Trafficking in inadequacy

The Guardian reports on Argentina's thriving medical tourism industry, centered around a plenitude of highly-trained and cheaply-priced plastic surgeons. It's not a fact that shocks me too terribly, but I was struck by this passage:

Argentinian plastic surgeons have good reason to be so skilled: domestic demand for breast implants, laser surgery and nip-and-tuck treatments is sky high in this style-obsessed country.

One in 30 Argentinians is estimated to have gone under the plastic surgeon's knife, making the population the most operated on in the world after the US and Mexico. Boob jobs are a popular birthday present from Argentinian parents stuck as to what to buy their teenage daughters.

I've heard tell that a certain young scholar we know gets criticized for drawing connections between female circumcision and breast augmentation. While those connections certainly don't exist in every context, I think they might be valid here. That last graf tells me that there's a cultural imperative towards body modification, that boob jobs are seen as a "rite of passage" for young Argentinian women, and that radically invasive body modifications are performed with little regard towards the long term health consequences.

I'm certainly not suggesting these women are coerced into receiving breast augmentation, just as I'm told that West African women aren't necessarily forced into circumcision. But they certainly exist in an environment where the hegemonic ideals dictate a certain self-objectification in order to achieve personal perfection.