Surgical Enhancements (1998)
Originally published in pugzine.com (now defunct)
“The body is obsolete,” the French multimedia artist Orlan is fond of saying. To paraphrase Orlan somewhat (she is, after all, repeating a statement of her friend and fellow artist Stelarc), the aging female body has been obsolete for quite a while. Think about it: how many women “of a certain age” from Hollywood and the media have not been surgically enhanced? While feminists such as Naomi Wolf have railed against the entire beauty industry, which includes cosmetic surgery, others, most notably, Cindy Jackson have decided not only to have multiple and radical cosmetic surgical procedures to seek beauty, but to go public about them. In so doing, Jackson, like Orlan, has attempted to demystify cosmetic surgery as a secret, elitist enterprise.
Interestingly enough, Orlan and Jackson both started to alter their bodies surgically in 1990, the same year cyberpunk novelist William Gibson published Neuromancer, which depicts a future world where cosmetic surgery will be not only affordable but pretty much socially compulsory. The similarities end there. Orlan has had nine surgeries thus far in attempt to create a composite autoportrait with different facial features inspired by various famous images of Western art (i.e., the forehead by the Mona Lisa, the nose by Botticelli’s Venus, etc.). Jackson, meanwhile, has had close to thirty surgical procedures in order to achieve what she claims is the Western ideal of beauty, a living approximation of a doll called Barbie. In case the name Cindy Jackson fails to ring a bell, she is perhaps better known as the woman who would be Barbie — you know, that woman who keeps appearing on 20/20 and all the talk shows.
Orlan and Jackson have never met. Although Orlan has expressed to me that she is open to the idea, Jackson has told me otherwise. She doesn’t understand why she is constantly being compared to Orlan, as she believes she has nothing in common with the artist. In her view, while she has had much more radical surgery (including having her jaw sawed off, slid back, and reattached with titanium bolts), her appearance conforms with society’s ideals — unlike Orlan’s unnatural, space-age looks (Orlan has had cheek implants inserted at her temples, which gives her noticeable bumps as if she were sprouting antennas or horns). So why am I making yet another comparison between Jackson and Orlan? I am doing so for two reasons: First, because I have had the opportunity to meet and to get to know both women before having some cosmetic surgery of my own and second, because while I may have had what is considered cosmetic surgery, my surgery was unplanned and performed under very different conditions. Indeed, I had cosmetic surgery not for the sake of art nor for beauty; rather, I had cosmetic surgery because I had cancer. Not surprisingly, my own experience with cosmetic surgery has given me new perspectives on Orlan and Jackson that I did not initially anticipate.
I met Orlan first. In April 1994 I was invited to be on the same panel as Orlan for an art symposium in Atlanta. Afterwards, Orlan invited me to come visit her if I was ever in Paris. Little did she know that I would take her up on her offer a few months later when I went to the City of Lights to do research for my doctoral dissertation on women’s medical performances. Orlan graciously invited me to her home in the outskirts of Paris and let me examine her “archives” while she and her husband went out to the movies. Orlan returned to find me poring over books with her cat on my lap. Orlan was impressed that I managed to befriend her rather antisocial feline. Some time later our budding friendship was potentially threatened when one of the slides Orlan lent me was ruined by the photolab when I tried to make some prints. Orlan was understandably annoyed, yet remained quite generous with her time and suggestions. I left Paris that summer with an extra chapter to my dissertation.
Where ever Orlan goes, it seems, controversy follows. More often than not, that controversy is the result of misunderstandings and sensationalism — and not only from the media. Orlan’s appearance at an academic conference in March 1995 generated a great deal of debate and hostility, especially among graduate students who felt that her presence was overshadowing everyone else’s but particularly their own. Later that evening the conference organizers hosted a cabaret at a local trendy club in New York City. The club was packed, and I pleaded with the organizers to let Orlan in. We were both whisked inside, to the rage of those left standing outside. The following week on an online electronic discussion group Orlan was accused by a discussant of acting like a star, and the two of us were accused of pushing people while on line at the club. I happened to subscribe to the list, and read the postings in disbelief. I suddenly found myself in the uncomfortable position of having to defend both our reputations. I responded to the allegations directly, albeit hastily and, according to some of my online critics, aggressively. For the next three days the electronic discussion was extremely heated and unpleasant; yet, paradoxically, it became instantly “legendary” as it sometimes happens with “flame wars,” and excerpts of numerous postings were later published in an academic journal.
