blog 5

This 2017 MYA ad that was later banned in the UK shows multiple young women sharing their experiences with plastic surgery and how much happier they are now that they got breast implants.

As Brooks (2006) notes, when the media turns plastic surgery into a first-person narrative, they are normalizing these procedures. Plastic surgery is painful and needs months of healing, but this MYA ad makes it out to be an easy-fix to women’s insecurities. Because of this, these accounts are “hailed as candor, honesty, and a step to self-improvement” (Brooks, 2006). By normalizing getting breast implants this ad is also reinforcing this aesthetic normalcy, and how women need one body type to be considered attractive. Once women believe that they need to be attractive and that they need a certain body type to be considered so, then it would be ridiculous for them to refuse plastic surgery. In this ad, plastic surgery is framed as a ‘choice’ women take to take control of their bodies. As Goldman, Heath, & Smith (1991) explain, these sorts of ads frame the body as a key to freedom and free choice, tying these ‘choices’ and this commodity women are buying (in this case, breast implants) to the emancipation of women. Feminism is then framed as a commodity, an act of individualism that can be reached once a woman chooses to take control of her body and choose to have plastic surgery to get the body she wants.

references:

Brooks, A. (2006). Under the knife and proud of it: An analysis of the normalization of cosmetic surgery.

Goldman, R., Heath, D., & Smith, S. L. (1991). Commodity feminism.