I think Joan Rivers must simply have had all the skin on her face removed and replaced with a lifelike latex substitute; that’s the only thing that accounts for the fact she can still pull any kind of an expression at all. When she relaxes, though, she does look like one of those aliens from Communion.
In one of the many, many millions of magazines I have lying around the house lies one article which puts Botox in its proper context. Just as Dominick Dunne put crime into a moral context (which is really the primary context in which those events take place) so this article, which I cannot find, by a woman whose name I cannot recall, looked at cosmetic surgery in a fundamentally meaningful, humanistic context. I do not know why this article is, as far as I can tell, alone in the world. I do not know why no-one else has examined the social and cultural impact of Botox. But I do know, it asked some very important questions.
First among those is:
What will become of a society in which women are unable to express negative emotion?
Do you remember when you were a child, and you’d watch your mother for clues as to what was going on and whether or not it was a problem? What if those clues never came? What if all you had to depend on were her words?
Botox is censorship of the body. You think you’re only banning the bad words, but like an over-aggressive spamfilter that won’t let you open the Breast Cancer Charity fundraising site, it cuts you off from things you may not realize are both negative and positive. How’d you like to discover that too late?
I can’t even imagine being a fortysomething man trying to date age-appropriate, financially secure women; there would be no clues at all in her face if you happened to say something that struck a nerve. You would never know when to back off. You would never see the vulnerability. You would, to a meaningful extent, be cut off from an important part of that woman’s basic humanity.
As would be all other people.
And what must it do to them?
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raincoaster 
Well, if you can’t express negative feelings and thoughts, perhaps you eventually stop feeling those feelings and thinking those thoughts?
Stepford from the outside in!
Maybe all those dictatorships are on to something.
Nicole Kidman is becoming so Botoxed that soon she’s going to have to have an emotional stunt double for her movies. Either that, or she can just play replicants for the rest of her life.
Actually, my gossip blogger self can respond to that: She quit the botox AND the bleach. She’s got wrinkles and grey roots. It does my heart good to see them.
Really? Because she’s pregnant though, right? Mark my words, the day the baby comes, a hairdresser will be in the delivery room with a box of red dye number 2, and a doctor will be standing by with a syringe, waiting to paralyze her face again.
“I can’t even imagine being a fortysomething man trying to date age-appropriate, financially secure women; there would be no clues at all in her face if you happened to say something that struck a nerve”
Um. Since when do men pick up on subtle female facial expressions? In my [limited] experience, men pretty much require a blow from a sledge hammer to even guess they may have struck a nerve.
Hey, I’d do the op if I could be sure of being alive at the end of it – anything is better than how I look now (I have never recovered from a man seeing me from across a crowded room and running from the room. I think he was screaming inside.) Believe me, La Rivers would be an improvement on what I see in the mirror :-/
Philipa, darling, don’t tell fibs. I’ve seen your photo. And if the day ever comes when that loverly smile gets all wrinkly, you can wear shorter skirts and stun your victim with your legs before you pounce.
Rrrrr!
My ‘victim’ took one look at my legs and ran…
Grrrrr!
Mind you he did stand up to get a better look before he ran..
Thanks Metro ;-)
max, max. I know, but we have to give them a chance, don’t we?
Philipa, it’s not your outside that scares away the men you like. It’s your inside; you’re just too much woman for the neebling control queens you seem to encounter.
Raincoaster – as ever your wisdom inspires me.
But what does ‘neebling’ mean?