Thursday, August 09, 2007

Suicide Girls

Women who get breast implants are three times more likely to commit suicide. Of course, this would seem to fly in the face of the idea that plastic surgery ''improves self-esteem''. But does having breast implants make people more likely to kill themselves? I doubt it somehow.

(You realize, of course, that The Onion will probably run something like ''According to Local Mortician, Breast Implant Recipients 100 times More Likely to Commit Super Hot Suicides'')

Self-esteem seems like a fairly stupid goal to aim for anyway. I'm not convinced that loving yourself isn't as self-deluding and time wasting as walking around in a miasma of self-loathing.

It seems to me that life is much easier if you accept yourself as a given. Not as a problem to be fixed, nor as an endless source of romantic fascination; but just as a first principle. I find myself stuck with my own subjectivity- I must have a self to begin from to understand anything- but the older I get, the more my interests are directed outwards. I'm fascinated with history, art, my cat, my wife, and the city I live in, and a lot of other things. Currently, I have some sort of skin condition that is driving me nuts; other than that I'm not particularly self-loathing, or very interested in myself.

And whether I think that I'm a geeky, weirdo, bookworm (sounds about right), or a super intellectual academic (oh, please!), doesn't really make a lot of difference in the end. Thinking about your image of yourself is really freaking boring in the first place.

It seems to me that having radical surgery to change your body is one way of rejecting yourself as a given, and killing yourself is a fairly extreme way of rejecting your self as a given. But does one cause the other? I'd assume not. The same problems are probably behind both.

2 comments:

Holly said...

1) Breast implants aren't radical plastic surgery. Getting wings or a tail is radical plastic surgery.

2) Low self esteem does not lead directly to suicide. There are intermediary steeps. Believing that there is something--anything--in your life that can be "made right" by larger breasts, you demonstrably have difficulty making assessments and judgments. So it's not so shocking that you might go down a trail of poor assessments and judgments that concludes with, "... so if I just eat ALL the oxycontin and drink ALL the Smirnoff, all will be right in the world."

3) While I agree with and admire your dedication to the acceptance of the self as an uninteresting fact, a thing which requires the awareness of, but not necessarily action... I believe in the corporeal self as a kind of domestic animal. It gets me around, and as is the case with most animals, health is something that can be assessed visually.

When my cat is ailing, I attend to that, but also I think about what will give her the longest, healthiest life she can have, when she's not sick. Increasingly, I find myself using this attitude as a yardstick for the care & feeding of my own body. It's pretty concise (for me, anyway).

Rufus said...

1. Point taken. Maybe it should read 'unnecessary surgery', but not radical.

2. Agreed. I sort of saw the study about implants and suicide as being roughly as shocking as a study showing that drug addicts are more likely to also commit suicide. Correlation, not causation.

3. I'm not a great teaching example for care of the body, spending most of my time in dark libraries, and eating at least 80% penut butter & jam sandwiches.