womon:

“If women suddenly stopped feeling ugly, the fastest-growing medical specialty would be the fastest dying. In many states of the United States, where cosmetic surgeons (as opposed to plastic surgeons, who specialize in burns, trauma, and birth defects) can be any nonspecialist M.D., it would be back to mumps and hemorrhoids for the doctors, conditions that advertising cannot exacerbate. They depend for their considerable livelihood on selling women a feeling of terminal ugliness. If you tell someone she has cancer, you cannot create in her the disease and its agony. But tell a woman persuasively enough that she is ugly, you do create the “disease,” and its agony is real. If you wrap up your advertisement, alongside an article promoting surgery, in a context that makes women feel ugly, and leads us to believe that other women are competing in this way, then you have paid for promoting a disease that you alone can cure. This market creation seems not to be subject to the ethics of the genuine medical profession. Healing doctors would be discredited if they promoted behavior that destroyed health in order to profit from the damage: Hospitals are withdrawing investment from tobacco and alcohol companies. The term for this practice, ethical investing, recognizes that some medical profit relationships are unethical. Hospitals can afford such virtue, since their patient pool of the sick and dying is always naturally replenished. But cosmetic surgeons must create a patient pool where none biologically exists. So they take out full-page ads in The New York Times—showing a full-length image of a famous model in a swimsuit, accompanied by an offer of easy credit and low monthly terms, as if a woman’s breasts were a set of consumer durables—and make their dream of mass disease come true.”

— Naomi Wolf “The Beauty Myth” (via aishawarma)