Beauty Womens Bodies and The Law Performances in Plastic Jocelynne A Scutt Full Chapter PDF

Beauty, Women's Bodies and the Law:
Performances in Plastic Jocelynne A.

Scutt
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmass.com/product/beauty-womens-bodies-and-the-law-performances-in-
plastic-jocelynne-a-scutt/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...
The Wiley Handbook on What Works with Girls and Women

in Conflict with the Law Shelley L. Brown
https://ebookmass.com/product/the-wiley-handbook-on-what-works-
with-girls-and-women-in-conflict-with-the-law-shelley-l-brown/
Aboriginal Women, Law and Critical Race Theory:

Storytelling From The Margins Nicole Watson
https://ebookmass.com/product/aboriginal-women-law-and-critical-
race-theory-storytelling-from-the-margins-nicole-watson/
Gendered Identity and the Lost Female: Hybridity as a

Partial Experience in the Anglophone Caribbean
Performances Shrabani Basu
https://ebookmass.com/product/gendered-identity-and-the-lost-
female-hybridity-as-a-partial-experience-in-the-anglophone-
caribbean-performances-shrabani-basu/
Techniques in Ophthalmic Plastic Surgery: A Personal

Tutorial 2nd Edition Jeffrey A. Nerad Md
https://ebookmass.com/product/techniques-in-ophthalmic-plastic-
surgery-a-personal-tutorial-2nd-edition-jeffrey-a-nerad-md/
Bodies, Noise and Power in Industrial Music Jason
Whittaker
https://ebookmass.com/product/bodies-noise-and-power-in-
industrial-music-jason-whittaker/
Bodies, Noise and Power in Industrial Music Jason

Whittaker
https://ebookmass.com/product/bodies-noise-and-power-in-
industrial-music-jason-whittaker-2/
Women in the History of Science: A Sourcebook Harrison

Wills
https://ebookmass.com/product/women-in-the-history-of-science-a-
sourcebook-harrison-wills/
The Experience of Beauty in the Middle Ages Mary

Carruthers
https://ebookmass.com/product/the-experience-of-beauty-in-the-
middle-ages-mary-carruthers/
Plastic Surgery-Craniofacial, Head and Neck Surgery-

Pediatric Plastic Surgery 4th Edition Geoffrey C.
Gurtner
https://ebookmass.com/product/plastic-surgery-craniofacial-head-
and-neck-surgery-pediatric-plastic-surgery-4th-edition-geoffrey-
c-gurtner/
Beauty, Women’s
Bodies and the Law
Performances in Plastic
Jocelynne A. Scutt
Beauty, Women’s Bodies and the Law
Jocelynne A. Scutt
Beauty, Women’s
Bodies and the Law
Performances in Plastic
Jocelynne A. Scutt
University of Buckingham
Buckingham, UK
ISBN 978-3-030-27997-4 ISBN 978-3-030-27998-1 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27998-1
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc.
in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such
names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for
general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and informa-
tion in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither
the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with
respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been
made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps
and institutional affiliations.
Cover illustration: © Alex Linch/shutterstock.com
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Contents
1 Introduction—The Body Plastic 1

1 Brain & Body, Brain vs Body 1
2 The Body Perfect/Imperfect 5
3 The Body as Image 11
4 My Body, Your Opinion 16
5 The Body as ‘I’ 20
2 The Body Beneath the Knife 29

1 The Body in the Beauty Parlour 30
2 The Body on the Operating Table 42
3 The Criminal Body and the Body in Crime 58
4 The Criminal, the Civil and the Role of the Law 66
3 Above the Shoulder Blades 79

1 Her Crowning Glory 79
2 Oh! My Face … a Retroussé Nose & Pinned Ears 88
3 Around the Eyes & Rounded Eyes … 97
4 For Bee-Stung Lips, Whiter-Than-White Teeth, Receding
Chins & Measures Under the Neck 102
5 Plastic Faces or ‘The New Normal’? 109
v
vi CONTENTS
4 All Above the Waist 119

1 Over and Above the Bosom 120
2 Bust, Bosom, Breasts … 134
3 Reclaiming Our Bodies, Our Selves—Beginning
with Breasts & Chests 150
5 Below the Belt and Under the Waist … 165

1 Muffin Top Madness 165
2 Around the Fatty Abdomen 171
3 Within the Fatty Abdomen 180
4 What Lies Beneath … 187
5 Bad Body Hair … Comes Good? 198
6 Our Rounded Bits … 211

