Sense and Sensibility

Surgery, Steroids and the Willing Suspension of Disbelief

Athe gym, my friend and I wonder.

Are they real?

Has she had work?

How old is she any way?

Can’t be, we say.

We are, of course, two middle-aged women perusing a gym full of pneumatic breasts and moon-shaped buttocks. It is a pathetic exercise, of course, captious and utterly beneath us. But we can’t seem to help ourselves; we can’t believe our eyes.

This season Jane Fonda, 71, returns to Broadway after a 45-year absence. She is, as Meredith Vieira unctuously gushes on NBC’s “Today” show, gorgeous, and anyone who has breezed through a grocery store checkout line can tell you why. She’s had work<. Lots of it, probably, and she’s admitted to it. But as I watched the unflappably resilient Fonda parry softballs on “Today,” I couldn’t help but ask myself: Does it really matter? Do I subtract points from Fonda’s beauty index merely because it’s obvious she’s the apotheosis of good plastic surgery? Can my mind undo something my eyes cannot refute?

I thought of Fonda, arguably the exemplar of the American woman’s body disorder, in the context of Alex Rodriguez’ ambiguous admission of steroid use. I’m no sports expert, but if we take Rodriguez at his word (admittedly a cognitive leap) does it make him any less a baseball player, particularly if we admit, as seems likely, that everybody else in baseball was similarly juiced? I know just enough about baseball to believe that Major League Baseball turned a blind eye to steroid use because the fans loved the results. What I wonder is how much of the steroid scandal was greased by what I like to call the Dolly Parton problem: Our willing suspension of disbelief.

We all know Dolly Parton has had adjustments to what she famously quipped “everything that sags, bags or drags.”

And yet fans embrace her in spite of, or perhaps because of, the plastic surgery. As with Fonda or Rodriguez, what we see is more important than what we know. And what we see is exactly what we want: perfection.

When, after the Obama Inauguration, reports surfaced that the symphonic quartet performance was pre-recorded, many viewers were aghast. They pulled the wool over our eyes, purists grumbled. But the wool is routinely pulled over our eyes —-  from Jennifer Hudson’s lip-synched “Star-Spangled Banner” at the Super Bowl, to Kanye West’s CD “808s & Heartbreaker.” As Time magazine reports, West, like most pop artists, indulges in the audio crutch Auto-Tune, a computerized program that makes vocals flawless.

Where, Eric Felten asks in The Wall Street Journal, does this penchant for perfection come from? “Perhaps it’s of a piece with our age,” he writes. “Plastic surgery and air-brushing are no longer sufficient improvements on models who already possess impossible beauty — now it’s common for their images to be digitally manipulated….”

It is what my friend and I refer to as the “beauty asterisk.” As we ponder, shamelessly, over the facial uplifts and mammary inflation of lithe bodies in Lycra, we are undeniably awed.

These women are<$> beautiful, our eyes insist, even if our brains counter that their beauty is medically enhanced. The question is: Does it really matter? Of course not. But there is a sense of envy-soaked outrage that insists that there is something fundamentally unfair about a woman looking at 71 as we did at 43. Somehow, we have infused morality into plastic surgery; as though there is something deficient in a woman who would resort to surgery for a trifling matter such as looks.

Increasingly, I think not. Oscar Wilde’s perpetually youthful Dorian Gray may have made his deal with the devil, but the rest of us are merely trying to calibrate how much juice we want to inject in a society that demands nothing less than perfection.

Written by Tracey O’Shaughnessy. c. Republican-American, 2009.

contact: Tracey@Traceyosh.com