Liberal feminists, plastic surgeons, porn-brained men, Hollywood, even influencers have lied to us by telling us that surgery shouldn’t be stigmatized, that it’s “liberating.” They have also desensitized us to the words that are associated with getting going under the knife. They make it sound like it’s simple and easy, it’s harmless, when in reality it is that serious. It’s permanent, and it affects both the body and the mind, as well as the mind of others. Plastic surgery has become a social contagion, and I don’t see it stopping anytime soon unless we continue to speak up about it.

Naomi Wolf, author of The Beauty Myth, said, “Cosmetic surgery is not ‘cosmetic,’ and human flesh is not ‘plastic.’ Even the names trivialize what it is. It’s not like ironing wrinkles in fabric, or tuning up a car, or altering outmoded clothes, the current metaphors. Trivialization and infantilization pervade the surgeons’ language when they speak to women: ‘a nip,’ a ‘tummy tuck.’…Surgery changes one forever, the mind as well as the body. If we don’t start to speak of it as serious, the millennium of the man-made woman will be upon us, and we will have had no choice.”

[Well, progressive feminists and porn-brained men like to make the “liberating” argument for other things for their own benefit too, such as abortion. It doesn’t make them *actually* liberating. The choice for reconstructive surgery still should remain with the individual, but I think Dominique is close to the mark in calling the overwhelming social-media impulse for it a “social contagion.” More accurately, though, it’s the narcissism of social media and influencers that promotes and drives that impulse. — Ed]