1 Rounding Up vs Rounding Down 212
2 The Bottom as Bustle … 219
3 Bottoms, Hips, Thighs … 222
4 Exposing My Midriff or Where Are My Abs? 232
5 Suction Up, Suction Down 236
7 Extremities: From the Tips of Her Fingers to the Tips

of Her Toes 249
1 The Moons of My Nails, O’er My Elegant Hands … 249
2 Upon Raising Her Arms to the Sky 257
3 From My Elbows to the Bush Within My Armpits 262
4 Legs, Knees, Ankles & Feet … 269
5 Feet, Ankles, Knees & Legs … 274
6 To the Tips of Her Toes— 279
7 Fingers, Hands, Nails, Toes—The Extremities That
Count 283
8 Conclusion: Beyond the Body … 297

1 Recovering the Body … 298
2 My Body, My Self— 307
Bibliography 325
Index 373
CHAPTER 1
Introduction—The Body Plastic
Desiring normality
she was labelled with vanity
Whilst some said she chose
every change to her body
In plastic
1 Brain & Body, Brain vs Body

The painter Gwen John was both gifted artist and muse to the sculptor
Rodin. She painted and she posed, exercising cerebral artistry and phys-
ical dexterity in her own work whilst responding intellectually and bodily
to Rodin’s creativity. For an artist, painting is creative and physically
demanding. This is nowhere better exhibited than through Gwen John’s
Self -Portrait in a Red Blouse.1 In the biography Gwen John—A Life,
Sue Roe explains that the picture ‘would have required endless, metic-
ulous concentration’.2 Finding it physically strenuous, even exhausting,
Gwen John herself ‘likened painting in oils to doing housework’.3 Her
words are echoed by women working in the arts, including sculpture,4
ceramics,5 photography,6 craft,7 filmmaking8 and directing.9 As director
and filmmaker Karen Buczynski-Lee says:
© The Author(s) 2020 1

J. A. Scutt, Beauty, Women’s Bodies and the Law,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27998-1_1
2 J. A. SCUTT
Making a film is like constructing a jigsaw puzzle, moving, thinking and

communicating multidimensionally to translate artistic vision into the film
medium. Without physical and mental multitasking, filmmaking cannot
happen.10
This epitomises Gwen John’s life. In her work, as in the work of the
sculptor Camille Claudel,11 another of Rodin’s muses, she exemplified
the reality that women are both brains and body, body and mind.
Yet the way women’s bodies have been regarded over time tends to
undercut this truth. It is not simply that many looking upon the work of
artists or sculptors may fail to realise that the figure of the woman there
represented is more than body, more than emotional energy or inspi-
ration for the man (as it usually is)12 who painted or sculpted her. In
all life’s realms, woman-as-body rather than woman-as-mind or, better
still, woman-as-mind-and-body, has a propensity to dominate. Thus, the
invention of photography and film heralded new ways to represent women
in the same old way. Woman-as-body was confirmed and promoted
through these new mediums, harbingers of the twentieth-century inven-
tion of the beauty contest13 and the film actor as star, then as celebrity.
In the Countess de Castiglione, Abigail Solomon-Godeau provides an
example of the way photography solidified the traditional notion of
woman-as-object, despite the Countess’ engagement as a director of her
own images, bringing ingenuity, creativity, skill and knowledge of the
camera and what it could do. As Solomon-Godeau recounts, from the
mid- to the end of the nineteenth century, Countess de Castiglione was
photographed relentlessly by Louis Pierson of Mayer & Pierson.14 On
some accounts, in her younger years, then as she aged, photographers
Adolph Braun and Gaston Braun respectively trained their lenses untir-
ingly upon her, too. Yet she was equally untiring. This woman who has
historically been depicted as a willingly accommodating human object was
anything but. However apparently compliant in the eye of the camera
(and the cameraman) she might appear, the Countess was at work, mind
and body. Both famous and infamous in her pursuit of the celluloid
image, she was photographed in poses unconventional for one of her class,
déshabillé, legs akimbo and flying, head winsomely leaning towards the
camera.
Styling her essay ‘The Legs of the Countess’, Abigail Solomon-Godeau
reclaims the Countess as actor and director of herself as subject. She
draws attention to the three types of women who publicly populated the
period of the Second (French) Empire and the Third (French) Republic
when the Countess figured in the eye of the lens. These three were the
1 INTRODUCTION—THE BODY PLASTIC 3
prostitute, uniting (to paraphrase Solomon-Godeau) in her person both

