Mommy of Frankenstein

I almost forgot about this. There’s now a book that teaches kids how not to fear their new Plastic Post-Op moms. Rod Dreher no likey:

What kind of message is this sending to little girls? That if they don’t like their bodies, that if their physical appearance doesn’t conform to current physical ideals, that they should be willing to go under the knife to make themselves “prettier”? Sick. The proponents of this book say that it’s helpful for kids to have plastic surgery demystified so they won’t be so frightened when Mommy goes in for tummy tucks and boob jobs. Yeah, well, keep telling yourself that. What this book really does is put even more pressure on girls in this culture to learn to hate themselves for not measuring up to a Barbie doll ideal. If they’re being taught to absorb this toxic idea from childhood, what kind of neurotic wrecks are they doing to be as teenagers? And boys too will learn that if females fall short of the physical ideal, well, they ought to go to the medical profession and fix their imperfections via surgery.

I care less about the balance of trauma here than about the person who’s attempting to cash in on an often regrettable and sometimes pathetic side effect of modern life and human vanity. This is not a way I would want to spend my time to make a living. The great and twisted thing about the market is its mechanism for rewarding those who do things that (a) no one would want to do but which (b) generate goods or services that many people would and do want to use. Put in honor-culture terms, there’s less shame in using My Plastic Mommy than in writing it. Put in market-therapeutic terms, however, there’s more pride in writing that book than in simply reading it, because discovering and meeting a new social need is worth a bigger reward than simply having that need. So we both celebrate the invention of new needs and flatter ourselves to wonder why it is we keep turning today’s desires into tomorrow’s necessities.

This is the problem at the intersection of technology and vanity. Alone, neither is fatal, but together, they get a mind of their own — a mind some people might call History. Therapeutic books designed to teach us (and our children) how to cope with the full implications of free-range technovanity actually do so by stripping us of one kind of vanity while boosting another. Strangely, we’re forgetting how to cultivate vanity without technology. And we’re doing so to escape the obligation of having to do anything about the fact that technovanity makes true human vanity less and less possible. Ironically, what looks like the science of human improvement works against really arrogant nobility.