Girl, Cut Up Your Face

More than a few people are trying to predict what is going to happen this summer when the lockdowns and curfews are lifted. What is going to happen when people return to socializing, and especially when they return to socializing without masks? That is, when they again need to show their faces?

Naomi Wolf counts among the few who have noticed that wearing masks inhibits face-to-face communication. From a prior post:

Masks break human beings’ ability to bond face-to-face and enjoy human contact, smiles and jokes. Masks turn down the effectiveness of human “technology,” by making it hard for us to “read” each other and to pick up social cues. Forbidding assembly keeps us from forming human alliances against these monstrous interests. Forbidding human assembly also prevents new cultures, new heroes and new business models from arising. We are all stuck with the Rolodex and the ideas we had in March of 2020.

You might imagine that American women, in particular, would be happy to show their faces again. You would be partially wrong. A segment of New York women, liberated from all patriarchal constraints, has been rushing to plastic surgeons, the better to have that Gov. Gretchen Whitmer plastic dead face, Botoxed beyond recognition.

New York women, who apparently prefer to be looked at and not touched, are seeking out other kinds of plastic surgery, the better to look better in their own eyes. Or in their own mirrors. Narcissism, anyone? If they imagine that no one can tell that they have had plastic surgery, they are seriously fooling themselves.

As for being touched, making your body a doll’s body does not make any woman more touchable.

There’s a reason they call it plastic surgery. If you have enough of it you start looking like a doll, with that Gretchen Whitmer face and a body that has been enhanced by various plastic insertions.

Of course, Botox is the worst, because it affects more than the appearance of your face. As I have pointed out on several occasions, a plastic face, one where a multitude of facial muscles have been numbed into immobility, cannot express any emotion and cannot read the emotion on other people’s faces. As Wolf pointed out, you cannot even read smiles and frowns.

Facial expressions obviously express emotion. We read them all the time. But, when we are talking to someone face to face, we mimic his facial expressions and gain, thereby, a sense of what he is feeling. It might even be called empathy.

So, we have large numbers of liberated American women who have numbed their faces into plasticity, whining about how men do not express their feelings. Duh.

We owe this story to the New York Post. We report it just in case you believed that New York women were happy to be women and were happy in their bodies.

New Yorkers are facing the light at the end of the pandemic tunnel, and it isn’t pretty — prompting them to flock to plastic surgeons to get ready for a summer of fewer masks, more socializing and a return to the office.

“Double the demand is a reasonable statement,” Upper East Side plastic surgeon Dr. Melissa Doft said of her increased bookings in $25,000 facelifts, $12,000 breast augmentations and $15,000 nose jobs.

The best part is that these women believe that these plastic fillers and stretches and numbing are going to be therapeutic. They believe that having a plastic face will enhance their self-confidence.

Seriously--

The Manhattan doctor said “injectables, Botox, soft-tissue fillers” are the most popular procedures at the moment — with patients especially focused on their soon-to-be-revealed lower faces.

“People have lost their jobs, homes and confidence” over the past year, Rieder said. “Internal stress can manifest, especially on the skin.”

It is much better to return to the world of travel and socializing looking good, including with “new boobies,” East Harlem resident Alexis Williams said.

She told The Post she had $15,000 breast-augmentation surgery as a 30th birthday present to herself last month.

Better yet is the woman who said that she was now a whole new woman. Why does she think that disguising her appearance does not tell the world anything else but the fact that she is embarrassed by her appearance. And why should she be embarrassed at having a normal female body? Why would she be embarrassed to be aging. Do you think that aging is a patriarchal plot?

“I’m a whole new woman,” the marketing exec said after the procedure at Rowe Plastic Surgery on the Upper East Side in Manhattan.

“I am very excited after being inside for so long — it makes you appreciate everything: being able to go to the gym … being around people. I am a socialite, it’s a rebirth with a new look,” she said.

“I’m ready to show these things off. I don’t care.”

And then, for those who do not want Botox, there’s the latest thing-- the vampire facial. It is so new I had not heard about it before. 

A “vampire facial” — in which patients’ blood plasma is reinjected using micro-needles to tighten the skin — was the perfect pre-summer pick-me-up for one West Village woman in her early 30s.

The Manhattan woman told The Post that her $1,400 government stimulus check paid for most of the $2,000 procedure.

“People are going to see my face for the first time in like 18 months. Faces are the new cleavage after so much mystery,” she said.

Actually, if you Botox your face beyond recognition people are not going to see your face. They are going to see a mask that you have used to cover your face cosmetically:

Sharon G., 52, of Huntington, LI, came into the city last month for a mini-facelift, liposuction and breast implants — at a total price tag of $29,000.

“I have been hiding my face with a mask,” she said. “For me, this is self-esteem, truly done for myself and how I feel.

“It makes such a difference in how I feel in the world.”

As I said, it’s all supposed to be therapeutic.

She said she is seeing many more requests for facelifts, neck lifts and “facial optimization–” a combination of subtle surgery and injectable facial contouring.

“Real life happens face-to-face, not behind a filtered selfie, and I think all of us are thinking about how we want to feel when we see other people again,” she said.

“We’ve watched our hairs turn gray, our anxiety levels rise, and our facial furrows deepen — the combination of that, plus unflattering Zoom angles and the desire to recapture what we lost, is also fueling this trend,” she added.

Recapture what you lost, isn’t there something wrong with seeing the aging process in terms of loss. Lines on the face used to be signs of character. Now, they are signs that you are losing the battle to aging, that you can no longer play the twenty something vamp. 

As for whether there is something to be said for real faces, we have Hollywood actress, producer and director Justine Bateman who has written a new book called: Face: One Square Foot of Skin.

Vanity Fair interviewed Bateman. Her thoughts ought to be presented to everyone who who decides that she wants her face and her body to be more fitting to a doll than to a human female.

Whereas, girls were once advised, in a bestselling book, to wash their faces-- no objection there-- they are now being told to cut up their faces. Say what? At a time when teenage girls have gotten into the habit of cutting themselves, why do we need to glorify face cutting.

In Bateman’s words:

It’s almost your duty now as a female to start cutting up your face. How did this thinking become so set in our society? How about just saying no?

So, Bateman has set out to speak truth to vanity. As for those who consider it to be empowering to pretend to be a plastic doll, Bateman says this:

Empowering them for what? To shove plastic in their faces? I don’t get that. How about feeling empowered to walk out in the world with an attitude that says, “Fuck you, I look great”?

Character lines do not just bespeak good character. They suggest the wisdom that comes from experience. Erasing them cannot be a good idea. Tricking people into think that you are younger, more callow and more childish cannot be a good idea either.

One of the ways we’ve been able to survive as a species, through evolution, is our ability to read people and to notice that they’re aging: Oh, they’re older. They’ve had more experience. They’re a little wiser than somebody who has a face that looks like it hasn’t been around as long.

As for whether plastic surgery is a feminist issue, Bateman is having none of it:

I think it’s possible that I’ll be criticized by those who have decided that plastic surgery is some kind of feminist position. That criticism of “how dare you be critical of women that have taken control and are making the changes that they see are necessary?” But look, this is just how I see things. My hope for women is that they can get a steel spine as far as how they feel about themselves. That the condition of their face is completely immaterial. We assume others are going to reject us. We don’t trust that things are going to be okay. Because of that, women feel they have to make sure all these other people are okay with what they look like. As if that’s the only way they’re going to move forward.

Character, competence, achievement, accomplishment-- don’t we believe that these are more important than a dead face that makes you look like Gretchen Whitmer?