Did you know that Mexico ranks first in this type of cosmetic surgery, and everything seems to indicate that they do it more for beauty than for health?
Obesity and overweight have become a widespread health problem; however, many women seek cosmetic surgery such as liposuction to combat these ailments, which makes them more of a beauty issue than a health issue, expert Elsa Muñiz García said today.
Why would you get liposuction? Given this, the doctor in Anthropology replies that "it is faster and provides better results to undergo liposuction than to spend months exercising the body and undergoing diets"
Muñiz, a researcher at the Postgraduate Program in Feminist Studies at the Xochimilco Unit of the Autonomous Metropolitan University (UAM) in Mexico City, also pointed out that body modifications are surrounded by a set of ideas that leads one to think of effectiveness and immediacy.
The International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery (ISAPS) points out that in 2016 only in five countries – the United States, Brazil, Japan, Italy and Mexico – 41.4% of the world total of aesthetic surgical procedures were carried out.
Of these, liposuction and abdominoplasty occupy the first place in Mexico in the field of cosmetics, although the emergence of laparoscopic surgery for severe obesity has been widely accepted among those who need to lose weight.
Liposuction is the best known and most popular surgery, and it is recommended to improve facial and body contours by removing unwanted and unsightly fat deposits through a cannula and a vacuum device that sucks out the adipose tissue.
Abdominoplasty, also called abdominal surgery or dermolipectomy, surgically removes excess skin and fatty tissue between the navel and the lower abdominal fold depending on the needs of each specific patient. The musculature of the abdominal wall can be sutured and tightened.
These procedures directly appeal to the desire to approach imposed models of beauty and bring together in the same process bodily practices of medicine, beauty, normalization and violence, building a class of consumers, men and especially women, who adopt new types of emotions and desires in the search for perfection, Muñiz said.
The researcher considered that self-esteem should not be linked to the physical appearance of people.
"But unfortunately in the modern world, the cult of appearance has reified bodies more and more, fragmenting the individual as a subject of totality, separating his body from his mind, and cosmetic surgery is here the device that splits being," he said.
Cosmetic surgery, he said, creates fictional worlds by transforming flawed bodies into perfect ones, into fictional subjects whose unreal qualities are unattainable by most men and women.
"In this way they serve as a cult of appearance, with the involuntary and negative results that constitute exclusionary and discriminatory processes for a large sector of society that does not resemble the imposed aesthetic model," he concluded.