The XX Factor: What women really think.

Spoiling Susan Boyle

"I won't let Simon Cowell take her to his dentist and I certainly won't let her near his hairdresser," judge Amanda Holden tells the U.K. Mirror.

The frumpy 48-year-old "needs to stay exactly as she is because that's the reason we love her," Holden insists. "She just looks like anybody who could live on your street."

"The minute we turn her into a glamour-puss is when it's spoiled," she says.

A makeover "can perhaps come later when she has signed the album deal and conquered America," Holden adds. "For now we'll keep her exactly as she is because that's why we've all fallen in love with her. I think it's the underdog thing."  

Pretty Amanda Holden won't "let" Susan Boyle near Simon's makeup crew, lest she be "spoiled." In other words, the singer's frumped-up appearance is the most important thing about her; remove it, and we cease to care.

I don't know that turning Ms. Boyle into some kind of statement about physical beauty is any more respectful of her autonomy than forcing her into a makeover. She hasn't volunteered to be a feminist icon or morality personified or anything else we want to force upon her squinty visage. She is a person, not a placard, and her life is changing. Now that her audience consists of more than just Pebbles, she might well want to glam it up a little. There is nothing particularly authentic about preserving her appearance in amber while everything around her transforms dramatically. 

Orbach's "Bodies," Ourselves

A guest post from Slate intern Margaret Johnson:

Those interested in the crazy things we do to our bodies might want to look at Deborah Solomon’s interview with British psychoanalyst Susie Orbach running in this week’s issue of the New York Times Magazine (not online yet).  For fellow children of the '80s not familiar with Orbach, her best-selling 1978 book Fat Is a Feminist Issue argued that women’s struggles with food and weight were linked to their still subordinate status in a male world. The book, which Orbach refers to in the interview by the not so feminist acronym “Fifi”—I think of a French poodle or some Eva Gabor-type toddling around in kitten heels—got women questioning how much of their negative attitudes toward their bodies they had absorbed from the society around them.

Orbach’s latest book, Bodies, came out this week, ironically published as part of Picador paperback’s “Big Ideas, Small Books” series—apparently we want even our books to be thin. It examines the spreading belief, no longer confined to the West, that our bodies are badly in need of altering. In the Times interview, Orbach cites as an example young South Korean women who, with their parents’ full support, have plastic surgery to Westernize their eyelids. “They don’t experience this as a terrible thing, that they’re being passive victims and idiots,” Orbach says. “They see it as a chance at modernity.”

While I’m not sure it’s fair to call the Korean girls “passive" if they genuinely believe that the procedure will give them a better chance of success in the larger world. If they do, the surgery seems like an active, if unfortunate, attempt to get ahead. But why in the West do people with no shortage of opportunity obsessively revise their bodies? I suspect it's to avoid confronting what is imperfect about the way we live. Instead of addressing bad relationships, unfulfilling jobs, unhealthy behavior, or the helplessness we feel in the face of events we can’t change—death, crime, recession—we make our bodies into all-consuming projects, convincing ourselves that reshaping our bodies will somehow reshape our lives. And thanks to Orbach and  many others who have written about the cultural forces encouraging us to dislike our bodies, we, unlike those young Korean women, know that our bodies are not the problem, or the solution. So what’s keeping us from acting on that knowledge? What will it take to ditch the diets and the botox and deal with the issues for which there is no cosmetic fix?

Faint Praise Indeed

I'll take the bait, Willa. I found the Oscars as predictable and smarmily self-congratulatory as usual. Unlike Slate's Troy Patterson, who called the presentation of the acting awards by the five previous winners "a welcome development," I found it awkward and forced. The worst was Nicole Kidman, whose love of botox has rendered her face nearly immobile, thus making her tribute to Angelina Jolie in The Changeling seem insincere. The effort Kidman was exerting just to smile was gargantuan. I will admit, though, that I don't really have much of a stomach for this sort of thing. The Oscars comes at the end of awards season, and I don't find Hollywood giving themselves a new set of prizes every weekend especially inspiring. Am I hopelessly cynical, Slate women? Have I lost my sense of wonder? Check out the video of Kidman and Jolie below and see if you agree.

What Price Beauty?

Alex Kuczynski Rented Another Woman's Womb. So What?

In last weekend's New York Times Magazine, beauty writer, Botox fan, and Beauty Junkies author Alex Kuczynski writes about how, after she'd spent more than $100,000 on in vitro fertilization and suffered multiple miscarriages, she hired another woman to carry her baby for her. So far, there are more than 400 comments on the article, many written by women, most blasting Kuczynski for having the gall to rent a womb. You should have adopted! You're a spoiled brat! You're a kept woman who sees a baby as one more purchase! I say: Give her a break. She was infertile. She'd lost multiple babies in utero. She had the means—thanks to her writing career and her wealthy husband—to have her egg and her husband's sperm implanted into the womb of a woman who was willing to carry her baby for $25,000. I'm not sure what Kuczynski's bashers expected her to do. Follow their directions? Suffer silently so as not to offend anybody with her money? Do ... nothing? Something about this outpouring of female vitriol reminds me of the tarring and feathering of Sarah Palin. Maybe you don't agree with this woman's choices or that woman's beliefs, but who are you to deny her the choices that she has the right, power, or money to make? Sounds like envy to me.

