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.