another Barbie doll."
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
BARBIE OUT OF CONTROL
In December 1993, a platoon of bellicose Barbies mysteriously appeared on toy-store shelves in forty-three states. Their fluffy