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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