Many women struggle with the impact of aging and pregnancy on their bodies. But the marketing of the “mommy makeover” seeks to pathologize the postpartum body, characterizing pregnancy and childbirth as maladies with disfiguring aftereffects that can be repaired with the help of scalpels and cannulae.
“The message is that, after having children, women’s bodies change for the worse,” said Diana Zuckerman, the president of the National Research Center for Women and Families, a nonprofit group in Washington. If marketing could turn the postpregnancy body “into a socially unacceptable thing, think of how big your audience would be and how many surgeries you could sell them,” she said.
Oh the joys of our technology-driven consumer culture. I have just succeeded in convincing my father that white hair isn't something to be dyed away, but something to be delighted in as an indication of wisdom. And braces, let's all have identical teeth...
1 comment:
This is what totally baffles me. On the one hand, there is this myth that pregnancy "ruins" a woman's body. We are told that women with lots of kids have "ruined" bodies--yet somehow they keep having more kids!
Meanwhile, other women go out of their way not to have babies while going out of their way to make their bodies look like they've had babies (e.g, breast enhancements)
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