A few months after the conference and the subsequent controversies surrounding Orlan and myself, I happened to meet Cindy Jackson. A mutual friend of ours told her about my research when she came to Atlanta for a visit. She called me and we arranged an interview at a cafe in a bookstore where I attended a weekly philosophy seminar. I don’t think either of us anticipated what we saw. I didn’t see Barbie, but someone who strongly resembled Christie Brinkley. Someone who looked really good but evidently well groomed and taken care of. Heavily made up and well coiffed, Jackson looked in her early thirties — no where near forty, which is what she was at the time. She did have an other worldly appearance in the sense that she didn’t quite look real. She looked a bit plastic. On her end, she, I think was expecting someone who looked like a troll (her image of women writers) — not a tan, fit, twenty-nine year-old wearing a revealing summer outfit.
Jackson and I hit it off — she was like the big friendly sister I never had (as opposed to Orlan being the monstrous mother). She accompanied me to the philosophy seminar. The week’s reading was Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History, and the instructor — a friend of mine who was warned beforehand — introduced Jackson to the class (which was mostly comprised of lawyers, engineers, architects, and other professionals) as the type of individual we find at the end of history — in other words, as a completely self-determined individual. Naturally, Jackson, who never forgets to tell people that she is a member of Mensa, was flattered. Many of us went to dinner afterwards at a trendy Japanese restaurant. There, she bonded with my friend who told her all about the anti-aging properties of fasting and colonics. Such topics, while perhaps not being exactly appropriate for dinner conversation, fascinated Jackson, who did tell me during the interview that when she no longer can have cosmetic surgery to prevent looking old she plans to commit suicide.
Jackson invited me the following week to take her out and show her the town. The invitation posed an immediate dilemma for me: I knew virtually nothing about Atlanta’s nightlife (I had been in graduate school too long). I called on another friend, and he obliged us both by taking us to an Atlanta hotspot. There, one could see local celebrities intermingle with off-duty strippers, who seemed, incidentally, to enjoy quite a lot of male attention. Nonetheless, I daresay none of the homegrown, scantily-clad beauties were approached as much as the chic yet elegant Jackson. During our interview, Jackson made comments about how men are constantly approaching her. I smiled, nodded my head, and thought she was exaggerating. That night I never felt so ugly in my entire life as I witnessed man after man coming up to Jackson and telling her that she was the most beautiful woman he ever saw. Granted the bar was dark and smoky, but not a single man even glanced at me as I was sitting at Jackson’s side. It was a humbling experience for me to say the least. I saw a confident Yuppie visibly shake as he gave her his card. I saw a cocky rapper bedecked with gold jewelry go completely gaga over her. It was then and there that I became a believer in Cindy Jackson.
My dissertation committee poo-pooed the idea of including Jackson in my dissertation although I did mention her briefly in the conclusion. We talked regularly on the phone after that. I was the second person to call her — after her sister — when she appeared on 20/20 for the first time in November 1995. Cindy sent me a video about herself, entitled, The Making of Cindy Jackson, in the fall of 1996. In November I proposed a paper about the video for an academic conference that was to be held the following March. My writing was progressing — albeit slowly — until I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer in January 1997. I woke up from the cancer surgery to be informed by the surgeon and chief resident that they decided to do cosmetic surgery instead of stapling my neck back together because I was young and unmarried. I also found out then that the chief resident and not the surgeon had done most of the work. So not only did I miss out on many of the rituals involved in having cosmetic surgery, such as choosing one’s surgeon, but I bypassed the whole decision process of whether or not to have surgery and what I should have done. To tell the truth, after having had listened so extensively to both Orlan and Jackson’s detailed descriptions of the difficult and sometimes agonizing decisions they faced and made, I felt downright cheated since all of the major decisions — including the decision to have cosmetic surgery — were made for me without any options given.
