Beauty Junkies: Inside Our $15 Billion Obsession with Cosmetic Surgery by Alex Kuczynski (Doubleday, 304 pages)
Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping by Judith Levine (Free Press, 288 pages)
"You have got to be kidding me," Alex Kuczynski's mother says with a "look of disdain" when Kuczynski suggests she get pulsed light-laser therapy and some cosmetic surgery for her nose. I can see where the woman is coming from. I found myself thinking the same thing throughout Kuczynski's new genre-defying book, Beauty Junkies: Inside Our $15 Billion Obsession with Cosmetic Surgery. By turns a faux-recovery memoir, a pseudo-exposé, a cautionary tale, and a cry for help, Beauty Junkies reveals the secular circle of hell that is the cosmetic surgery world. It's full of shady characters such as money-hungry doctors, quid-pro-quo journalists, and lethal medical imposters. But it's dominated by pathetically insecure women in denial.
Kuczynski, a reporter for the New York Times Styles section, is unabashedly one of them, and would no doubt consider my raised and quizzical eyebrow a curiosity. Firstly, because the full use of facial muscles in her insular Botox bubble is atypical. And secondly, because she considers such disapproval behind the times. But Kuczynski's inability to furrow her brow is fitting -- her prose lacks a serious level of skepticism. She expects readers to marvel at her terminal declaration that by the time Beauty Junkies is published, she will have gone for an entire year without a shot of Botox or collagen.
In years past, she had indulged in liposuction despite reporting that women have suffered potentially fatal complications from it. She could not resist a shot of Restylane to her upper lip in between a friend's funeral and a memorial service at a restaurant. (Her lip got so swollen from the Restylane that she ended up having to skip the restaurant.) Isn't her "junkie" habit a conflict of interest? While vanity may be an asset in some occupations, it's a liability to reporters, who as a rule should accept nothing at face value.
Her lack of critical distance has so warped her judgment that she audaciously wrote this little gem: "Cosmetic surgery is the new feminism, an activism of aesthetics." Sadly, Kuczynski is not making some absurdist joke. It's a "terrifying" thought, she says, but we live in a "terrifying world." It is just this kind of superficial sensibility that betrays her own beliefs. She has clearly bought into the idea that a person can divine a woman's morality from her physiognomy. "Admitting you've had the latest wrinkle filler is no longer a mark of shame; on the contrary, it is a status symbol in the mind of the twenty-first century consumer who believes that self-maintenance" is a "deeply moral obligation."
It makes sense that Kuczynski would link women's insatiable acquisition of cosmetic surgery to competitive consumerism; it is an expertise she has cultivated as the "Critical Shopper" columnist at the Times. But while she is able to make the connection, she barely scratches its surface. Such an abiding interest in shopping has left Kuczynski unskilled at asking such broader questions of how voracious consumption wreaks havoc on these women's independence from men and their personal bank accounts.
By contrast, Judith Levine asks how consumerism takes a toll not just on bank accounts, but on the environment and on the wages of foreign workers in Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping, which will be out in paperback in the spring. For one year, Levine and her partner lived minimally, buying only the essentials for sustenance, health and business. She had strict, somewhat arbitrary rules that she stuck to for the most part. She had to buy food but did not allow herself to go to a restaurant. She could buy work-related books unavailable at the library but not go to the movies.
Levine came up with the idea for her social experiment during the Christmas season of 2003. She had maxed out her credit card and questioned the national pastime that promised national security, family, friendship and spirituality. A few months into the experiment, she pays off her $7,000 credit card bill, yet remains ambivalent. She comes to recognize that much of her social identity -- whether it be taking in a film or skiing in Vermont -- revolves around consumption. To be sure, going a full year without shopping creates some socially awkward situations. She recounts a painfully self-conscious conversation about accepting a friend's movie invitation. And Levine admits that this kind of behavior is only acceptable because she is a writer who happened to be working on a book about not buying stuff.
From aesthetic and ascetic extremes, both books prove the patently obvious truth that consumerism is a fundamental part of our way of life. For many people, what they buy is their sole mode of expression -- most people are not writers, artists, or pundits. Even writers, these books show, are loath to forgo this outlet. For others who take in the theater or rearrange their faces regularly, consuming makes them feel like they have accomplished something. Kuczynski describes some women in New York or Los Angeles, usually wives of very wealthy men, whose lives revolve around nothing more than self-maintenance. In Los Angeles, for instance, women "live with this notion that it is all about looks." And then "they wake up one day and realize they are nothing but a shell of skin."
Levine started off her Spartan year conceiving of consumption as social -- "that is, it happens inside a structure larger than a single person or family." But by the end she realizes that not buying stuff did not mean she led an hermetic existence, or that the social sphere of shopping is public. Not shopping frees up more time, energy, and money to be a more engaged citizen, Levine argues. From that, she recognized a pervasive false consciousness: "Free markets have displaced free speech; sexual freedom is the right to get breast implants."
Even Kuczynski knows women are deluded if they believe getting breast implants is expressing sexual freedom. Because it's not freedom so much as it is a slavish obedience to the womanly caricatures found in celebrity gossip magazines and ever-proliferating pornography. "We want to be wanted -- by our husbands, by our lovers," Kuczynski writes, as if to mean these men won't love these women unless they have a D-cup. Some of the women Kuczynski writes about have taken their habit to such an extreme that they get labiaplasty.
Both Levine and Kuczynski, in their own way, urge women (and men) to slow down and reassess. Levine urges readers to be more thoughtful, ethical consumers, and recognizes that over consumption is a huge political and economic problem. Thinking about what you buy might not change the world, but at the very least it raises your awareness. For Kuczynski, she says it took her exploding lip "to stop and think" about how she does not want to become a surgically-altered woman who never felt "quite valued enough." In this caffeinated culture, slowing down can be radical. Just think of the possibilities. If people spent less time shopping, they might actually become more active citizens, as Levine suggests. And if they "stop and think," as Kuczynski claims to, they might stop pretending that their consumption of beauty products and cosmetic surgery is not pathological.
Jeanine Plant is a New York-based freelance writer.
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