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Cosmetic Surgery for Vanity Is One Glaring Symptom of Our Toxic Culture.

Brooke Meredith
11 min readJun 4, 2020
Notice the ironic message on her t-shirt. Image by Sandra Gabriel from Unsplash.com.

Cosmetic surgery does not exist in a vacuum. It is a direct result of pervasive cultural influences. Firm and subtle social directives, along with prescriptive imagery and messages telling women how they can and, thus, should look- if they can hope to be deemed of any worth to men or society.

As a culture, we teach women to dislike, even hate, as well as inflict cruelty and violence on themselves. This self-inflicted violence includes extreme dieting, eating to excess, binge drinking and other substance abuse, over-exercising, taking laxatives or diet pills, mental cruelty such as telling oneself “you are ugly”, “not good enough”, or that this body part isn’t up to par, self-mutilation, and paying someone else to cut open and essentially mutilate oneself in an effort to feel more accepted and desired.

Cosmetic surgery is a symptom of a culture that is toxic and abusive toward women. It’s a significant sign of disease within a society if an entire sex feels compelled to surgically alter their bodies and outer appearance to feel more aesthetically acceptable.

This is a catch-22 though because, within said culture, women are never acceptable. They are either too thin or…

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