Sunday, 1st October 2006
Body - Clothes for the soul?
Is the Body merely clothes for your soul?
Here is a thought. The body is no longer a prison for your soul. It's become more like a house, one that you can decorate to your tastes or you can change it daily.
How acceptable would this be in society and would they warm to the idea of customizable bodies? These days making changes to your body isn't quite yet socially acceptable, but people assume that it will be acceptable in the future.
Without overlooking the plastic surgery craze. Well then: if a 22-year old girl gets a nose job, and she has to wear a bandage for a couple weeks, does she tell everyone she got a nose job? Nope. She fell down some stairs, or maybe had a split septum. If people speculate that she got her nose redone, then she has to deny it, or say it was an accidental by-product of the surgery.
What cosmetic changes are acceptable these days?
Tatoos and piercings have gradually become acceptable to everyone except the parents of the person in question. Plus it's hard to lie about them and say you accidentally shoved a steel bolt through your lip and then sat naked on an inverted permanent-ink design.
Anyone who's not going gray is allowed to color their hair pretty much any color they want without exciting much comment. A woman can color her hair to cover up gray. It's less acceptable for a man to do this, but he can more or less still get away with it. Wigs and toupes, however, can't be talked about openly: they're taboo.
Getting a wart or a mole removed: fine. In fact people will be mildly surprised if you don't go to the trouble to remove them. Getting a scar removed or hidden: also definitely OK. In fact, any and all kinds of reconstructive surgery to help recover from injuries or disease are perfectly acceptable, and you can talk about them without shame. Little blue pills, oddly enough, have to be taken in secret.
However, changing your eye color via contacts is popular and non-taboo, so presumably if there were a surgical procedure to change the color permanently, it would also not be taboo. Liposuction: shouldn't admit to it. Artificial tanning: fine. Hair implants: don't admit to it. Veneers for your teeth: OK, for the most part. Lip implants: keep 'em secret.
I think the whole taboo-ness of cosmetic changes is pretty lame. I think the girl shouldn't have to say she fell down the stairs. People should be able to complement her on her pretty new nose the way you complement someone on a new haircut. Same goes for all the other procedures I've mentioned.
I think it's pretty obvious to most rational people that the trend is towards having control over how you look, and there's nothing wrong with making yourself look better. If a change makes you happier, then it will almost certainly make the people around you happier too.
Changes can make you healthier -- you can already get your eyesight upgraded and your teeth upgraded, so in some sense our bodies are becoming like so much hardware. Cosmetic surgery is closely tied to vanity and pride, which are proscribed by any number of popular religions, presumably on the dubious grounds that if God made you ugly, then it was just "meant to be" and you have to live with it.
However, I also think that cosmetic surgery has the evolutionary advantage: beautiful people get better treatment in the world, whether the world is conscious of it or not. So being beautiful gets you, on average, better jobs, better pay, and a better lifestyle. It pays to be good looking. It seems like this is going to drive cosmetic surgery towards becoming more or less completely acceptable, up to and including changing your apparent race, roughly as fast as these things become technically feasible. Economics will drive it.
And if you ask me, you shouldn't have to lie if someone asks you about your hair or your nose or your love handles or whatever you changed. Your body is your very own, and it's just clothes for your soul, nothing more. Decorate it however you please, and be proud of your decor.
Posted by Nikhil on Sunday, 1st October 2006 in Life in General | Humour | Fun | Nonsense