When I was a child and my mother had dental surgery, I was shocked to come home and find her in bed in the middle of the day. She explained she'd been to the dentist, she hurt, and she needed me to play quietly. Fine. When I was a teen, she told me that if I wanted a nose job, it would be fine. When a classmate had breast-reduction surgery, she explained that the girl had been in pain and people had laughed at her.

These things can be dealt with rationally without traumatizing a young person or without making him or her feel as if s/he is a commodity.

What distresses me is the sort of censoriousness I detect here. Which surgeries would you sanction? Is a nosejob okay if you have a deviated septum? I gather that breast augmentation is Bad. What about breast reconstruction? If a tummy tuck is Wrong, how about a C-section.

There is a difference between getting some facial work done and coming out looking like Jocelyne Wildenstein.

No, I haven't had any plastic surgery, cellulite removal, or even Botox. But if I did, it would be the concern only of myself, my insurance provider (which doesn't handle cosmetic procedures) and as much gentleness as I could muster to explain it to a child.

We can't all write poetry like Cyrano de Bergerac, you know. Or hold our heads and our white plumes up quite that self-destructively high.

Is this art or exhibitionism?

In which case, does the student need a gallery or a shrink?

The stress that she has put on her body is appalling.

>>But the idea that it's not really a factor for most people at all...>>

The one person entitled to pronounce ex cathedra just celebrated Mass in D.C.

I didn't believe him either.

Tom Davidson is playing semantic games before thudding down with his pronunciamento. Why on earth should anyone accept -his- perceptions as being more...well...perceptive than anyone else's?

He came on over with the rest of the pack to protest those perceptions. If he -- and the others -- did that, then, presumably, they see value in attempting to refute those perceptions.

And don't tell me it's because, out of the goodness of their hearts and their rigorous training in logic, they want to set (by-definition) flawed-and-wrong others straight.

They don't sound like Vulcans to me. They sound like chauvinist trolls. I haven't seen this many of the breed since that was called standard operating procedure, back in the 1950s. To me, that indicates they're running angry, defensive, and scared.

Ann Landers used to say that Yalies were great hoaxsters.

If this is a hoax, it's a dreadful one.

You've done a -lot- of pronouncements on the nature of academe.

What do you really know about it? To me, it sounds as if your talking about jobs and standards derives not from knowledge of the university system, but from a grudge that you seem to regard as an ideology. There is a difference between ideology and spite that you have missed. But, then, you are well-named. I want to hear how you're not privileged. You're good at slinging the names; let's see you defend yourself if you can.

To another poster from the U.K.: I was fascinated to hear that in the U.K., the specializations are so rigid. I knew that undergraduates specialized very early, as opposed to taking a broad liberal arts curriculum (or technical or business training), but at least in my generation, Oxbridge graduates seemed to have the happy facility to switch in and out of academe, journalism, and business.

No one's surprised to hear me agree with DurianJoe about the nature of a liberal arts education. It -is- possible to make the transition from a pretty arcane field into business; it's just not easy. And, up until the second wave, with the exception of a few outstanding women's colleges, studies -were- men's studies.

Were. amd are. such colleges privileged? Only in the sense that Marine basic training is privileged, I've subsequently come to learn from an LTC who trained some of the first all-female Marine platoons (and I hope I've got the term right; my family's Army). If you survive, you get the accomplishments -and- the respect for your teachers that you've earned.