Body mods

[lnr]

From a conversation on irc...

To me all of the below are in some way the same sort of thing, although I didn't see it that way until Richard pointed it out a year or so back. It made me feel a lot less bitter at people who I don't see as overweight who still want to be thinner. I instinctively still find the cosmetic surgery more distasteful than most of the rest, and wonder if others feel the same.

NB More what you find acceptable in others than what you would consider doing yourself.

[Poll #369403]

Comments

[j4.livejournal.com]

I'm not really sure what you mean by "acceptable" and "unacceptable". I have no moral objection to any of them per se.

There's a lot of different body-mods in there, though, & while Richard may think they're all the same thing, I think they can be loosely divided in two different ways: first, the distinction between the ones that are purely decorative (piercing, hairdye) and the ones that could have sound medical reasons (teeth-straightening, laser eye surgery, dieting); second, the distinction between the ones that are temporary/reversible (piercing, hairdye, dieting, contacts) and the ones that aren't trivially removable (tattooing, surgery, scarification).

I'm not going to draw moral conclusions from that; the above is just a starting point for balancing risk and necessity, benefits and consequences; I think those are areas where individuals have to draw their own lines.

The only thing I would say is that I don't think any of them are acceptable things to do to somebody else without their full knowledge and consent, or to try to pressure somebody else into doing; and I wouldn't advise anybody to rush into any of them without thinking about the consequences.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Indeed, I usually mention that there are differences in riskiness, etc, when making the observation that there's a large class that they all fall into.

[j4.livejournal.com]

Do you think it's useful (to you, to others, to the world, whatever) to regard them all as members of the same class?

There's another way of dividing them, actually, that I forgot to mention before: visible/invisible. Nobody needs to know that you've had laser eye surgery or even a nose-job (provided they haven't seen the 'before' and 'after', of course); under normal circumstances nobody can see if you've got your wobbly bits pierced; but a bone through the nose or a scar on the cheek is fairly impossible to hide.

(I draw no moral conclusions from this observation.)

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Eleanor seemed to find it useful when I made the original remark way back when. IIRC the original context was someone objecting fairly loudly to the concept of dieting and the particular comparison was between dieting and piercing.

If someone wants to change their body in some way, and has a reasonable understanding of the consequences and risks, can afford it, is an adult, etc etc etc, I think it's their own business in the end. (So perhaps the class I'm talking about might be the class of things I think this of...)