Also, I’m pretty uncomfortable all around with celebrity worship. I don’t think that there would necessarily be anything wrong in admiring a woman’s beauty, in so far as people say “oh, I want to know how to do that hairstyle” or “I really like her fashion style” and copying those things. But when we get into surgery and pressure towards weight loss, and basically anything that tells women (a) they don’t look fine as they are and (b) not being “pretty” is the end of the world, well, I’ve got a problem with that no matter who women and girls are trying to look like. Which again brings me back to promoting wider and more fluid notions of beauty :)

As to the point about eye surgery being more drastic than breast implants, I agree only so far as Hollywood-driven aesthetic hegemony is just not good for societies all over the world. But once the eye surgery is done, it’s done. Breast implants, however, opens up a whole new can of worms in terms of women’s health and family impact. Here in the US, implants, replacement implants, biannual MRI monitoring, and treatment for complications (very likely) are NOT covered by insurance, so we’re talking about financial costs that could and actually have pushed many a family to insolvency.

I never thought about complementing a woman about her “exotic” appearance as being reinforcing of the white baseline; maybe it is my own ignorance. In Japan, people conceive of other skin colors like black or white as being “exotic.” I think the term does not necessarily mean exotic in relation to white culture, but rather in relation to whatever culture that person originates from. Still, the operations you mentioned are most definitely a product of white culture.

I also think that surgeries are becoming more extreme and invasive. I mean, purposely breaking someone’s nose and putting it back together is envasive enough. So is cutting open a woman’s breasts and inserting saline poches. But for some reason, eye surgery strikes me as more extreme, and certainly so do the leg surgeries, and the genital surgeries just scare the crap out of me.

You also bring to mind an important and daunting point — how the hell do we fight this kind of plastic surgery if we haven’t effectively fought things like compulsive hair straightening? And how do we fight things like compulsive hair straightening, when other such extreme measures are becoming normal?