"In “Unbearable Weight”, I describe the postmodern body, increasingly fed on “fantasies of rearranging, transforming, and correcting, limitless improvement and change, defying the historicity, the mortality, and indeed, the very materiality of the body. In place of that materiality, we now have cultural plastic.” When I wrote these words, the most recent statistics, from 1989, listed 681,000 surgical procedures performed. In 2001, 8.5 million procedures were performed. They are cheaper than ever, safer than ever, and increasingly used, not for correcting major defects, but for “contouring” the face and body. Plastic surgeons seem to have no ethical problem with this. “I’m not here to play philosopher king,” says Dr. Randal Haworth in a “Vogue” interview; “I don’t have a problem with women who already look good and want to look perfect”. Perfect. When did “perfection” become applicable to a human body? The word suggest a Platonic form of timeless beauty-appropriate for marble, perhaps, but not for living flesh. We change, we age, we die. Learning to deal with this is part of the existential challenge-and richness-of mortal life. But nowadays, those who can afford to do so have traded the messiness and fragility of life, the vulnerability of intimacy, the comfort of human connection, for fantasies of limitless achievement, “triumphing” over everything that gets in the way, “going for the gold.” The Greeks called it hubris. We call it our “right” to be all that we can be."