the commodity and the seller; the dancer or actress being ‘the spec-
tacle within the spectacle – who is perceived as a type of circulating
goods’; and the ‘beautiful, worldly woman’, both idea and ideal ‘end-
lessly hypostatized, scrutinized and dissected’.15 It was at this time that
Karl Marx wrote ‘The Fetishism of Commodities’.16 Solomon-Godeau
remarks and reflects upon this, drawing attention to the increasing fetishi-
sation and commodification of women and women’s bodies during this
period. Simultaneously, the industrial revolution led to a downgrading of
skills on which women prided themselves and for which they had had
some acknowledgement. Industrialisation homogenised production and,
hence, the work and the workers creating the product. Women as workers
took on the role of automaton in the factory, or body on the street.
Women who did not work in the world of industry became celebrated
as ‘the lilies of the field’.17 Idealised as neither toiling nor spinning, they
graced society as objects to be looked upon, their value lying in the bodies
they inhabited and the clothes they wore.18
The following century, the focus on women’s bodies, and women as
bodies, if anything deepened. Women’s attention to their own bodies
as if they were canvases to be worked upon and titivated, transformed
and changed at the hands of women themselves, or through the hands
of others employed to renovate their person, intensified. Writing in
1993, Susan Bordo examined this phenomenon. She expressed concern
that in the 1980s, ‘a decade marked by the reopening of the public
arena to women’, women were ‘spending more time on the manage-
ment and discipline of our bodies than we have in a long, long time’.19
For Bordo, the principal influence in this is not ‘chiefly … ideology’,
but ‘the organization and regulation of the time, space, and move-
ments of our daily lives’. This, she said, ‘trains, shapes and impresses’
women’s bodies with ‘the stamp of prevailing historical forms of selfhood,
desire, masculinity, femininity’.20 Women’s bodies, rather than brains,
were foregrounded, the trap set by ever-increasing cosmetics and perfume
production—alongside a growing aesthetic, cosmetic and plastic surgery
industry.
Today’s women, Susan Bordo posits, are engaged in the pursuit of
‘an ever-changing, homogenizing, elusive ideal of femininity’, a pursuit
without end.21 Women are required constantly to ‘attend to minute and
often whimsical changes in fashion’. Women’s bodies thereby become
‘docile bodies—bodies whose forces and energies are habituated to
4 J. A. SCUTT
external regulation, subjection, transformation, improvement’. The ‘cen-

tral organizing principles’ of women’s daily lives, from when we rise in
the morning to going to bed at night, are the ‘exacting and normal-
izing disciplines of diet, makeup, and dress’.22 And, faced with this daily
regime, where our bodies are a focus of our everyday living—not from
vanity, nor from narcissism, but because this is the way lives at least in the
Western world are ordered, our bodies are never good enough.
In Flesh Wounds—The Culture of Cosmetic Surgery, Virginia L. Blum
also highlights women’s connection with their physical selves and,
through this, identifying their own physical imperfections. She refers to
‘the perceived flaws of the female body’,23 providing an opening for
plastic surgeons who view themselves ‘as “healers” of cosmetic defects’.24
They see their work, too, as healing the ‘emotional desperation’ of women
who detect flaws in their bodies writ large—sufficiently large, that is, to
seek the surgeon’s scalpel. Surgeons, Blum writes, conceive of their work
not as damaging healthy bodies, but as ‘helping’ women to reconstruct
not only their bodies, but their lives. Albeit on the one hand appre-
hended as miracle work, making and remaking the ideal, the work they
do on women’s bodies is ‘maintenance’, says one surgeon. The obligation
falling upon women is that akin to the good householder who paints the
house regularly, as required.25 In the same vein, the good householder
would ensure that the gutters are kept free of weeds and bird droppings,
leaves and other detritus, or repair bulging window frames and shutters,
or replace or reorder sagging brickwork and tiles gone awry. Unable to do
this alone, the householder must call upon the skilled services of special-
ists. When maintenance of women’s bodies is required, therefore, the
skilled specialist provides the answer.
Virginia Blum identifies a moralism creeping in. Middle-class morality
requires home upkeep. This segues effortlessly into a moral imperative for
the ageing woman. Here, Blum apprehends the work of Robin Tolmach
Lakoff and Rachel L. Scherr who in Face Value: The Politics of Beauty
observe that sometimes ‘in the popular media it is suggested that a woman
has a virtual moral duty – to herself and those who must behold her …’.
This requires that she ‘remove those wrinkles and bags, tuck that tummy,
raise those breasts’.26 Or, rather, that she seek out an aesthetic, cosmetic
or plastic surgeon to do so.
The imperative of normality infuses the surgeon’s exposition and justi-
fication, too. If twenty-five years classifies as maturity and if, at this age, a
woman ‘had exactly the right amount of skin coming from the brow down
to the first fold [of the eye or the neck] and exactly the right amount of
skin coming to the eyelashes … and that was normal, then is it normal to
allow time to change it’? The question is clearly rhetorical, for of course
it is not ‘normal’, in the surgeon’s eyes, to ‘allow’ change whereby ‘the
skin begins to slide down over the jaws and the bags begin to show’.27
This notion of what is normal harks back to the ancients and their ideas
of female bodily construction as perfection. In Femininity Susan Brown-
miller recalls that the classical Greeks determined what was ‘perfect’, as
did the Goths, whilst the Renaissance envisioned another shape and form
as the ideal.28 For the Greeks, ‘in the perfect female torso the distance
between the nipples of the breasts, the distance from the lower edge of
the breast to the navel, and the distance from the navel to the crotch were
units of equal length’.29 With the coming of the Goths, this changed:
Centuries later, the Gothic ideal was strikingly different. With the breasts
reduced to oval spheres … ‘distressingly small’, and with the stomach
expanded to a long ovoid curve that suggests an advanced state of preg-
nancy, at least to the modern eye, … ‘the navel is exactly twice as far down
the body as it is in the classical scheme’.30
Contrarily, perfection of form in Renaissance Italy was demonstrated by ‘a

