Unfortunately, women hear the choice so many men voice preference for - they get the message. And even with the knowledge that much of the stated look is engineered, doesn't stop men preferring it - or women feeling lessened by it.

And you could argue that these men with their stated preference vs their real women - that maybe they are with the women they are with, only because they couldn't afford the lifestyle of the super model?

What I hear - is that men settle for who they get sex from but find the image of super model (or starlet du jour) the prefered model of "woman".

And for many women, they know they don't compare to the image, however fake or retouched it is, and so feel at a loss.

I do think a lot of men want a real woman with whom they can be themself. But there is a lot of difference between what men say they like, and how they respond to the silicon babe they meet.

I've had a lot of opportunity to observe.

I guess I was lucky that my family never paid any attention to my appearance - good or bad - but that did not vaccinate me from peers and society. Or at least totally.

Fetboy - I've known a number of women who have had surgery to change their breasts. There is a significant difference in the attitude between women getting a reduction and women getting enlargement.

In the case of reduction, it truely does seem to be a case of "I'm doing it for me". I hear the same from women getting the increase but there is the underlying reasons: I don't feel good about myself compared to women I see in the media, I notice men pay more attention to women with bigger breasts and I am tired of feeling unnoticed, I think it will just "balance" me (because being bottom heavy is so un-female?), etc.

Women who get a reduction seem to want the lifestyle and comfort benefits, women who get enlarged seem to be dealing with feelings of inadequacy they got from media/peers/men/family/internal critic - from somewhere.

I guess that is what Dove's campaign, self serving or not, is trying to convey.

My mother, getting up there in years, is deeply offended by the plethera of adult depends type ads and commercials that seemed to be out there a few years ago.

She hated the impression it seemed to leave that all older women needed adult diapers and worried that her grandchildren would think of her when they see the commercials.

How does this apply to Mommy Makeovers? Well, now that they have a name for it, and it is increasingly getting press and clients, the impression it leaves is that there is something inherently defective and unattractive about a woman's body if she has a child. (Or if she doesn't and just lives her life - all those primary and secondary sex bits need overhauling!)

So - no one is chasing us with scalpels - but you get the feeling that we all have to look like a 17 year old Britney (though how "natural" she was even then is debated) That we can't possibly be considered attractive or desirable otherwise.

And there is a resentment that several industries seem all tied in - first to generate the disfatisfaction with our own bodies (and alter the expectations from men), then to offer the "cure".

If women want to go out and do all this body alteration and try and pass it off as "doing it for myself" as a exercise in choice. Go for it. But I for one, will exercise my choice by not believing they "do it for themselves".

Somewhere, the message was delivered to these women that they are defective.

I've noticed, both in media and in my own personal experience, that the female body is somehow open game to a public (and private) practice of critiquing. Like it is required. Like without that voiced critique, women might not know how defective they really are?

I am not sure what it is - in my own experience, it seems like "well meaning" men who I was aquainted with, seem to feel it their right, or obligation to inform my of my physical failing and lack of measuring up (to some soft porn ideal?)

It made me mad - and exasperated. Who gave them the right! I would demand. Why did they feel they had to disect and grade my parts? I really wanted to retaliate in same, but somehow that game seemed repugnant to me - why not to them?

I can understand the pain that leads a perfectly beautiful young woman to get balloons sewn in under her breasts to somehow quiet down those insults from her past (and then get on a magazine cover? well, not that), but I would guess that these surgical manipulations are merely a bandaid covering a festering wound in her self image. What will she do when she hits 30!

I think my frustration with cosmetic surgery focusing on "defective" female primary and secondary sexual bits is that it gives in to all those voices trying to compare us to a propped and shaved and altered and airbrushed woman in Playboy. I like the magasine but let's admit that the naked women photographed are part of the skin trade - soft porn if you will.

Everytime I hear women get huffy and declare they "did it for themselves", it makes "them" right. "They" win then. I understand someone wants to feel good about themself but but "giving in" in this way - it just confirms the thought that women are defective and must be fixed to an ideal determined by images in soft porn.

If you get your boobs inflated. If you get your labia trimmed. If you shave off all your pubic hair. What will be the next step? Where else are you going to "fail" as a woman?