Western chauvinism prevents Western people, women included, from seeing the flaws within their own society. Labiaplasties, breast augmentations, rhinoplasties, and the like are seen as elective procedures done for the betterment of the patient’s mental wellness and physical appearance. Beyond the personal, these are done to increase their desirability to men, to increase their acceptance amongst women, and to improve their social standing in society at large. However, Western women do not see these procedures as validation of or bending to the will of patriarchal ideology, it’s a choice. (How much choice does one truly have in this world?) Western women don’t see the parallels between the labiaplasty in the Western world and the female circumcision in the Global South. They see female circumcision as purely coercive all the time and advocate for the complete banning of it, while they, ironically enough, are mutilating their own genitals for societal approval. This is what Simone Weil Davis discusses in her article “Loose Lips Sink Ships.” She argues first that the desire for labiaplasties is rooted in insecurity and self-doubt engendered by societal standards for female genitalia. She also argues that this desire is informed by the same patriarchy that Western women want to save African and Middle eastern women from when it comes to female circumcision. Female circumcision is a term that encompasses a wide range of procedures, and it is a cultural practice with various purposes that supposedly benefit females and males. This is something women and girls desire for social and cultural reasons. Western women are unable to see that the reasons underlying the existence of female circumcision in African are quite similar to those that exist in America. It is a belief that those in the Global South are culturally inferior to Westerners and it is impossible for women to choose in these societies. What they fail to realize is that if African and Middle Eastern women are lacking in choice, so are Western women. The desire for these procedures is rooted in similar patriarchal norms, so if Western women want to view women who undergo these procedures electively as coerced victims they should see themselves in that same light. Either all women are coerced into these procedures, or they all (except in the case of actual force) do so willingly without influence, but the distinction cannot be drawn across cultural lines without upholding white, Christian Western supremacist ideals. Westerners see female circumcision as a complete moral failing of Islam and the culture of people in the Global South with no acknowledgment of their own depravity.
I tried to explain Simone Weil Davis’s argument in “Loose Lips Sink Ships” to my family. I mentioned how Americans try to pathologize African cultures by painting their practices as backward or savage when we engage in similar behaviors for similar reasons. I also said that you can’t really make the argument that you get plastic surgery for yourself and I was met with a lot of pushback. It is a bit controversial but I do not believe that changing the body (in most cases, but not all) is what makes someone happy about plastic surgery. It’s about changing the body to match societal standards in order to ease the time someone has in our society or to make them desirable. We don’t want things in a vacuum, our desires are shaped and molded by the society in which we live. And when society is telling you your body is not desirable, it’s not wanted, you will seek to become what is desirable. Humans are social creatures and we naturally seek acceptance. I think when we make the argument that people seek plastic surgery to make themselves happy without the context that societal norms (which are informed by white supremacy, cishet male gaze, cisheteropatriarchy, fatphobia, and ableism) you absolve society at large of responsibility for creating conditions that are antithetical to self-acceptance. I think if you ask why enough times, you get to that point where you can recognize that it is a societal issue more than it is a personal issue. But I think we need to recognize that society coerces people into disliking or hating themselves enough that they will spend their money to undergo a procedure that will make unchangeable alterations to their body, just so they can please a society that would otherwise hate them. There is nothing wrong on an individual level with plastic surgery, but on a broader scale, it is a problem. I also think that the things we hate about our bodies are things we pretend not to hate on others, I won’t elaborate on that. Anyway, my nose bridge is wide and it has some (unsightly) protrusions on it, and sometimes I think about getting a rhinoplasty so that it’s not so offensive to me. And then I remember that in doing that I would be validating Western beauty standards, and I don’t want to do that. I may be doing myself a disservice because no one wants to feel ugly, but I would rather feel ugly in the context of this society than tell myself I am inadequate (which I feel I would be doing by getting surgery to change something that’s not hurting me). I realize I may sound like an egomaniac but I do believe that I am so much better than the world I have to live in, and so is everyone else. I’ll do anything I can to discredit or compromise the hold the status quo has on human beings.
Davis, Simone Weil. “Loose Lips Sink Ships”. Feminist Studies, vol. 28, no. 1, 2002, pp. 7–35.
