Is plastic surgery really an empowering choice?

I think there is a new wave of feminism I am very excited about, that seeks to respect a woman's choices in her life regardless of whether they fit society's mould or not: being a homemaker is worthy and respected, and being a career woman who never wants kids is worthy and respected. This is a response to the "not like other girls" feminism that was popular in the 2000s and early 2010s, the kind that made out eating pizza and chicken nuggets to be real personality traits, and looked down on girls who did makeup, fashion, etc.

This is incredibly exciting, and I firmly believe a woman should absolutely be empowered for her choices and respected for them, but I think it is also important to continue analyzing the societal factors that influence women to make their choices. In a patriarchal world, and with a lifetime of being pressured to cater to the male gaze, it is very difficult to actually know if we are indeed making a free choice when we, say, shave our legs, do makeup, get plastic surgery.

Certainly there should be no stigma against those things; women that engage in traditionally feminine behavior should not be looked down upon, should not be seen as not feminist, and it should not be assumed of them that they are doing it under pressure of the patriarchy, but the enormous influence of the patriarchy should also not be underestimated.

But how can we know if something is our choice? How can we simply separate ourselves from years of patriarchal conditioning? The only way to know would be to live in a post-patriarchal society, but we cannot get there without making choices against the patriarchal norm, and normalize those choices. But we cannot make those choices freely under the patriarchy, and oftentimes women do follow the norm. It is a loop.

I think one big roadblock to this conversation is shame. It is human nature to feel shameful that our choices are in fact, not our own--I think this is also a reason why people are so defensive when talking about meat eating. Eating animals, I would hope, is not a conscious choice that people would make. Certainly most children, when faced with slitting the throat of a chicken, or eating a veggie burger, would choose the veggie burger. But people get very defensive when told the meat eating that is such a staple part of their lives in not in fact something they chose.

But anyways, I think there is an immense shame among us women to be giving into a system rather than making our own choices. Such an intense shame to the point that we are less likely to truly investigate whether something is our choice, and rather defensively and immediately try to justify it as it being, indeed, our choice. I think this was a similar shame that led to the "not like other girls" as well. It was shameful to be following what was perceived to be the vapid, glittery pink, majority. We wanted to be different. But looking back, that was simply internalized misogyny. So is it not then worthwhile to continue to investigate our choices today? It is not shameful to be influenced by the pervasive system of patriarchy. It is normal (perhaps this has something to do with the fact that as humans we don't like to think of ourselves as "normal" or "average," even though ironically, we also want to not be singled out). It is not shameful to have internalized sexism. But it is counterproductive to fight against recognizing our internalized sexism.

This post is not a long way away from what I originally intended it to be, as seen by the title about plastic surgery. But to use plastic surgery as an example, I have never seen someone doing plastic surgery against a conventional standard of beauty. It is always to make the nose straighter. In Asia it is to make the eyes wider. Now in America it is to make the lips plumper. Are all of these people really doing it "for themselves," or are they doing it for the beauty standards they have internalized within themselves. And again, I do not judge a person for wanting to fit into beauty standards. That is normal and natural within a society that places so much value on conventional attractiveness. But is it an empowering choice? I don't think moulding yourself to internalized sexism is empowering.

Perhaps it is valuable to provide my own struggle in this as well. I currently shave my body hair, but I suspect it is not my choice, and that I am making a choice to cater to my internalized male gaze, and patriarchal norms. Because I think to myself--if no one shaved around me, if women in magazines had body hair, would I have thought to shave? Or perhaps in that thought experiment I would require not only enjoying shaving, but the innovation to come up with shaving itself which I do not see myself possessing, so what if I grew up in a society where half the women shaved, half the women didn't, and there was no societal preference for either one; they were seen as equally beautiful, equally sexy, etc. Or going a step further, what if body hair was seen as more attractive?

It is impossible to know what I would be for sure in any of these circumstances, but I don't see why I would continue doing something as time consuming and costly as shaving. Sure your skin feels smooth, but it grows back prickly, rather than if you let it grow out, it becomes a softer, more natural body hair. I've also read that it's less hygienic to shave--body hair is there for a reason. It is also worth noting that women didn't shave for a long time, before a bunch of men decided they could sell more razors if they convinced women they had to shave. Classic capitalism, creating wants where they didn't exist before.

I can know all these things, and still I shave. But I suspect many women are in the same boat as me, from the way we joke about not shaving in the winter as much, or during quarantine right now. And worrying about how we look when we go out is simply a marker of the patriarchy/male gaze, it doesn't even cover internalized patriarchy/male gaze that influences our preferences.

Shaving is already a personal choice, but this thought process (what is our choice, what isn't?) can be carried over to even more personal choices, like sexual activity, and even our personalities. I wonder sometimes, if we will ever find the "essence" of ourselves, amidst the sea of oppressive systems that influence our worldview, if there is indeed a such "essence."