rounded body’, sporting ‘full hips and large breasts’. This vision should be
topped off by ‘strawberry blonde hair’ above a high forehead, the whole
embraced by ‘pale skin’.31
2 The Body Perfect/Imperfect

The female archetype does not remain static. Nor does ‘everyone’
conform or strive to do so. Sometimes resistance to the demands of
appearance and bodily construction (whether real or created by dress,
fashion and other artifice) surface, as Elizabeth Shackleton’s Pocket
Diaries of 1765 and 1766 reveal.32 In The Gentleman’s Daughter,
Amanda Vickery writes of Shackleton and her fellow Georgians, their
habits as consumers of fashion and household accoutrements, and their
place on the social scene. Elizabeth Shackleton was not, observes Vickery,
a ‘slavish imitator of elite modes, nor a passive victim of the velocity of
fashion’. Such lack of conformity, insurrection even, was supported by her
recording in her Pocket Diary a sardonic poem, mordantly mocking the
6 J. A. SCUTT
demands placed upon women’s bodies to comply with prevailing social

strictures:
Shepherds I have lost my waist. Have you seen my body?

Sacrificed to modern taste, I’m quite a Hoddy Doddy.
Never shall I see it more, Till common sense returning
My body to my legs restore, then I shall cease from mourning.
For Fashion I that part forsook where sages plac’d the belly
Tis lost and I have not a nook for cheesecakes, tarts or jelly!33
Nonetheless the imperative that governs women’s appearance infuses

