Last week Sarah Burge made headlines when she gave her seven-year-old daughter �7,000 worth of�vouchers towards cosmetic surgery when she's 16. Psychotherapist Susie Orbach blames the industry for fostering body hatred. Susanna Rustin brought them together.
Susanna Rustin: Did you mind being criticised for giving your daughter the�vouchers?
Sarah Burge: I'm happy to confront my critics, I'm a professional person and an�associate of a cosmetic surgery company. To me it's no different from if�I was a car manufacturer, reserving a car for my daughter when she is 18.
Susie Orbach: How big is your company? What is its turnover?
SB: I'm not divulging that. We specialise in reconstructive surgery. Our surgeons work free of charge in Africa helping disfigured people.
SO: I'm interested in you talking about people in other countries who need reconstructive surgery because I'm aware of ordinary women and men feeling they are damaged in some way. Even though from the outside they look lovely, that is not their inner experience. And so they've been encouraged to seek a solution in transforming their bodies and now we're sending that idea out all over the world.
SB: Beauty is on the inside, not the outside, that is true, but that doesn't change how you feel when you look in the mirror. Psychoanalysis might help, but you've still got to look at yourself.
SO: What if a person is perfectly lovely on the outside and they don't experience that? We have a narrow view of beauty.
SB: I think beauty comes in all different shapes, sizes and ages. I'm just here to point people who don't feel good about themselves in the right direction.
SO: We've turned the body into a product and I feel troubled by that, not particularly for my generation although we feel we have to look 30 when we're in our 60s, but I really feel for youngsters who are growing up without feeling body stability at all. The pictures of labias in need of correction on cosmetic surgeons' websites strike me as being simply pictures of labias in all their variety. But from the moment they start�to develop pubic hair, these days young women are encouraged to keep a�pre-pubescent look. It's become perfectly OK to take yourself off for a series of surgical procedures.
SB: But it is OK, it's not wrong, it's not illegal. I get thousands of emails from people who are not happy with the way they look and the majority of people I've�spoken to, there's always something they would change. I'd like to put a question to you, Susie, is there anything that you would change, given the opportunity? Or are you completely happy within yourself?
SO: I'm bound to be influenced by images like everyone else, but I'm also a woman of a certain age and I think that's important for me to accept ? Before plastic surgery became an industry, when it was a medical speciality, and somebody had a nose or breasts they really couldn't live with, for some people an operation did solve the problem. But now if we look at Argentina, in�health plans you get "a plastic" every two years, you have an entitlement. It's a notion of body modification, you start with one and then you have another. That's a different idea, isn't it?
SB: I agree ? obviously when you see the benefits of one surgical procedure you think, what can I have done next? I'm a bit like the Forth Bridge and I'm the first to admit it, you get to the bottom and start at the top again. But you can get carried away, yes you can.
SO: There are huge amounts of misery on the one hand and profit on the other.
SB: You say people are profiting from it, but you're profiting from it as well. People who are unhappy with themselves, you're sitting here counselling these people and saying, "Look, you don't want to go and have plastic surgery, it's not the right route, it's this that and the other, you've got other issues going on inside there, we're going to try and treat that together." So you've got them coming backwards and forwards, loading up your bank account, so you're�quite happy with that as well.
SO: I don't think people come to psychotherapy trivially, I think they come when they're in very great distress.
SB: But people don't trivialise surgery�either.
SR: When did you have your first surgery?
SB: I had my first operation at the age of seven. I was born with a sticking-out ear�I considered to be a deformity. Even back then, I'm the first to admit, I was a vain little cow. Then I had plastic surgery because of a man. I was 29 and he almost killed me. I had my cheekbone and jaw smashed, my eye sockets, I�was�slashed with scissors, I looked horrendous and I lived in isolation for six years until I decided to take control. I�didn't have any money, so I took myself through university and nursing, until I ended up with my own consulting rooms in Harley Street. I then put a business proposal to leading plastic surgeons: I�said, you put me back together again and if I'm happy with the results, I can refer patients to you. I became the first walking advert in Harley Street.
SO: Will you carry on having surgery all your life?
SB: Probably. I had liposuction under local anaesthetic the other day, and a facelift two weeks ago.
SO: Sitting with me, do you think this woman is so crazy, how can she be walking around looking like this?
SB: I don't sit in judgment on anybody, and no one should sit in judgment on me, although they do. A lot of people don't listen to what I say, they just think "airheaded bimbo, loads of plastic surgery, married a rich man, blah blah blah". I think if you're happy in your own skin, absolutely fabulous. If you're not, change is good.
SO: I think I'm terribly 20th-century in that I wish girls and boys could grow up feeling confident in their bodies. I look at kids a lot and they're all so gorgeous and so different, and I find it enraging that they come to feel they are inadequate and need to look more and�more like each other.
Susie Orbach is UK convenor of�Endangered Bodies. Details: endangeredspecieswomen.org. Sarah�Burge's book The Half a Million Pound Girl is published by Apex.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jun/17/the-conversation-cosmetic-surgery
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