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And it’s become so normalized! Oh, don’t like your tits? Shove some new ones in there! Hate your nose? Cut it off. Feeling chubby? Suck that fat out! You don’t actually want that vagina, do you? Trim trim. (More on this one a little later, ’cause it’s the one that makes the least sense to me.)

There’s a quick fix for everything—if you have the money. The rich (whom we’re supposed to look up to, I guess) get plastic surgery, so that makes it glamorous and desirable. Rather than vapid and wasteful. Which, let’s be honest—it is.

Not only is this obsession with plastic surgery totally superficial, but it also presupposes that we’re all sick or broken and in need of fixing. Seriously, have you seen The Swan? Perhaps the most horrifying (and yet transfixing) of reality shows, The Swan finds the “ugliest” people (women) around and “fixes” them. They’re swept out of their homes and go into seclusion for months for extreme surgery on pretty much every part of their faces and bodies. But not before they get the victim’s, I mean winner’s, family and loved ones to talk on camera about how horrid-looking she is. You know, for dramatic effect.

There were a couple of things I found interesting about this show. One was the rhetoric of brokenness behind it. As if these women weren’t getting plastic surgery to adhere to a beauty standard, but to fix something that was wrong with them. The doctors used deliberately “nice” language, like making your nose “match” your chin. Or getting rid of “excess” fat. How can it be excess if it’s on you? It’s not like someone stapled it on there and these doctors are there to make you “yourself” again.

There was also a lot of “life coaching,” which was laughable, going on on The Swan. One of the show’s producers—nipped and tucked to the extreme herself—called herself a life coach and would have one-on-one sessions with the potential Swans. I think this was partly to keep up the facade that somehow the makers of The Swan actually gave a shit about the women, but also to put out the message that being beautiful will cure your problems. And as nice a thought as this is, come on now. If your husband is cheating on you, it doesn’t mean that you need to get prettier—it means he’s a scumbag.

In a way, The Swan is totally telling about how we’re supposed to view beauty and appearances. We’re supposed to pity (and quietly mock) those who don’t fit into the narrow standards of what beautiful is, and we’re supposed to applaud them when they finally “fix” themselves (that’s if you consider pulled-back skin and big, scary white teeth an improvement).

In real life, it’s similar. If you’re not constantly trying to “improve” yourself, even in the smallest ways (think waxing, tanning, manicures), you’re gross and you don’t “take care of” yourself. Just saying.

And unfortunately, these quick fixes are starting earlier and earlier for women. In 2003, more than 331,000 plastic surgery procedures were performed on people younger than eighteen years old.

The Los Angeles Times reported in 2005 that Asian Women are increasingly seeking out skin-bleaching creams and medical procedures.

And you don’t have to look very far in youth pop culture (I’m talking to you, MTV) to see how acceptable it’s becoming for young people to get plastic surgery. On the MTV show I Want a Famous Face, young people get radical plastic surgery to look like their favorite celebrity, or, in the case of one girl, like a Playboy model. Sigh. But of course, the sexualization of beauty standards has been a long time coming. And it starts below the waist.

Beauty Standards . . . for Your Vagina

Oh, how I wish I were joking on this one. As if it’s not bad enough that we have to get the hair ripped out of our sensitive lady parts so as to not offend the porn-raised boys of today, now we have to trim up our skin as well. Puke.

I don’t know if it’s the porn culture or the weird virginity-fetish stuff that’s going on politically, but for some reason, “vaginal rejuvenation” surgery (as if it were