every age, so that at the end of the eighteenth- and into the nineteenth-
century Britain revered a particular look, hair along with facial features
playing a vital role. Hence, the Duchess of Devonshire, aunt to Lady
Caroline Lamb who was later worshipped then pilloried for her looks,
her rejection of convention, and her ‘tempestuous … liaison’ with Lord
Byron, possessed ‘red-gold curling hair, grey eyes, and an always laughing
mouth’.34 Her sister Henrietta, Lady Bessborough, ‘had dark eyes and
hair and a softer less lively disposition’. This led Elizabeth Jenkins, Caro-
line Lamb’s biographer, to nominate Henrietta as ‘altogether perhaps the
more interesting of the two’. However, the perspective formed through
an early twentieth-century woman’s eyes and intellect was not replicated
when the women lived, for the Duchess was considered by the society of
the time as ‘the most fascinating woman of the age’. Her sister rated not
so well.35
Forward, then, to the Victorian era, where the dominant paradigm
featured women showcasing nipped-in waists, their bodies conforming
to the required ‘hourglass’ shape, hips and bosom swelling above and
below into rounded perfection. The look was achieved by the wearing of
tightly structured corsets which pulled women’s bodies into a smoothly
sculpted form.36 In Victorians Undone—Tales of the Flesh in the Age of
Decorum, Kathryn Hughes recounts the contradictions between the way
a woman’s body should be, and the way the body of a woman might
be represented in art.37 Dante Gabriel Rossetti painted his muse, Fanny
Cornforth (aka Sarah Cox), ‘from the torso up’, her brocaded costume
‘falling open to reveal her thick pillar of a neck and her creamy chest’.38
Her body is ‘plush’ with a ‘tumble of red-gold hair’ falling over her
forehead, disclosing ‘facial features [that] are full but not quite heavy’.
Painted in 1859, the portrait, known as Bocca Baciata, displayed the ‘tilt
of her head tactfully foiling the beginning of a double chin’,39 such arti-
fice able to be avoided had the twentieth-century surgeon’s knife been so
readily available as now. Indeed, when it first went on display, the sitter’s
body was regarded as wanton, her style that of a floosy, her bulges and
her features poorly reminiscent of those required of the ‘good’ Victo-
rian lady.40 The painting was likened to a foreign print, a euphemism
for the pornographic representations that came into popularity through
distribution in seaside towns of these images on postcards.
The passing of the age of Victoria brought with it a new ideal. In The
Spectacular Modern Woman—Feminine Visibility in the 1920s, Liz Conor
recounts the influence of photography, film and beauty competitions in
dictating how a ‘real’ woman should look in the 1920s and 1930s.41
She was flat bosomed, narrow hipped, long of leg, with pretty knees,
elbows and wrists, her slender calves tapering towards well-turned ankles.
As Conor observes, the ideal was rarely if ever achieved by reason of
nature. She cites Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov, who perfected through
montage the archetypal woman of film:
I shot a scene of a woman at her toilette: she did her hair, made up, put
on her stockings and shoes and dress – I filmed the face, the head, the
hair, the legs, the feet of different women, but I edited them as if it was
all one woman …42
‘Thanks to my montage’, he averred, ‘I succeeded in creating a woman

who did not exist in reality but only in cinema’.43
From the last century and into the present, the demand for the ideal
travels to the most intimate parts of a woman’s body, with culture, race
and ethnicity playing their part. Notions of womanly perfection as allied
to cultural, racial and ethnic imperatives formed part of the contradictory
response to the Fanny Cornforth portrait. Some viewers swam against
the tide by declaring it ‘a superb thing, so awfully lovely’, focussing
particularly on her lips.44 These were described as ‘slack’ or Mulatto
lips, despised on the one hand, yet longed for on the other, for what
they represented: sexual availability and pleasure. This is reminiscent of
the contradictory approach to women’s lips when reddened by rouge
or, later, lipstick: the colouring being associated with actresses, prosti-
tutes or fallen women. It brings into play, too, the paradox of Western
or Anglo-Saxon features being prized over African, Middle Eastern or
Asian characteristics, whilst some at the same time being secretly admired
8 J. A. SCUTT
and imitated. Bee-stung lips, achieved by design not nature, today imitate
Fanny Cornforth’s mouth. The Brazilian butt lift seeks to enable women’s
flat bottoms to imitate the rounded curves of their African sisters. These
complimentary imitations are matched in the reverse by the renuncia-
tion of and growing revulsion for vulva that are perceived to be other
than perfect. The growing demand for labiaplasty (‘cosmetic labiaplasty
surgery’ or CLS) revives the vision of the ‘Hottentot Venus’ with her
rounded buttocks and ‘elongated’ labia minora.
In 1810, Sarah Bartmann, a Khoi woman from the Cape of Good
Hope, was brought to London as a slave, then becoming an exhibit,
representing female African sex and sexuality.45 As Camille Nurka and
Bethany Jones note in ‘Labiaplasty, Race and the Colonial Imagination’,
the protrusion of Sarah Bartmann’s labia minora from between the labia
majora was a bodily conformation observed a century earlier by Captain
Cook in his excursions around the Cape. As Nurka and Jones confirm,
Khoi women’s genitals were the subject of scientific interest.46 ‘Enlarged’
labia were classed as signifying lower evolutionary development, with
Nurka and Jones remarking, too, upon the association of this genital
design with a lack of cleanliness, sexual laxity and even a propensity
towards prostitution. Sarah Bartmann was charged with suffering from a
bodily dysfunction or distortion, labial hypertrophy. This classification of
a normal bodily construction as abnormal or deformed, Nurka and Jones
postulate as associated with the addition of labiaplasty to the contempo-
rary clinician’s repertoire. ‘Racial and sexual deviancy’, they acknowledge,
‘are no longer readily apparent in the medical literature – presumably
because they are recognised as belonging to a flawed scientific explanatory
model …’. However, this ‘does not mean that they do not still resonate
in what we might call the “white cultural unconscious” as a central moti-
vating force in the desire for labiaplasty’.47 The ‘containment’ of the
body, Nurka and Jones affirm, ‘as well as cleanliness’, provide a core
feature to the way in which labiaplasty is marketed to women.48 This
is a reminder of ‘deeply held anxieties about feminine non-conformity’
which are exploited by the aesthetic, cosmetic and plastic surgery industry.
Women themselves inculcate these anxieties, which reach expression, too,
in the market for skin-whitening and hair-straightening products which
can be dangerous, with life-changing consequences.49 As for labiaplasty,
dangers lie in the increased attention paid by clinics to so-called labial
hypertrophy. This is replicated in the minds of today’s women who travel,
in increasing numbers, to the operating tables of aesthetic, cosmetic and
plastic surgeons seeking to have this ‘excess’, ‘excessive’ or ‘surplus’ tissue

