I’m very pleased to be speaking here today on this historic occasion.

It has been customary for the west to bemoan and critique the appalling forms of violence practiced against girls and women in the rest of the world – FGM, rape as a tactic of war, forced marriage.

In this focus what has been overlooked have been the vicious body practices that girls and women have come to take on themselves in the west in the mistaken belief that they are doing good for themselves.

These include:

Self-starvation and the often bulimic response–compulsive eating and vomiting.
The surgical transformation of breasts, legs, stomachs, cheek bones to conform to the latest beauty ideal
The use of diet and pharmaceutical products to suppress appetite
The botoxing of 5 year olds
The west congratulates itself on its distance from Eastern practices of foot binding which constrained and limited women. It fails to see the links between toe operations carried out now to enable women to fit into the latest 4 inch high heels.

The west smugly criticises FGM while sanctioning labiaplasty and the remaking of the genital lips which has become a growth area for cosmetic surgeons. Read more>

Dr Michael Carr-Gregg and MTR discuss on Sunrise

A UK survey, commissioned by UK charity YWCA Central, has found half of all girls and a third of boys are obsessed with body image.

According to a report in the Daily Mail this week, children are willing to take extreme measures to get a perfect body or reach an ideal weight. The survey of 810 children aged 11 to 16 found a majority compared their bodies to what they saw on TV. A quarter were willing to have cosmetic surgery.

Rosi Prescott, chief executive of Central YMCA, said: ‘Young people appear to be increasingly insecure about their appearance and body image.

‘There is a growing trend to resort to quick fixes, which are damaging to health and often unfulfilling.

‘It is also interesting that what used to be seen as a problem affecting young girls has now spread to young men.

‘The root cause of this problem is the pressure on young people to conform to an unattainable and unrealistic body image ideal.’

A UK Parliamentary inquiry into the issue opened yesterday in the UK.

When are we going to see some real action on the issue in Australia?

Adolescent psychologist Dr Michael Carr-Gregg and I were asked our thoughts on Channel 7’s Sunrise program this morning.

Two young women dead thanks to the fetishisation of female body parts 

British woman Claudia Aderotimi was only 20 when she died last week after travelling to the US for a procedure to give her a bigger ‘booty’. She paid more than £1000 ($1600 AUD) for silicone injections to give her the look she thought would help score a part in music video clips. She’d auditioned before, and failed.

The practitioner used industrial silicone. Think sealant designed for plumbing kitchens and bathrooms. This noxious substance was injected into a vein, in error.

Claudia Aderotimi flew to Philadelphia for a cut-rate bottom enhancement in a hotel near the airport in an effort to conform to pornified ideals of women’s backsides, increasingly featured in music video clips.

The silicone injection was apparently a ‘top-up’ to a procedure carried out last November. It was arranged online and performed by a practitioner believe to be lacking qualifications.

Last Monday she developed chest pains and was taken to hospital where she died 24 hours later from a suspected a blood clot in the lung believe to be caused by the silicone entering her bloodstream.

It’s not the first time women have been harmed from the use of cheap industrial silicone. Here’s a report about how other women were made gravely ill as a result.

Susannah Frankel observes that we fetishise the female form and then condemn the wish to improve it. She writes:

Of course, anyone with more than a passing interest in body image will know that the roundness of rump that Aderotimi aspired to is no more easily achievable than the ideal of extreme slenderness that is still more widely upheld by the media – unless, of course, one is born in possession of either. Times may be changing – it is reported that buttock implants are almost as much in demand as breast augmentation – but the emotional impulse that lies beneath the desire to change one’s body in any shape or form remains the same. And so, after years of women the world over wondering “does my bum look big in this?”, will they now be asking: “Does it look big enough?” And if anyone were ever likely to miss the cruel irony that lies at the heart of this, then Aderotimi’s story has driven it home.

But some women shouldn’t have bums at all

But of course it has to be the right kind of ‘big’ – not the ‘wrong’ kind used by the weight-loss industry to shame women into buying its products. Have a look at this add (left) seen in a Melbourne shopping mall last week (thank to Catherine Manning for forwarding).

