Back on the first of March, Jessica at Feministing wrote an entry on a grossly sexist contest being run by the Clear Channel radio station KDGE-FM in Texas. The name of the contest is "Pimp My Ride", in obvious reference to the MTV television show of the same name, which deals with remakes of ordinary looking vehicles into "cool-looking" status symbols in street culture. I'm not a fan of that kind of automotive transformation (even allowing for differences in taste, every example I've ever seen sacrifices efficiency, safety, performance, or all three for the sake of appearance), but the radio contest was much worse: instead of being about modifying cars with automotive tools into being better status symbols for a predominately male audience, it was about modifying women with surgical tools into being better status symbols for a predominately male audience.

There are so many things wrong with this that it makes a good launchpoint for a discussion into what the social cost is of such programs, and to whom. Although I passed it by the first time I saw it, I started thinking about it more heavily when it was revisited by Feministing today, which pointed out a Dallas News editorial by Jacquielynn Floyd (registration required to view) that was somewhat dismissive of the incident because the contest had willing participants. She's right in that it is difficult to consider women who volunteer for such a thing helpless victims of what they're volunteering for, but I think that misses the point.

The contest isn't catering to women who are looking for their own body modifications for the sake of artistic or technical interest (this crowd tends to find tattoos and piercings a cheaper and less dangerous way to explore that sort of thing, anyway); it's catering to the men who tell women that they aren't attractive if they don't have the same body shape as the chesty, skinny supermodels that grace their centerfolds, who want better trophies hanging off of their collective arms, and who don't care about the pain involved or health risks to the women if they can improve their social status. Bringing this attitude into the mainstream media unopposed propagates the meme that the primary goal of women should be to be sexually pleasing to men, and that men should not only think about women this way, but encourage them to take serious risks to further that goal. That in turn becomes the foundation stone for a host of other problems.

Let's start by looking at the symbolism of the contest, starting with the name and logo:

Taken from the Feministing article

To "pimp out" a car has lost much of its context of forced prostitution, but there is generally little ambiguity about the meaning when one discusses wanting to pimp out a woman. Likewise, to refer to a woman as one's "ride" while highlighting her breasts and crotch has clear connotations not only about the woman's sexual place in the speaker's life, but where the speaker thinks that place should be in general. These are not things that you can say innocently.

So what modifications are suggested? Breast augmentation and liposuction are the obvious ones, and from the reference to the "grill" (face) presumably a facelift or nose job as well, though I don't remember seeing those specifically mentioned and the radio station has since removed the page with the contest details from their website, preventing me from checking. The various risks of breast augmentation, from infection risk to other health complications have been downplayed by plastic surgeons making substantial amounts of money from the procedures, but have been fairly well documented elsewhere, such as http://www.breastimplantinfo.org/, which includes references to the medical papers and other sources of information that they use. They have three pages I recommend to those interested in the procedure, the risks involved, and things women might want to consider about life after a breast augmentation:

• What Women Need to Know About Breast Implants
• How You’ll Look and Feel
• What If My Implants Break?

Liposuction is also a surgical procedure with the usual risks, both to health and cosmetic, and although some people greatly overweight might be considering the health benefits from being slimmer, liposuction doesn't provide as many of those benefits as one might think. In any case, the women selected as finalists in the contest were not grossly obese (and did not even appear greatly overweight), and would likely have had better (and healthier) results spending six months with a personal trainer than six months recovering from surgery.

As far as it concerns nosejobs, well, it's still surgery with the usual risks, and although many people undergo such plastic surgery without lasting problems, the mere thought of potentially ending up like Michael Jackson (and yes, those are real photos) ought to make most people hesitate.

But back to the topic of social cost, this is all playing on the commercially driven belief that you have to look a certain way or have a certain body shape to have a good self-image, or even a sense of self-worth. This is learned behaviour; children don't start out with this problem. Chubby babies who don't like the feel of their clothes gleefully strip and escape their front yards to run naked down the sidewalk, a slightly panicked parent chasing after them. It takes years of conditioning and emotional abuse, from magazine ads telling young girls that they're ugly unless they have the same body shape and skin tone as the heavily retouched images and are then covered with paint, to "she's so flat" and "she's so fat" jokes in junior high and high school, to being rebuffed for being too bright, or insufficiently meek, and asked out on the basis of physical appearance alone, to being pressured to get a boob job by men with fixation problems, to radio shows making a contest out of the entire thing.

The primary victims of this aren't so much the participants (though they are the ones at most immediate risk of physical harm), but rather the girls (and in a secondary sort of way, the boys) in the next generation that are seeing this as a model for what is okay. Contests like this say that it's okay to be cared about only for your body. It's fine to tell a woman that she isn't attractive unless she gets someone to chop her open to "fix" that a-cup (often leaving her with visible scars, potential short-term and long-term health risks, and breasts that neither move naturally nor feel natural and can never again be returned to their original form). They make the statement that it's healthy to spend months in recovery from a liposuction that has negligible benefit (if not substantial harm and expense) over spending the same time with a personal trainer. It's manly to go tell your girlfriend this, or tell your male friends to think this way.

In encouraging this, such shows propagate the problems in both directions. A broken sense of self-worth doesn't happen overnight, and it doesn't get fixed overnight (if you had the capacity to just throw a mental switch and decide you were happy with your natural body after all, it wouldn't be a broken sense of self-worth to begin with). To fix this requires that when such detrimental memes are presented, others stand up in opposition and present their reasons. The next generation needs counterexamples, and those convinced that they need surgery to be beautiful need to find out about the people who think that they are beautiful without it.

Pitch in and help out. Provide your own counterexamples, oppose blatant sexism, and perhaps most importantly, remember to tell people that they're beautiful. It's good for their health.