Last week, my roommate and I were discussing our favorite early 2000s rom-coms (with “How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days” at the top of the list, obviously), when she asked, “Hailey, are you against plastic surgery?” This question may seem abrupt, but it represented the accumulation of critical bits and pieces of our conversation: Samantha Jones in Sex and the City (Season 2, Episode 3, “The Freak Show”), the popularization of discussing cosmetic procedures on social media and the ways in which the female body has been turned into a trend. Ultimately, we had a meaningful conversation about what it means to powerfully embody or succumb to femininity, and how it has looked for us and those we care about as we enter our twenties. Let’s map it out:
- 1. Samantha Jones and “The Freak Show”
In Season 2, Episode 3 of Sex and the City, everyone’s favorite character (I won’t hear out conflicting opinions) Samantha Jones has a plastic surgery crisis. After a younger man she spends the night with comments that she is an “older woman,” Samantha decides that she wants to get plastic surgery. Miranda comments, “Whatever happened to aging gracefully?” with Carrie quipping “It got old!” and with that, Samantha is off to her very exclusive, very expensive Manhattan surgeon. With the initial expectation being that the doctor is going to inject fat from other body parts into her face, making her appear “younger,” Samantha is surprised when the doctor begins marking up her entire body, recommending a laundry list of procedures that he feels she needs. In the final scene of this Samantha-saga, Samantha stares at herself in the mirror — more marker than skin — while circus music mockingly plays in the background.
2. If Samantha Jones were on TikTok
If Samantha Jones were on TikTok, I doubt she would have been surprised by her surgeon’s markings — in fact, she may have just grabbed the marker and kept on drawing. Today’s social media algorithms are saturated with surgeries that you just have to get if you want to get rid of your buccal fat and fix your eyelid skin and add to your hips and take away from your waist. We speak about plastic surgery so casually now, with many online influencers preaching transparency when getting work done.
This phenomenon presents the issue that my roommate and I began to discuss: We are living in a world that has begun to reward plastic surgery as a feminist choice, and thus you are either a good feminist if you support it or a bad one of you don’t. The thing is, we both agreed that we do support plastic surgery. Not only do we support a woman's choice to do absolutely anything she wants, especially if it’s something that improves her quality of life, but it is also, frankly, nobody’s business.
What I realized that I don’t support, though, is the subtext behind why we live in a society where I will take up arms for women who just want to get botox in peace. No decision is made in a vacuum, and thus while someone like Samantha may tell her friends that her plastic surgery is strictly for self-empowerment purposes, the voice of the man who called her an “older woman” will still ring in her ears, and behind that, an entire culture and industry that has tried to sell away the overwhelming feeling that a woman is never enough as she is.
3. Shapeshifting: from 2006 to 2016 to 2026
Just because we haven’t always been able to watch plastic surgery before-and-afters on targeted iPhone algorithms, doesn't mean that these messages haven’t been in the female consciousness for decades. As we wrapped up our discussion of Samantha Jones, my roommate and I began to dissect women’s bodies in early-2000s media, particularly in the romcom genre, and how public perception of the “ideal woman” has changed. In these older romcoms, the ideal woman is paper-thin, devoid of any curves, just tall and slender. Commentary is constantly being made about what these women eat, which perfectly-normal women are “fat” and what fads the characters are trying to attempt to lose weight. What is so compelling is that these tidbits are almost never the media’s main plot, rather they are stitched neatly into the seams of the script, so casually that you might not have even noticed them until you were re-watching. However, when pieced together, the message is loud and clear: you need to eat less, take up less space, to be desirable.
Ten years later, the early-2010s introduced a new ideal woman. Fueled by an explosion in Kim Kardashian’s Instagram following, this new ideal woman was all about curves, and plastic surgery fads were more popular than ever. This was an era of BBLs and boob jobs, augmentations in women’s bodies that were superficially about confidence, but held underlying messages of needing to have bigger “assets” to be seen as attractive and worthy of social connection. In this world, the early 2000s ideal woman is not the one the men or the people of Instagram want — she is the one in the before pictures.
The thing about trends is that they cycle. In the early-to-mid 2020 period we now exist in, the 2000s it-girl is the ideal again. Our algorithms are flooded with ab exercises and disordered eating content and celebrities in Kim Kardashian’s tax bracket are reversing their 2016 procedures and replacing them with new procedures, ones that will help them take up as little space as possible.
We can never win, and I am mourning it. Our curves, our stomachs, our breasts, our faces have become commodities that go in and out of style right along with shoes and handbags. Though we might have once been able to say “You can’t buy a different body!” we definitely cannot anymore. I mourn for Samantha Jones crying in her surgeon’s office, for the twelve-year-old girls who are saving their pennies for a nose job, for anyone whose eating, exercising or existing habits have been taken apart by “pretty” culture.
Yesterday, another one of my roommates sent me a TikTok with the caption, “Has anyone thought of spending all of their money on plastic surgery to get to level 10 baddie and then just make all of the money back through pretty privilege on social media?” The most liked comment read, “I feel like it’s a better investment than a college degree.” We were both shocked, ultimately agreeing that, as feminists, we cannot tear down women who feel they must fight their way through life with beauty alone. What we should tear down, though, is the system that makes them feel they have to.
Hailey Finkelstein is a junior from Ardsley, N.Y. majoring in Medicine, Science and the Humanities. Her column shares miscellaneous prose on current issues, the collective Hopkins experience and growing up with a pen in hand.