“No hips or butts”

Apparently OptiSlim’s meal replacements will magically transform the woman on the left into the woman on the right and give her that nice, tight, pert, rounded backside so necessary to be an acceptable woman and to complete and utter happiness in life.

While OptiSlim doesn’t involve knives or needles,  the female body is still broken down into problematic parts (hips, butts) which need to be transformed.

Carolin dead after sixth breast enlargement: male fans pay tribute – to her breasts.

Claudia’s death came after another woman of similar age also had her life cut short while trying to super-size her breasts. German porn actress Carolin Berger, better known as ‘Sexy Cora’, dead at 23.

Carolin Berger, who weighed a mere 46 kilos,  wanted to fill a size 34G cup. During the operation by two US surgeons (do these people ever say no?) she suffered a brain hemorrhage and was put into an induced coma where she lay for nine days before dying. Sky News reported:

She went under the knife for the last time at the Alster Clinic and was having 800g (28oz) of silicon injected into each breast. But her heart stopped beating during the operation. She suffered brain damage and was put into an induced coma. Cora’s husband Tim Wosnitza remarked, “The doctors told me that she wouldn’t make it. The brain damage was too big.”

The writer at this site described the dead woman as greedy.

The stand-out feature of her death was not the actions of the doctors whose negligence during the attempt to turn her into a human freak show allegedly killed her. It was the emphasis on her breasts.

Here’s how our own News.com reported it

“Busty Big Brother porn star dies after breast op: A BUSTY Big Brother star who got viewers in a lather when she soaped up other housemates’ boobs has died after a breast enlargement op went wrong.”

The author of a piece titled ‘No Immunity in Death for sexual objectification’  on the blog ‘Against all Evidence’, writes powerfully about media and porn consumers representations of Carolin.

Basically every mainstream headline about her death involves the words ‘porn star’ or ‘sexy’, and few use her non-porn-industry name. A couple examples: “‘Sexy Cora’ Dead: Porn Star Dies After Sixth Breast Operation” . . . “Porn Star Dead After Breast Surgery”

She cites a post on a forum eulogising ‘Sexy Cora’ for dying in the line of duty:

She’s a hero. She died doing something awesome to an extent that most people wouldn’t dream of. She’s like a cop that died saving a bus full of babies and puppies by pushing it through the wall of a burning building.

 Her death is a tragedy because it lessens the pool of new pornographic images of women with grotesque silicone mounds where there natural breasts once were, for men like him to enjoy.

Jill, writing here, extrapolates:

 Porn stars are not human beings, they are a brand of consumer sex receptacle. Thus are the dimensions of Berger’s breasts, both pre- and post-op, more germane to the announcement of her death than, apparently, the detail… that her surgeon-butchers are now up on negligent homicide charges. To find out about that, you have to go to CBS News’ lurid true crime website, where Berger’s humanity is of little importance compared to her value as a sensationalized dead TV slut. If you doubt this, you have only to observe the 38-page wealth of “Sexy Cora” images available in a CBS online photo gallery, and compare it to the amount of CBS discourse relating to Berger as a human person (barely any), or to the instances of broader CBS discussion of the murderous effects of institutionalized misogyny on the quest for human enlightenment (zilch-o).

She says Carolin died because of “rigorous adherence to deeply internalized pornographic beauty standards.”

Claudia and Carolin were real women whose lives were needlessly sacrificied in pursuit of a goal inspired by pornographic fantasises about what constitues a sexy woman. But all women and girls are harmed by the message that they are in need of repair, a message becoming so loud that in the end they think of their whole bodies as deformed and in need to correction.

 See also: When the price of cosmetic surgery is death, MTR blog.

                 97 percent of women will be cruel to their bodies today, Glamour.com.

The latest category of women targeted for cutting

“Your quest to be the perfect bride has ended. Your wedding will still go on, it just won’t be perfect”.

In the latest in a long-line degrading reality shows which both generate then prey on female insecurity comes Bridalplasty, billed as “The only reality show where the winner gets cut!”

Fodder for the expansion of the global cosmetic surgery, 12 bridal contestants compete in wedding-related challenges to win cosmetic surgery, so they can have the ‘perfect wedding’.

This gut-churning exercise is further evidence for the case that the cause of women is rapidly moving – in a backwards direction.

