there’s a very unpleasant rhetorical sleight-of-hand that happens halfway through this post. why do we go from ‘the cosmetics industry’ and ‘the tobacco industry’ to ‘gambling your savings away’ and ‘criticizing your drinking habits’? what is it about the latter two things--about gambling addicts and alcoholics--that makes this post revert to the language of personal responsibility?
this is the language which has been adopted and promoted by, e.g. the gambling industry and legislators looking to expand it in order to sanitize the fact that gambling and gambling addictions are produced by deregulation and industrial expansion.
(Rebecca Cassidy, Vicious Games: Capitalism and Gambling)
and i think this sudden shift once we reach the more socially stigmatized forms of monetized social harm is indicative of what this post’s implied stance on bodily autonomy, intentionally or not, ends up being--that once a ‘cosmetic’ procedure becomes sufficiently ‘unacceptable’ then suddenly we will find ourselves talking about the individual who is ‘acting irresponsibly’ with their body rather than the industry and the defenses of that industry this post aims to be a critique of--and as a trans woman i think we should all be allowed to act irresponsibly with our bodies for what i hope are clear reasons!
smash the beauty machine, sure, obviously! but this rhetoric around cosmetic surgery that blurs the lines between ‘individual choice’ and broad capitalistic structural incentives along a gradient of stigmatization doesn’t end at a good place.
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