To instead refer to cosmetic procedures as harmless, personal, feel-good choices is much easier. It obscures the long-term, population-wide implications of investing, one by one, in a world that confers power to those who assimilate to an ageist, sexist, classist, and racist value system, while continuing to punish those who don’t. It may be nice to ease the burden of shame endured by individuals living under those conditions, but it’s irresponsible to suggest procedures will do anything but deepen those conditions for everyone else.
Despite Jonas’s valiant efforts, only 6% of cosmetic procedures are performed on men. In 2019, a RealSelf study found that one in four American women were considering getting work done. That statistic is very likely an underestimation now. Per The Aesthetic Society’s annual study, “surgical procedures increased 54% and non-surgical procedures were up 44%” in 2021. Many chalked this up to a “Zoom boom”—i.e. women hating how they looked on video calls in lockdown. But it’s hard to parse that from other changing tides, like the fact that the normalizing of cosmetic procedures over the past few years has also served as a defacto form of marketing for them. Based on current growth patterns, The Economist reckons that “the global sales of non-invasive aesthetic treatments, currently around $60bn, could more than triple by 2030.”
In Marxism, reification refers to “the process by which social relations are perceived as inherent attributes of the people involved in them.” To suggest cosmetic procedures are merely another type of grooming choice is to ignore, among other things, that they’re marketed towards various underclasses as a solution to their experience of oppression. It’s to reify inadequacy as the inevitable condition of being a woman, or being trans, or existing otherwise outside hegemonic power structures. It’s not quite the act of solidarity it purports to be. As a progressive ethic, it’s half-baked.
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