The shape of things to come?

Not only reduced to buying a copy of Elle, but because of nail biting boredom, a long wait for my train and a lack of tobacco for my nicotine craving lungs am also reduced to reading it from cover to cover including the plastic surgery adverts in the back. It always amuses me that a magazine claiming to empower women, and containing heartwarming articles telling us to love our curves/wonky noses/droopy bosoms (delete as appropriate) likes to sell its advertising pages to the cosmetic surgery market keen to cash in on altering these very imperfections we are supposed to love. In a poem by Denise Levertov she highlights this dichotomy with the wonderful last line 'and with what frivolity we have pared them [our dreams] like toenails, clipped them like ends of split hair' In this post-modernist fall out of doing whats right for you, a collective feminist ethos cannot stand the ground to comment on this irony, instead falling into the trap of stating that it is ok for woman to have plastic surgery as long as it is for themselves and their own self esteem. We are incapable of resisting the gloss of these adverts, the inherent message that to hate our bodies and wish to change them by going under the surgeons knife is an acceptable method to feel happier in our own skin. Society seems to have lost the ability to see beauty, when we look with the aesthetic eye ( and that is not a critical eye), and the same is true of viewing other peoples creative output; we can begin to revel in the tiny variations which make up the unique beauty of humanity.