Cosmetic surgery is a very old practice, and understanding its history might help to understand the practice.. People have used various methods of body modificationg surgery since the stone age. " This medical specialty is ancient, dating back to 800 B.C., when hieroglyphics describe crude skin grafts. ... A long time ago... Jewish slaves had clefts in their ears. And some of the first plastic-surgery operations were to remove those signs of stigma." (Slater) Even today, many "primitive" tribes use many different forms of cosmetic modification. For example, they may use piercings

Cosmetic surgery is good because it allows for personal empowerment. One group of people who do a great deal of cosmetic surgery are the modern primitives, who are more or less defined as a group by "their variety of body modifications. [and]... desire to explore and experience the body as a method to express themselves in ways society finds difficult to tolerate." (Larkin) They speak of the way in which, by altering the body, one can bring the physical into alignment with the spiritual. "There is a growing group of individuals who are camouflaging the scars of their mastectomies and bums with meaningful tattoos that represent 'beauty' and 'symbolic healing.'" (Selekman) By removing or altering scars or other problems, one can help to heal the emotional trauma associated with them. The earliest known cosmetic surgeries mentioned earlier were no doubt partly of this sort -- seeking to remove the memory of having been a slave.

How one appears is very important to the way in which one feels about one's self. This is so true that an entire psychological disorder has been discovered called "gender dysphoria," dealing with the ill affects of feeling that one is a specific gender while looking like the other one. Sexual reassignment surgery (which is also a cosmetic surgery) is used in these cases so that an individual can feel "like herself" because the body and the inner picture of the self line up. Even in less severe cases, a person might not really feel like themselves if they do not look as they imagine themselves looking in their minds. Sociologist Charles Cooley talks about the "looking glass self, [which] is formed by our imagination of the way we appear in the eyes of others... If we are lucky, we feel pride in that imagined self; if not, we feel mortification." (Elliot) Cosmetic surgery can heal that looking glass self, so that a person can feel spiritually at home in their body and physically empowered to deal with others.

Finally, cosmetic surgery is good because it is a physical way of laying claim to one's right to do whatever one wishes with one's own life and body. Cosmetic surgeries, especially those which are the most radical, are like planting a flag in one's body and screaming out "this is my territory, no one else can define it." This is part of the motivation for those who do extreme modifications. It is also important even with normal surgeries, to some degree. By allowing cosmetic surgery, our culture is acknowledging that no one has such a pressing interest in the body of an individual as that individual themselves. Whenever society or the government interferes in the medical decisions of an individual -- including those regarding elective or cosmetic surgery-- they are asserting that society has more of a right to a person's body than that person does. Cosmetic surgery proves the opposite.

Changing how one looks not only changes how people treat an individual, it can also quite literally change the roles tha

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Approximate Word count = 2005
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)