I’ve a very dear friend who is weeks away from going under the knife. After meeting with her cosmetic surgeon twice, the two of them decided it would be a reasonably sane idea to perform a tummy tuck on a mother whose body has shed over 50 pounds since her last year of childbearing.
“I want to feel confident in my own body, and I can’t do that with slabs of stretch-marked skin hanging over my hips,” said the woman who insists on remaining anonymous.
See, I’m all for confidence and a reasonable amount of self-esteem, but who’s the person who decided women may only find self-esteem in an image?
I say “image” because a mirror will show you more than just your body, and I say “women” because statistics imply that men simply aren’t having as much difficulty coming across their confidence.
According to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons’ 2012 Plastic Surgery Statistics Report, a total of over 14 million cosmetic surgeries were performed on humans (pets can have plastic surgery, too.) Out of those 14 million surgeries, less than 1.3 million were performed on males. The other 12.7 million surgeries were performed on females.
I know someone may want to argue that all cosmetic surgeries are not done for vain reasons, and that’s a valid argument. So let’s talk about the top medical reason for women to have cosmetic surgery: breast cancer. According to U.S. Breast Cancer Statistics, 12 percent of women develop breast cancer in their lifetime. To be as fair as possible, let’s not include the 12 percent of cosmetic surgeries when considering the vast amount of cosmetic surgeries performed on females. Instead, let’s imagine we live in a medically perfect world and assume all of these women were properly diagnosed and able to remove the breast cancer before it became fatal.
Females would still have to account for a whopping 79 percent of cosmetic surgeries.
Let me be clear. I am not blaming males (or females) alone for the flustering gender gap when it comes to cosmetic surgery.
Ladies and gentlemen, let’s be more understanding, more kind and more sensitive to each others’ scars. These scars are not imperfections. These scars are stories, and we should be proud to tell them. Stop pushing and paying each other to hide them.
