Baraka_Guru

This appears to me to be elective surgery for the wrong reasons.

This is the kind of thing Angela Carter wrote about, along with a slew of other postmodern writers. She was a feminist magical realist. These are issues dealing with the body, appearances, and self-perception. In this particular case, we have the issue of what constitutes a "normal" image of the body, which must be based on some kind of standard set by media images. On top of that, you have the idea of ostracism among youth based on superficial qualities (which isn't new) at a time when there are fundamental issues hitting crisis levels below that surface (which in its unique form is new): illiteracy, aliteracy, post-literacy, and the failure to instill a capacity for critical thought.

This whole story reeks of "thousand-dollar surgeries on dollar-store heads."

They say postmodernism is dead, and I suppose it is at least in its death throes from an artistic standpoint, but many of the core issues that the movement addressed are as prevalent as ever. Whatever takes its place—whether its some form of David Foster Wallace's idea of New Sincerity or something similar—seems to have a wellspring of social material to address in future works. I suppose that's always the way with art.

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Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot