Male Roles Vs. Female Roles in Fiction: Discussion/Analysis/Troperwank

How do you think female or male characters undergoing cosmetic surgery should be handled in fiction?

Personally, I’d love if it wasn’t shamed as often as it is. Like yeah, people being pressured to get plastic surgery is bad, but at the same time, a friend of mine just got her breast enhancement surgery crowdfunded and she’s the happiest I’ve ever seen her before.

Plastic surgery, for a lot of people, can be incredibly fulfilling, and really improve their self image. I would love to see more media reflect that.

Plastic surgery has such a bad reputation. Kind of hypocritical as braces for teeth are accepted, even if they're just for cosmetic reasons.

I don't like the weight that lies in the word should.

If I believe anything about stories that should be, is that they are engaging, interesting, and ideally, ethical. For example, I do not give the slightest fuck if the The Turner Diaries were well written - it's dumb propaganda.

In the context of body modification, I can see several things where cosmetic surgery has been used to revile a character, or to show them as good. Cyberpunk settings in particular have a way of speaking about cosmetic surgery which is hard to pin down: on one hand it is a strong criticism of the lack of humanity in rampant consumerism, in the other, it is also one of the "coolest" elements emphasized on, and I would dare say one of the most attractive of the setting for people.

Despite criticizing something it cannot bring itself to fully condemn it, so it's integrated as a sort of unequestionable inevitability with moral conundrums.

So, I am all out for the more careless use of body modification surgeries and treatments to denote characters as shallow, or somesuch. By all means, the demonification of vanity is stupid and it can go fuck itself. We've had enough of "Oh the old woman is old and ugly thus she wants to bathe in babies' blood to restore her youth" plots whose aesop is "Ugly makes you evil", to contrast Evil Makes You Ugly.

Does this mean I think the plot shoul be removed forevermore now? Fuck no. Do I think it behooves us to notice it's a pattern that allows for more nuance and an examination of societal presumptions on beauty and self-care? Hell yeah.

Ideally it should be handled like anything else: With some level of nuance. Mostly, plastic surgery is just the tool of evil; rarely is it depicted as something that's good (e.g. burn victims, victims of disastrous accidents and so forth - people who have very good reasons to want to get surgery).

Is also because cosmetic plastic surgery is asociate with hollywood and the vanity of the famous who want to kept beutifull at all cost.

The only place were I saw that as good thing was in a korean drama and that have to be with the fact plastic surgery it saw very favorable there.

My positive view of plastic surgery probably in part owes to me being in the trans community. It’s a very common desire among myself and my friends.

The regular Joe is unlikely to think all that fondly about plastic surgery when their exposure to it is almost entirely from TV shows about decadent rich people using it purely for vanity.

You know, shit like Doctor Hollywood.

Reminds me to a book arguing that a lot of issues of male insecurity would be solved if male plastical surgery was socially accepted

I dunno, insecure people mind end up in a loop of constantly doing plastic surgery in the hopes of fixing imaginary flaws.

Which is another negative rep it has: being extremely predatory and profitting off the insecurities of people.

I dunno how much that actually has any basis in reality, mind, but it's the default narrative.

It makes sense. A lot of men who take up weightlifting or other exercise for the purpose of body aesthetics are known to get stuck in a trap of "I just need to be a little more muscular," no matter how big they actually get. No reason the same principle wouldn't apply here.

I feel like that's not an issue with plastic surgery so much as a broader one regarding culture and greed/capitalism.

Eh, anecdotal but the issue of many people I know is that they get into fitness to be handsome and then they realize being muscle man doesn't make them conventionally Atractive. Sometimes is even counterproducent ("

I don’t think that’s an issue with plastic surgery, but beauty culture as a whole. The same reason why some people get sucked into buying incredibly expensive makeup in quantities that they could never use.

It’s not makeup that’s bad, or using makeup. It’s the way that people are told by other people “you need this”.

“You need” vs “I want” basically.

When it come to plastic surgery people have two mode: medical plastic surgery which mean the kind people need for some reason(and accident that let them scar for life, a bith deformity,etc) and vanity cosmetic cirugery that often is asociate with the rich, specially the hollywood and media rich that does to be eternally young and it feel just to show off.

The idea of regular comon plastic cirguery does so people can fee better about themselves dosent register.

Line between those to things is rather blurry, though.

I don't think it's a matter of the line being blurry so much as, sadly, it's just the most effective sales pitch.

Then again, I don't know much about personal appearance beyond basic hygiene, so I may not be qualified to say anything.

One of the few times plastic surgery (and I am distinguishing this from cosmetic surgery in general since it actually involves reconstruction of a body part) in media was used for something other than to show how vain a character is was in the movie Face/Off of all things. There's one scene where a guy who got his ear shot off is having it replaced with plastic surgery, as a lead-up to the whole face switching thing. The face switching was also only part of the process - regular plastic surgery was also needed since the two characters had different body structures.

Come to think of it, the way Anakin and Luke in Star Wars had their chopped off hands replaced with cybernetic replacements is also technically plastic surgery. Especially in the case of Luke, since his new hand actually looks like a regular hand due to artificial skin.

Edited by M84 on Feb 18th 2021 at 12:25:44 AM

This discussion reminded me to grab this TLP

Which it fall under the whole "reconstrutive cirgury good, cosmetic cirugy bad"

There's also the cosmetic surgery done to switch a person's very ethnicity in Die Another Day, though that goes beyond plastic surgery and involves cutting edge gene therapy.

Edited by M84 on Feb 18th 2021 at 2:30:22 AM

Also, that one wasn't done because of vanity but because the villain wanted to fake his death.

I think part of the issue is that it's called plastic surgery. "Plastic" comes with the connotation of something being artificial and fake. Combine that with the mixed messages society sends women - mocking them for both failing to live up to impossible beauty standards and mocking them for trying to live up to impossible beauty standards (that pesky Madonna-Whore Complex again) - and that's how you get plastic surgery getting treated as something vain spoiled shallow women do.

And now I'm reminded that the antagonistic clique in Mean Girls are actually called "The Plastics".

Edited by M84 on Feb 18th 2021 at 3:32:12 AM

For those who watched the show, what are your thoughts on Lana Lang from Smallville?

I always liked Lana Lang even if she had an absurd number of Lois Lane (ha!) plots of being stalked by people envious of her. Having started watching the series over with my wife, a very interesting thing is the fact Lana is a miserable unfulfilled person who wants to self-actualize and is dealing with depression.

However, she's hated by a substantial number of fellow students who think she's got the "perfect life."

She's also obviously, in retrospect, the basis for the TV version of Elena Gilbert on Vampire Diaries.

Feminism wise, Lana is actually quite impressive in that she wants to do something important and help people but the story is written in the way that this gets overshadowed by the fact she's unaware of the supernatural shenanigans going around. This made the fandom hate her as distracting from Clark's constant Buffy-esque adventures.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Feb 21st 2021 at 1:47:20 AM