excised.
Whilst accepting Susan Bordo’s thesis that it is the ordinary, everyday
routine that focuses women’s attention on the body, that so many
women are propelled into the world of aesthetic, cosmetic or plastic
surgery with its consequent dangers, together with the potential for
dissatisfaction, requires further explanation. It is consistently attributed
to motives beyond the daily routine. Sometimes, body dysmorphia or
body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) is alluded to. In ‘Body Dysmor-
phic Disorder in Plastic Surgery’, Kashyap K. Tadisina, Karan Chopra
and Devinder P. Singh observe that BDD is defined by three prin-
cipal characteristics. First comes ‘an obsession or preoccupation with
a minor or non-existent flaw in physical appearance’.50 Secondly, this
‘causes functional impairment or significant distress’ which, thirdly, ‘is
not explained by another psychological disorder’.51 Patients are generally
youthful, with the obsession growing from the mean age of approxi-
mately 16 years, until the first surgical consultation is generally sought
when they are in their thirties. Tadisina, Chopra and Singh identify the
‘distinguishing symptom of BDD’ as ‘significant body image dissatisfac-
tion’ accompanied by ‘obsessive-compulsive behaviors, including mirror
gazing, comparing personal features, excessive camouflaging, skin picking,
reassurance seeking and even “self-surgery” practices’.52 Rather than seek
psychiatric help, as a consequence of ‘poor insight’, BDD sufferers are
likely to consult plastic surgeons. Although referral to a psychiatrist is
recommended, a plastic, aesthetic or cosmetic surgeon has a discretion
as to whether to operate to satisfy the patient. This can be unwise, for
research has it that BDD sufferers are unlikely to be satisfied and can react
by engaging in ‘violent or threatening behavior toward their surgeon’.53
Eva Fisher’s study undertaken in 2012 of 225 members of a BDD
support group found that principal discussion incorporated disclosure of
personal experiences and asking about the experiences of others, seeking
support, engaging in conversations and telling stories. Concerns about
appearance were high on the list, with comments relating to ‘feeling ugly,
depressed, guilty, ashamed, angry, and suicidal’ along with disclosure of
‘compulsive behaviours’. These included constant checking of appearance
in mirrors or photographs and social comparisons, whilst plastic surgery
topped the list in this category of contributions,54 consistent with the
findings of Tadisina, Chopra and Singh.55
10 J. A. SCUTT
Nevertheless, perusal of the literature confirms that BDD is attributed

