Debate: Plastic Surgery

By Glenn and Jake

You can’t go to a divorcees home without hearing her complain about her ex-husband’s new young girlfriend with the “fake tits.” These artificial breasts in which she refers is an example of plastic surgery. Plastic surgery is a controversial appearance altering procedure. It has come under fire for being vanity driven, but it is not always. The real question: is plastic surgery a necessary surgery for the ugly, merely to be used in extreme cases or never to be used?


Glenn: Growing up in California I was exposed to plastic surgery from an early age. When we were in junior high we’d cruise the sunset strip to see if things were actually like our favorite books Bright Lights, Big City and Less than Zero described. They weren’t, exactly, but the prevalence of plastic surgery scarred us for life, pun intended. It is for this reason that I stand firmly against plastic surgery with the exception of horrific accidents and incest. People who just want a better nose, cloaca or butt need to figure out other ways to improve their self worth besides having a third rate doctor cut them open. I’ve seen Nip/Tuck. It scares my children and so does Joan Rivers’s face!


Jake: Plastic surgery is the one saving grace in the disastrous melodrama we call human existence. I have gawked at my fair share of ugly people, and either they take care of their horrific looks or I am apt to go to the optometrist and have him remove my eyeballs. This big blue piece of shit floating in space that we call “home” is bad enough without a bunch of uggos taking up residence, reading their Entertainment Weekly magazines and drinking their McCafe’s--there is terrorism, a perpetual orgiastic war, taxation without representation, female, and to a lesser extent, male circumcision, oil spills, deforestation and an endless barrage of diarrhetic remakes being shit upon us by film producers working in the city of Hollywood, CA. The least we can do is to improve our looks by any means necessary to distract us from our true inner ugliness and the resulting actions. Nobody gets upset when a botanist tinkers with the genetics of a rose in order to make it smell as sweet as a name, but once one becomes a doctor and changes a pair of Bs to Cs, then it is somehow controversial. We are, and always have been, living in a dystopia. I know this debate is not about suicide, but that will be the end result.


Glenn: I agree with you that our civilization is doomed. If we make it five more years - to my 50th birthday - I will be shocked. However, I don’t think plastic surgery is the magical elixir that will overthrow our failed global capitalistic system; it is actually a symptom of its immorality. Allah has created you, me and the people we love in his own image. If we are to change ourselves in order to become more “beautiful” we are actually blaspheming him. I have performed extensive body modification (for BME and for other organizations) but that is to be part of a subculture - a sense of belonging we all need as we struggle through the emptiness of our existence. Cosmetic plastic surgery is not a cure for that emptiness but rather a symptom of it.


Jake: Nobody is saying that plastic surgery is going to overthrow anything (besides copious globs of semen), it will merely make our short remaining time on the asshole of the universe more pleasant. The powers that be have tried to reprogram us to believe that looks do not matter via television programs and films full of beautiful people. The reason they are trying to change our minds on this is because looks really do matter. Do you want to copulate with a victim of agent orange? No, of course you don’t. You want to “make it” with Elizabeth Shue or Audrey Hepburn. Attractive people typically have better jobs than the terminally unattractive. It is just a fact, Jack. Plastic surgery will not solve all of the worlds problems, and I’m not trying to say that it will. It will solve one problem: the problem of gaggles of ugly people walking the street like the living dead.


Glenn: I understand the impulse now and I understood it even more before I finally grew my second ear. Walking around as a teenager with one ear I felt like a freak and couldn’t hear half of the insults thrown at me by my friends and family. But I waited and prayed until Allah blessed me with another ear. I knew he would because he is wonderful but even if he hadn’t I would have been okay. Freaks and ugly people can exist and thrive in today’s society. Just look at Texas Governor Rick Perry or the tallest man to ever live Robert Wadlow. Both are held up as heroes: one by the moronic American right and the other by everyone who dreams of being taller than they now are. But if you were to have wooden sticks surgically implanted to extend your shins this would be unnatural and a blasphemy against the same god who blessed you with so many other gifts, such as your quickly regenerating epidermis and ability to count to one million without pausing.


Jake: So your main position in this debate has come to be that plastic surgery is against “God’s law?” God’s law, as we all know, is only in effect in Heaven and not on Earth. You can get saline added to your tits, inject botox into your face and get butt fat injected into any body part you desire, but you cannot do any of that to your soul. Souls is what your lord cares about, if, in fact, your lord were real and not a product of a delusional, schizophrenic state. If the ugly do not get plastic surgery their best option for sexual pleasure is those of us who have an ugly fetish. Yet, these uglies can simply get some hot goop applied to their face by a skilled surgeon and become, at the worst, moderately attractive. Let us not deny sexual pleasure to anybody. The only hesitation I have toward plastic surgery is that criminals can use it to evade authorities, ala Arsenic and Old Lace. Yet, this one rare circumstance should not stand in our way of letting the general, ugly public alter their appearance. If the ugly duckling would have had some minor plastic surgery, then the story would have been called “The Beautiful Duckling who Grew to be a More Beautiful Swan.”