Pygmalion 21st Century Style

As I was driving to work this morning, I had the radio turned to a radio station that I do not frequent, and I heard an ad for plastic surgery. That's right, a radio advertisement for becoming the "best you" you can be. I laughed derisively when I realized what was being suggested. Then, my mind immediately went to Africa. Why would plastic surgery make me think of Africa? Well, because I am preparing to go to Africa on May 17, and I have been planning how to pack, what kinds of gifts to take for the Africans I meet, and how to deal with the emotional impact of spending time in Rwanda post genocide. So, the fact that in this country one can pay to have fat removed while in other places food is a luxury is particularly striking right now. The idea that one would spend her money to get bigger breasts to impress a man (the ad included men talking about how their wives were now returned to their former confident selves by having breast "enhancement") and suddenly all problems disappear just seems wrong on so many levels.

Don't get me wrong; I'm not saying that because parts of our world do not have the technology and infrastructure that we have in the United States, we should feel guilty or not avail ourselves of it. That's not it at all. What I am saying is that I believe we have so much capability, so much excess, that we create needs. While women and men in this country have always been body conscious (witness "Muscular Christianity" in the late 18th and early 19th century), they did not always have the opportunity to pay a surgeon to give them a body wholly new and different from the original. What does it mean to be able to buy the body you want? What does it do to the meaning of living within this body to see it as infinitely malleable and capable of being improved upon with technology? What happens to us when we buy the bodies we want and still find that we haven't become the people we want to be?

New breasts or a trip to a place in the world that might open me up to parts of myself, parts of humanity, that I've yet to explore -- I know which I think is the better way to spend my money and time. And my yoga practice has taught me that the body I have, while maybe not the body the magazines tell me I should want, is beautiful in its own way and capable of housing and hosting the Infinite Self. No human intervention to change the surface look comes even close to the wonder of that fact...