to a small number only of those seeking bodily changes.56 The vast
numbers walking into clinics and being wheeled into operating theatres
are not relegated to the realms of those suffering psychiatric illness.
Women seeking or undergoing procedures are frequently cited as saying
they are driven by a wish to appear normal’.57 Some researchers and
surgeons say it is nature and the wish to gain a ‘natural’ appearance, or the
desire to achieve ‘normality’.58 Some writers raise a desire for ‘beauty’ or
the spectre of a self-centredness, egotism, women’s narcissism or conceit
in endeavouring to gain and claim bodily perfection.59 Others assert that
agency is the driving force, the woman taking control over her body,
appearance and shape, making decisions wholly attributable to her and
her capacity for and exercise of choice.60 Research from Australia sees
the impact of Covid-19 generating an upsurge in facelifts—not able to
fly abroad on holidays, women have spare funds, with lockdown meaning
they can hide away without suspicions of their ‘having work done’, and
facemasks meaning they can conceal bruising when outdoors.61 The
same research identifies Zoom meetings, a consequence of the coron-
avirus pandemic, revealing to women their ‘turkey’ throats, teeth, nose
and eye ‘defects’, requiring beauty treatments, surgical and non-surgical
procedures, and a need to adjust the configuration of their smiles.
However, the proposition that there is a sole motivation for any woman
is too superficial a way to analyse what is happening here. A multiplicity
of factors may spawn the desire, but what is clear is that ultimately the
shape, size, dimensions and nature of women’s bodies and how they are
transformed is driven not by women, but by how the ‘perfect body’ is
seen in the eyes of the surgeon or practitioner implementing the changes
a woman says she needs. Just as the fashion industry is dominated by male
designers, the aesthetic, cosmetic and plastic surgery industry is peopled
in the main by male protagonists. Elizabeth Morgan in The Complete
Book of Cosmetic Surgery: A Candid Guide for Men, Women and Teens ,62
draws attention to the tradition of the ‘before’ and ‘after’ photographs
intrinsic to the industry. These images are employed by practitioners and
appear in magazines and advertisements, persuading women that they too
should enter into the world of the new body, the improved body, the
‘after’ replacing the ‘before’. Seeing danger in these projections, Morgan
observes that the ‘illusion of change of character can be added to the
photographs, so that “improvement” becomes a quality of the repre-
sentation’. Thus, as prospective patients or clients, women see in these
photographs that not only can the body be changed, but with change to
the body comes enhancement to the personality or a personality boost.
At the hands of the surgeon, the person as a whole is changed. Surgery is
represented as wreaking miracle conversions of a woman not only into a
beauty but into belle of the ball, conversationalist, and ‘new woman’ all
in one, although this is not driven, or necessarily driven, by a desire to
increase the number of beaus. Following this theme, in Making the Body
Beautiful—A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery,63 Sander L. Gilman
remarks upon the impact of photography. There is, he says, a ‘constant
bleed between the world of medical photography and the general world
of visual culture’.64 These images represent that the surgeon’s prowess
lies not only in ‘altering the body, but also … the altered state of mind of
the patient’.65
3 The Body as Image