The show is screening on “E!” TV. Liz, writing for Feministing this week, has watched the show. Here’s what she reports:

Brides to be…are living in a house together and competing in wedding related challenges (dress, food etc) to win plastic surgery. Each woman has a list of surgeries and each time she wins a challenge, or is the “top bride”, she gets some work done. At the end of each week the three women who scored the lowest on the challenge are summoned to an RSVP ceremony where one of them, the “bottom bride”, is voted off. Eventually there will be one “top bride” who will have received all the surgeries on her list, and wins prizes/money design her dream wedding.

The set is a decked out banquet hall, as though it were actually someone’s wedding. Each of the 3 “bottom brides” sit at their own table, and the other brides stand across the dance floor from them. The hostess calls each bride forward and she must cross the dance floor and chose which table she will sit at. The “bottom bride” is the one with the least amount of people at her table, and is then sent home, with these parting words: “Your quest to be the perfect bride has ended. Your wedding will still go on, it just won’t be perfect”.

Bottom bride, you are a loser. You have lost the popularity contest, your cake-making skills (so essential to a happy marriage) suck, and your wedding can never be perfect. Because you don’t make the cut (literally).

Isn’t it ironic that a so-called ‘reality show’ is actually centered on how to get rid of reality by employing knives, breast implants, botox, veneers and fat suctioning devices?

What pressure on women. What ugly competitiveness. What a view of how to launch a life-long partnership.

The groom doesn’t get to see his re-made (artificial) bride until the wedding day. What if he preferred her how she was when he proposed? What if PlasticBarbieBride isn’t quite the look he was after?

And what of the woman who perhaps had considered getting one procedure done, but with the combination of peer pressure – and being persuaded she should to ‘cash in’ on all the free surgery on offer – ends up getting a lot more done than she’d originally planned? It’s not hard to imagine this happening.

You can watch a pitch for the show here (‘Bridalplasty: a fight for perfection’) and extracts here.

I appeared on Channel 7’s Morning Show recently on the issue – along with a cosmetic surgeon and his post operative bridal patient. You can watch it here.

Or leave you permanently disfigured

“It’s an industry that has developed in health care which has nothing to do with health care” – Prof Merrilyn Walton

If you didn’t see 60 Minutes segment ‘The Beauty Trap’ on Sunday night, here it is:

The program tells the tragic story of Lauren James, who died three years ago at the age of 26 following an $8000 liposuction procedure on her thighs in a Melbourne clinic. We hear from her bereft parents and boyfriend.

It also tells the story of Kerry who suffered life-long disfigurement as a result of undergoing a breast lift as part of a $25,000 “Mum’s Makeover”, also in Melbourne. Kerry bravely tells her story and shows the extent of the mutilation of both her breasts. This extract from the transcript:

KERRY MULLINS: I was in there for three months, and each and every other day they’d take me down to theatre and so I had 22 operations all up, and every second day they would cut it away, cut it away, cut it away until it was just a big hole in my chest.

TARA BROWN: How were you coping, mentally?

KERRY MULLINS: Um, all I kept thinking was I just want to live. There was a couple of times I didn’t want to wake up, but I was in so much pain and I did looked so disfigured that I didn’t want to wake up…

KERRY MULLINS: That is my right breast, and that is my left breast and they are the scars I’m left with.

TARA BROWN: This is not easy for you, is it?

KERRY MULLINS: No, it isn’t, it isn’t, but I just want women to be aware that is they’re going to consider having plastic surgery that they look and have a look at me and see what the outcome can be, and this is what you can end up looking like.

TARA BROWN: How do you feel about your body today?

KERRY MULLINS: Um, like a freak. I’m disgusted. Even when I wash myself, I feel disgusted that I even have to even wash that area and touch that area.

TARA BROWN: Do you think you’ll ever lose that feeling?

KERRY MULLINS: No, never, never ever.

Professor Merrilyn Walton, who has investigated Australia’s cosmetic surgery industry in Australia, says it is “an industry that has developed in health care that has nothing to do with health care.” She also says Australia’s industry is less regulated than elsewhere.

It is time the industry was made accountable for preying on women, enticing them with false promises and playing down the risks. There should be a major overhaul of the industry with tighter regulation and accountability.