I was priviliged to watch 45 minutes of tonight’s Extreme Makeover, wherein a future husband and wife decided to undergo tremendous amounts of plastic surgery on screen.
It’s quite obvious that the dominant aesthetic that ties all of these “medical” and radical surgery procedures together is a Northern European one. In each case of “after,” the men and women look more white, their noses straightened, their eyes enlarged, their chins made stronger. I studied Greek and Roman art many years ago (as did many Germans in the 1930s) but our unspoken and unacknowledge popular inheritance of racist preferences seems unstoppable.
Just when we were starting to think miscegenation is okay and that Latinos can look white and that Jews can look Arab, we have to undergo (or go under) the knife yet again.