Letters to the Editor
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Maybe you'd need the book yourself
If you'd be freaked out if your mom came home with 2 black eyes, maybe you'd be just the audience for a glorified office pamphlet such as this. I'm sorry but if you're trying to use this as an excuse to excoriate the entire plastic surgery industry your missing the mark. I'm pretty sure that some woman in her 20's or 30's is capable of making that informed consent herself without needing your political diatribes to dissuade her from making the wrong choice.
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Not so heinous
I am not a big fan of plastic surgery, but this book may have a place in the world. I was looking through old photos with my mom several years ago and this school age girl, very ethnic looking, was always in shots with my grandparents. Who was she?
Thus, I found out at age 48 that the mommy that I knew so well, her face indelibly etched in my brain, had a nose job when she was in high school. She never mentioned it, ever, til then. It threw me for a loop, even at my advanced age.
Better to let the kids know and avoid these "break-in-belonging" moments when they wonder, if mom isn't what she seems to be, then who am I and who can I trust to be what I see?
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If you really want to...
If you really want to, why not do it? Get yourself stitched and siliconed and sucked out if you want. But why, why, why would anyone tell their small children any details about surgery? Just say, "I had a little problem and I needed to get it fixed. It makes me feel better." Period. Honestly, kids really don't care and no, they don't need to know how mommy feels unhappy with her less-than-perfect body.
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Also primes young girls for their own eventual plastic surgery
These "educated" children will know when the time comes that if they are fat are flat-chested or big-nosed that the solution is not a diet or exercise or developing a personality in order to be loveable. These things are easily fixed by a trip to the doctor!
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Plastic surgery primer for little girls' future surgery
It's depressing that we live in a looks obsessed world, but that's how it is. I was disgusted by the mere idea that a surgeon would put something forward like this book aimed at small children and that, specifically, the child in the story is a girl. The absence of a son makes it seem like a primer for little girls getting surgery someday. Not that little girls need one...our sexist media and sexist society is a primer.
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I bet you haters are the same ones who complain about other people's soap too
I bet everything this side of the Bronze Age just irritates the shit out of you.
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My Beautiful Fembot Mommie
Women sneer that men all want Stepford wives, yet women go do this to themselves.
Inevitably they choose a generic nose from a book of barbie noses.
Who else, besides me, thinks Jennifer Gray was much more interesting with her old nose?
Do you women want to be taken SERIOUSLY, or do you want to be generically factory produced? Let me put it a better way, do you LIKE yourself and all your quirks and are willing to ride them to success? After all, it is confidence that makes one sexy.
The least confident women are those who get plastic surgery. After the surgery they wonder why a world of wonder has not opened up for them (talk about an ANTI FEMINIST THING, playing off your looks, but I digress) and they get more depressed.
Unless you have a cleft palate, the answer is CONFIDENCE, not surgery. Unless you want to be mistreated by a shallow doofus who only looks for Barbies, the answer is confidence, not surgery.
confidence, confidence, confidence, confidence.
It is what makes ALL French women beautiful.
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As for the book
Anything that promotes honest and open dialog between parents and their children is a good thing. Haven't read the book and had a hard time making out all the text in the illustration at newsweek.com....so I won't comment as to whether this book trivializes or over simplifies the issues, or even if it serves as a springboard for honest and open dialog.
The motives for men or women electing to go under the knife are not all rooted in vanity...although that motive seems to dominate the illustrations and analysis I saw/read.
Also, after reading the newsweek piece, it's unclear that the book addresses the risks involved with surgery. What happens when the reader of "My Beautiful Mommy" has to deal with unfortunate consequences of surgery that run the gamut from minor complications to death?
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It's just...
... marketing. Since noses are known to be hereditary, what could be better than to get the child ready to demand a rhinoplasty for her 18th birthday present.
And why not think about our Nose 'n' Nooky Coming of Age Jon-Benet Special with a 50% off vaginoplasty with every hooter hack-job? You know that old mommie-style vagina you inherited won't please your new millennium lover, so tighten up and get ship shape now, baby-doll!
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I wonder
how many children of parents who've gone under the scalpel are terrified that their parents will send them in "to be fixed" if their features or body aren't perfect?
After all, their Mom or Dad did go away for a day or so, and came back bashed, bruised, and from the child's point of view, no better looking than before after the bandages come off? I can see how that would be very scary for a child.
In the end, though, it's not necessary or desirable for children to be given a pretty explanation for adult behaviors. There are lots of things adults do, besides plasic surgery, that you just can't sugarcoat for a kid.
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Can you say "overreaction"?
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.