But a Boob Job IS an Investment

In his "Human Nature" blog, Slate's Will Saletan rejoices over the recession's toll on the cosmetic surgery business and expresses horror at the idea that some suckers (social parasites?) still refinance their homes to get cosmetic surgery during economic downturns. Then these vain people justify their ill-gotten boobs and rhinoplasties on the grounds that their plastic surgery was "an investment." Saletan cries foul: "When you can't pay the mortgage, we're supposed to bail you out? And your surgeon calls what you did an 'investment'?"

But isn't that a perfectly reasonable perspective? Sad but apparently true: We live in a society that rewards beauty and punishes ugliness, often using the medium of cold, hard cash. A 2005 Federal Reserve study, for instance, found that attractive people—in all occupations—earned 5 percent more per hour than the physically average, while the ugly earn 9 percent less an hour than everyone else. So say you find yourself, through sheer genetic bad luck, stuck in the low-earning "ugly" category—why shouldn't you decide that putting down $5,000 for a nose job or $2,500 for a "chin augmentation" is a smart long-term investment? If you can go from "ugly" to "average," you've potentially got a lifetime 9 percent income boost right there! Even if you're utterly devoid of vanity, some wisely chosen plastic surgery might be a sound economic decision.

I'll go further: Research suggests that the benefits of physical attractiveness start at birth. Nurses in maternity wards spend more time with the cute babies. And even parents, God help us all, apparently take better care of cute kids than of ugly ones—in a 2005 Canadian study, researchers found that parents with unattractive children often didn't even bother to buckle the little tykes' seat belts. Clearly, parents, if you want your ugly kid to get a fair shake in life, you need to get him or her to a cosmetic surgeon, pronto. And this, comrades, should be our new rallying cry: high-quality, government-subsidized day care; universal preschool; and free pediatric cosmetic surgery on demand!

We Are All Under 40 Now

This excessive Botoxing and retouching has something to do with the collapse of the classes, or at least the shifting in what used to define the super-rich. "The 'luxury' experience has become thoroughly middle-class, even prole (two words: 'Gucci T-shirt')," Sandra Tsing Loh wrote a few years ago in the Atlantic, in a rare book review that did not reference her children's school. When I was in my 20s, my dermatologist was a product peddler, but in a sad pushcart kind of way, selling some kind of skin cream only he could provide (now Clinique sells it). I remember my mother once took me to Georgette Klinger, and I felt like I was in the Trump penthouse, and I in fact was so uncomfortable among the minks and lapdogs that I had to leave. Now Georgette Klinger is like the MacDonald's of spas; the super-rich go to these souped up urban spas where you can color your hair and get a face-lift in one session. I went with my post-mastectomy friend to the plastic surgeon once, and it was just how Melinda described—two doctors who looked identical, with absurd winter tans and actual golf ties. The place was gleaming, and they had their own chocolates! To me, the blending of boob job and cancer was very jarring. But they clearly considered both just facts of middle-class life. And they were just here to serve.

I'm sure there is no connection here, but since this is my latest obsession, I will try it out. If all classes have gotten bumped up a grade, does this explain why prostitutes are so middle-class now? In the escort service trial now unfolding in D.C., the latest call girl on the witness stand had a Ph.D. from the University of North Texas and held clinical and academic positions all over the world. She started working for the escort service when she was 56. Not a typo. She was caught serving a john at 63. Surely she must have had some work done.

Peddling Botox

Ah, yes, the unsolicited-Botox pitch. My experience wasn't nearly so harrowing or prolonged as Melinda's, but a couple of years ago I went to a dermatologist for a small, straightforward medical matter. It was hard not to notice the large photo on his examining room wall, showing him on vacation, trekking someplace exotic. At the end of our appointment, he took my file and looked at my birth date. "You're over 40," he pointed out, gratuitously. "Want to try some Botox?"

This was a mainstream medical doctor, seeing a patient for a medical matter, and here he was, peddling a pricey cosmetic sideline, doubtless as a way of paying his next sherpa. I declined his offer. He shrugged and assumed I was just offended. And in a way, I was; it's hard not to feel self-concious about your forehead when your doctor offers to correct some aspect of it. But mostly, I was shocked. I'd never had a doctor try to sell me something. It was no big deal to him. Some women resent the suggestion, he confided, but others don't. For that reason, he said, it's hard to know the best way to make the pitch. Next patient!

Cosmetic surgeons may be hurting in the current economy, but the pressures of managed care are also inspiring some some regular practioners to seek ways to augment their own income by performing—and proferring—cosmetic procedures. I was chatting about this recently with Kathryn Hinsch, founder of the Women's Bioethics Project, who has lots of concerns about physicians dabbling in lucrative cosmetic enhancements. The problems are manifold: It's cheesy, it commercializes medicine, and most of all, it corrupts doctor-patient trust. Hinsch pointed out in our conversation that general practitioners, family practitioners, and ob-gyns are all cashing in on the trend. And who are their primary targets? Well, women contribute by far the majority of cosmetic-procedure revenue.

And how are we paying for these procedures? On another topic, Melinda, just to tie up one loose end: That data set I mentioned last week, showing that one-third of all wives earn more than their husband? This may be a violation of the blogging ethos, but after your entry, I felt curious and made a call, to the Labor Department, to see if there were any caveats or backstory. It turns out that this statistic does not include families where the wife does not work. (The WSJ article was a little misleading that way.) But in families where the wife earns a paycheck, one third of the time she makes more than her husband. So she has even more $$$ with which to pay her GP for that liposuction!