Heidi Montag – typical American girl?
Anything to be famous? To be a pop star? I don’t buy it. Heidi Montag, a (previously) beautiful 23-year old reality TV star on The Hills, now “improved” by 10 cosmetic surgery procedures. 
Is this what our culture is becoming? A 23-year old who is (was?) lovely, who undergoes 10 hours of procedures including brow lift, lipo-contouring, augmentation of DDD breasts, nose job revision, chin reduction, cheek implants and more, in a single surgery?
She blithely mentions nearly dying during recovery (see the video clip). And as for her answer to what she sees when she looks in the mirror?
“I see improvement.”
Is this “improvement?”
Is this really what we want our daughters to aspire to? Is this America now? This young woman who wants to be a pop music star, who compares herself to Britney Spears and talks about engaging Michael Jackson’s producers?
Is putting the spotlight on her surgeries good, or exacerbating the problem?
And yes. I believe it is a problem. A major problem. A Hollywood trend that has spiraled far beyond any reasonable control, and trickles down into the psyches of our daughters and our sons. I would even go so far as to say the collective effect is that this hurts all women – and is no standard of beauty for anyone to covet.
A woman’s view: health and well-being
We all know there is a mind-body connection, that men and women both feel better on the inside when they believe they look good on the outside. Fine. But when we reinvent ourselves on the exterior to this extent, in the name of well-being, or a pseudo-standard of beauty, is that healthy or damaging?
- Where does it stop? How young? How much?
- Must we all undergo cosmetic surgery for a better sex life?
- To market ourselves in this youth-obsessed, fame-addicted culture?
- To look in the mirror and “like” what we see, and see what we like?
Check out the Nightline video clip, courtesy of HuffPost.
Here is one well-known cosmetic surgeon’s perspective on Heidi Montag’s procedures.
As a woman, an American woman, and as a parent, I am appalled. And alarmed. This is just the latest example, hyped by the media and begging many of the questions above. When do we stop living by the transient, the superficial – risking our lives for it, sinking all our dreams into it? Where do we draw the line?
Click image of Heidi Montag to access original and article on Huffington Post.
That girl is just batsh*t CRAZY! You gotta wonder what she’ll look like in 10-20 years. It’s sad, really. Just so sad that at 23 she has such a poor self-image. I’m sure marrying her douchebag of a husband didn’t help any.
As the mother of a 15 year old daughter, I worry about this very thing. Is my daughter viewing this as “normal?” Is she looking at herself thinking of the enhancements that could be done to her body and/or face? When I say something negative about my appearance, am I sending the wrong message to her? I am thankful that right now my daughter has good self-esteem. But as much as I can tell her she is beautiful and smart, she has to feel it from within. It’s my job, as her mother, to reinforce that beauty takes all kinds of forms, and that she is beautiful, inside and out.
If you didn’t see the fabulous Dove campaign that focused on our “daughters” – not just our “mature women” – try to find it online. It’s wonderful. It was referenced by one of the terrific bloggers I read. I cannot recall which one at this moment. (Possibly A Design so Vast.) Perhaps someone can provide that link in a comment?
I, too, worry about the message this sends. Lindsey did blog about the Dove campaign – http://www.adesignsovast.com/2009/12/best-of-2009-real-beauty/
Another wonderful resource is Mary Pipher, PhD’s book – Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls – http://www.bookrags.com/Reviving_Ophelia
This saddens me to no end. This society has become so plastic. It is all about superficiality and no longer about substance. In the music industry, it all began with the birth of MTV – all of a sudden, great musicians disappeared from the scene because they just weren’t that appealing to the eye only to be replaced by the Britney Spears’ of music. That is truly “The Day the Music Died.”
I think the post BLW refers to was indeed Lindsey at A Design So Vast as part of Gwen Bell’s Best of ’09 event. (Check her December archives.)
This is what I want to know: when people have plastic surgery like this, what do they tell the child who inherited the trait they went under a knife to get rid of?
Do all those Real Housewife bitches look at their kids and tell them it’s ok to be ugly now because they will just have surgery to fix themselves later?
Horrifying.
She is a little crazy. I read all about her surgeries in People magazine at the barber shop, and I just rolled my eyes. People didn’t exactly paint her procedures in the most flattering light.
Don’t worry. Young women like my daughter are stronger and more self-confident than you think.
Natalie, funny you should ask what we should tell the children…
“My Beautiful Mommy” http://www.newsweek.com/id/132240
Written by a plastic surgeon, of course.
“We can rebuild her…” Except she was never broken in the first place.
In Tori Spelling’s memoir (what???), she recalls a moment during her childhood, maybe middle school or younger, when she asked her mother if she was pretty. Mom’s response: “You will be, once we get your nose fixed.”
Wow.
In that People interview, Heidi Montag said there’s just one area she wants to keep working on with plastic surgery: her breasts. She wants bigger ones. How will she hold herself upright?
I’ve been thinking about this stuff a lot as I approach my big 5-0 and, like you, BLW, I’m aghast for so many reasons. Is there only one way to be pretty in our society – Scandinavian pretty? Only one figure to have – gigantic boobs and no hips? Only one brain size – small? Number of wrinkles – zero?
And I know a lot of people feel a-okay about this, but I do think that it’s a little weird that we’re okay with injecting ourselves with the BOTULISM bacteria in our quest to remove wrinkles from our foreheads. Okay then.
Aghast. Perfect word.
Here’s another. France.
I don’t really care if people get plastic surgery because it’s their lives to screw up if that’s what they want. Sometimes these things are for the better (medical reasons and extreme cosmetic issues) but usually it’s just an attempt to hang on to youth for a few more ticks. Youth is good, but age is too if seen from a different perspective. Problem is that people don’t value wisdom, they value ignorant youth. Of course, the perfect combination would be a beauty who is also wise. It’s more valuable to work on wisdom than it is beauty, but alas. What can we do to stop it? Nothing, because like so many other destructive behaviors, it’s only themselves that they’re hurting.
Thanks for joining the conversation, Keith. I would go so far as to submit that there is collective damage. To society. To our future daughters. To all of us. But I couldn’t agree more that we have lost sight of the value of wisdom. And its beauty.
In the past few years we have noticed a growing trend in the number of cosmetic surgery procedures that are being performed on a yearly basis. We can say that every single year we see more operations done and one factor that needs to be discussed stands in teens and cosmetic surgery popularity. This is because we have noticed that more teenagers are looking towards body modifications. Whether or not this is moral it is not something that we need to discuss but there is an impact in both our bodies and mind that has to be talked about.