The XX Factor: What women really think.

Who's Got It Worse?

Reading "Plastic Surgery Confidential" and "Growth Industry," I was struck by the similarities between the two. In the first, 27-year-old, 120-pound Melanie Berliet visits a slew of plastic surgeons who inform her that she's in dire need of $30,000 worth of plastic surgery. In the second, Kent Sepkowitz investigates male "enhancement" procedures that promise to turn men's penises into frankenfurters. There are plenty of women-run sites devoted to lamenting the multitude of ways pop culture turns female self-love into self-loathing, but far less attention is paid to how pop culture makes men neurotic about their masculinity.

In one surgeon's office, Berliet meets the Axis Three, a high-tech digital visualization program that uses fancy effects to show prospective surgical patients what their boobs might look like after they've been implanted. Meanwhile, at the University of Belgrade, men can have their penis disassembled and lengthened with the help of a transplanted rib. I'm actually all too familiar with the male "growth industry," having done more than one story on the subject, from penis weight-lifting to penile enlargement surgery. (Regarding the latter, suffice to say, it wasn't pretty.) 

In "Posthumans Go Hollywood! (Maybe)," Charlie Jane Anders asserts the cyborgization of the population is about escapism. But when the cyborg is you, is the escape from yourself or from the human population? While there's something pleasurable about imagining a world in which you can become whomever you want to be, the haunting backdrop is that of someone who inhabits a double-consciousness, stuck between who they appear to be and who they really are, the gap between unbridged.