What began as academic research suddenly, unexpectantly became an integral part of who I am. Before I was diagnosed with cancer my personal life took a backseat to my intellectual work even though my research on cosmetic surgery did have limits: I had neither the inclination nor the financial resources to consider having any cosmetic surgery of my own. Cancer changed all that. By having cosmetic surgery (paid by my health insurance no less because it was for medical reasons), the boundaries between my research and my “real life” collapsed. Incredibly, the greatest insights I learned about cosmetic surgery did not come from reading a text or conducting an interview, but with my own unsettling attempts to get used to my changed body. For example, a month after my surgery, I learned that cosmetic surgery for cancer patients is not the same for normal healthy people, and that cancer patients are not to expect the same high caliber of results. Instead, we are to be eternally grateful for our surgeons for saving our lives. Believe me, I am. But I did not expect his reaction when, during the post-op check-up I joked, “Well, everyone has been complimenting how nice my scar is but I wouldn’t say it was exactly sexy,” my otherwise jovial surgeon suddenly snapped, “That wasn’t the idea.” In other words, what is considered cosmetic surgery for cancer patients is that which doesn’t deform an individual; the goal of cosmetic surgery for cancer patients is normalcy, not necessarily beauty. Thus while I can say that yes, I had cosmetic surgery, I cannot say that I had the cosmetic surgery experience as most people understand it, and as Orlan and Jackson talk about it. I may have had cosmetic surgery, but I experienced it as just another mystery in the myriad of mysteries regarding cancer.
My cancer experience put me out of touch with both Orlan and Jackson, but brought me to Arizona, where I have recovered much more quickly than my doctors originally predicted. I can now daily observe numerous surgically enhanced women just by going to the local gym. I see women around thirty with breast implants and sun ravaged skin. I have watched some occasionally having to rearrange their displaced breasts after doing pushups in aerobics class. To my constant amazement they do it publicly without any sense of shame.
I also frequently see older women in their mid-fifties with really tight faces and impossibly perky bosoms that defy gravity even when the rest of their bodies sag. As I put in my time on the stairmaster I think about these women. I berate myself constantly for lacking the courage to ask them about their experiences with cosmetic surgery. I wonder if that is how women of a certain age in Hollywood look like away from the cameras. I wonder if Jackson will look similarly in her fifties. Sometimes, I almost envy these women, because I presume that they did not live with the risks of cancer when they went under the knife. They were just dissatisfied with their looks, and took steps to remedy their situations. For me, cosmetic surgery wasn’t a choice. But I wonder if it ever could be in the future. I wonder too if I could even have cosmetic surgery should I ever want it because of all the cancer that was once in my neck and underneath my chin.
Then again, I cannot imagine myself ever undergoing the surgical process willingly again. Undergoing pre-op was too terrifying to recall completely: thus whenever I now watch videos of Orlan being calm, directing and reading from texts immediately prior to her surgeries I am absolutely amazed. How did she do it (again and again)? And now when I view video clips of Jackson smiling as she is being wheeled to the operating room I cannot help but be irritated over the fact that she is smiling. How on earth can she be smiling? Why does she look so happy when she is about to have surgery? All I can remember about pre-op is that I cried silently until I was given sedatives. After that, everything suddenly becomes a big blur.
The terrors of post-op were even worse: it took me a long time to recover not so much from the trauma and pain of being cut and opened up, but from six hours worth of anesthesia. I could not think. I could not write. Quite frankly, for months afterwards I feared that I would never be able to think or write again (One year later, this essay is my first attempt to write again). But it could have been much, much worse and I know it. So, I often end up marveling over the fact that I survived the entire cancer ordeal relatively unscathed (Without a thyroid, I will battle against sluggishness and weight gain for the rest of my life but that’s another story.) while others have died just from the allergic reactions from anesthesia, a risk that many cosmetic surgery advocates take perhaps a little too lightly.
Thinking about all the negatives associated with having cosmetic surgery certainly makes time go faster while on the stairmaster. But despite my ambivalent sentiments towards cosmetic surgery I do feel a great deal of sympathy towards the obviously surgically enhanced women at the gym because they are the constant brunt of jokes among the men there. It is not uncommon to overhear a bunch of wise guys joke about the enormous sizes of some of the women’s breasts. In fact, it is difficult to avoid not hearing these inappropriate remarks because so many guys will make rude comments so frequently. I have found myself on more than one occasion telling one or more of these jerks to shut up. If I can hear these cracks, I am quite certain that the implanted women hear them too. Unlike me, however, these women just refuse to acknowledge that they hear anything. From a bystander’s point of view, their non-recognitions are amazing performances. In a sense, their behavior can be compared to the Emperor’s in the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale, “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” At the end of the tale the Emperor walks in a procession wearing his new clothes, i.e., is naked. The public, seeing his nakedness, is afraid to comment. Only a little boy tells it as he sees it: the Emperor is stark naked. The women at the gym, like the Emperor, walk past their immature male detractors who expose their open secrets with their chins up and chests out, staring straight ahead. With such self-composure, they succeed in displaying to the world the full extent of the power they experience from the facticity of their surgically enhanced bodies, which, in their minds at least, is clearly beyond reproach.