Television has taken this into an extended visual territory. As Susie
Orbach’s Bodies explains, television’s many makeover shows, including
The Swan, 10 Years Younger, Extreme Makeover ‘show a relentless display
of the ordinary body – usually female – in the process of reconstruc-
tion’.66 These entertainment programmes incorporate the ‘before’ and
‘after’ exemplar. Women’s ‘cheekbones, teeth, noses, lips, wrinkles, lines,
breasts, pecs, legs, bums’ are acted upon. Together with ‘chins, feet, labia,
stomachs, midriffs, hairlines, ears, necks, skin colouration, body hair’ they
‘become putty in the hands of cosmetic surgeons, dentists and dermatol-
ogists’.67 Such transformations are projected as both enormously skilled,
though easy, with fairy tales such as Cinderella and the Ugly Duckling
coming to mind, although The Mermaid, living her life above the sea as
if she were walking perennially on razor blades, may be more apt. Danger
and risk are hidden. Yet just as they exist in the operating theatre and the
clinic, they lie on the set and in the television studio, albeit unseen or
concealed, a veiled or unacknowledged warning that body renovation can
be hazardous.
Alongside the surgical dimension of the body-changing explosion lies
the parallel world of the beauty industry. At the hands of these profes-
sionals, the hairdressers, manicurists, pedicurists, beauticians and the
like, transformations are again projected often as the natural outcome.
Though in this, as in the surgical dimension, what is ‘natural’ has a
particular meaning. Every woman who walks into the salon or spa will
12 J. A. SCUTT
walk out a new woman, hair, hands, feet, nails, lips, eyelashes renewed
and changed, so that not only her features are transformed but her
self and even her life are transfigured. The beauty industry is popu-
lated mainly by women working on women’s bodies. Products they use
remain as women invented them or are lines descended from many orig-
inally devised by women, including African American inventors Theora
Stephens (hair pressing and refined curling iron)68 and Lyda Newman
(patented hairbrush featuring health, brushing and efficiency improve-
ments),69 and cosmeticians such as Polish-American Helena Rubenstein
(skin and perfume products).70 Consumerism is a driving force, which
Laurie Pennie identifies in her work, Meat Market—Female Flesh Under
Capitalism, as ‘punishing and policing’ women’s bodies through a
barrage of thousands of seemingly endless messages ‘informing us that
we do not look young enough, slim enough, white enough and willing
enough’.71 The messages are both subtle and direct, advancing into every
woman’s personal space and psyche through public sources including film,
television, advertising and print media, and added to by women’s friends,
colleagues and acquaintances. Laurie Pennie concludes that women are
‘corralled into rituals of consumption and self-discipline that sustain a
bloated global market in beauty, diet, fashion and grooming products’,
to women ‘three quarters of [whom live] in countries where food is plen-
tiful [but they] go hungry every day in an effort to take up as little space
as possible’.72 Anorexia nervosa, bulimia, and body dysmorphic disorder
(BDD), along with dangerous surgery and dangerous products are part
of this consumer culture and an outcome of it.
Yet that danger and risk accompanies the changes to their bodies
sought by women in surgeries and beauty parlours, and that women are
prepared to submit themselves to the danger and risk, leads inexorably
to the question of what is the driving force. Women are not helpless
in this, and research shows them variously asserting they ‘want to be
normal’, or ‘beautiful’.73 In this, they assert their agency as they define it.
Choosing the surgeon or practitioner, selecting the operation or proce-
dure, this is an assertion of ‘I will make my body as I want it’. However,
the practitioners operate as artisans, moulding women’s bodies to their
own specifications and perspective as to what is a woman, what is aesthet-
ically pleasing to them … This is exemplified starkly in the commentary
of Daniel Man, author of The Art of Man: Faces of Plastics Surgery.74
Man prides himself on his ability to ‘read’ his patient. This enables him
to make her body as she wants it, he says:
I try to envision the inner person, the inner beauty and the potential that
are lying so close to the surface. When I look at her, I visualise a finished
work of art that truly expresses how she feels inside.75
He, of course, has an advantage. The ‘finished work of art’ that he envis-
ages will, all being well with his technique, proficiency, skill and all other
aspects of surgical intervention at optimal level, be his vision. Whether it
will be his patient’s is another matter. The contention that he, the plastic
surgeon, can ‘truly express how she [the patient] feels inside’ does not
follow. The result may satisfy the patient despite not being precisely as she
envisaged it. Or it may be welcomed by her as completely to her own visu-
alisation. Yet this is unlikely to be always so, not the least because another
person, whether or not an aesthetic, cosmetic or plastic surgeon with a
high regard for his own abilities, cannot see inside the head of another,
nor experience their ‘inside feelings’. On a lesser scale likely to have reso-
nance with most women, it is surely a rare woman who has not been
to a hairdressing salon with a vision of herself renewed, to find the hair-
dresser remakes her hair in the vision the hairdresser perceives as ‘right’
for the client. How many women have returned home, simply to brush
out the new hairstyle, wash it, or even re-dye it or, despite her misgivings,
wait out the time it takes for nature to take its course and her own hair,
her own look to reassert itself. It is true that sometimes, the visions are
identical or the client discovers that the hairdresser’s vision is just as she
wanted it, even though departing from her earlier instructions. That this
can happen in so relatively innocuous place as a hair salon (ignoring for
the moment more ominous and lasting hazards of hairdressing), where
hair cut generally regrows, dyes wash out and fade over time, perma-
nent waves eventually straighten, and straightened hair regains its frizz,
surely presages the chances of its happening in the dire circumstance of
an operating theatre or a clinic engaged in a non-surgical procedure of
some relative permanence. That a not insubstantial part of the business
of aesthetic, cosmetic and plastic surgeons is ‘fixing up’ their own or
other surgeons’ perceived errors or misinterpretations of what women
want76 confirms that ‘truly expressing what their patient feels inside’ is
not certain.
That the surgeon can assert he experiences the ‘inside feelings’ of
the woman who lies on his operating table is, however, instructive in
itself. How do these ‘inside feelings’ come about? To investigate the
origin is not to deny women’s intelligence, intellect, wit or capacity for
14 J. A. SCUTT
decision-making. It is, however, to give proper regard to the world in

which every woman lives where, whatever her country and wherever in
her country she lives, mainstream media and the advertising industry,
gossip and celebrity recitations via magazines or online, in social media
and by word of mouth are pervasive. No one surely asserts that men are
not influenced by advertising. Nor that advertising is not influential: its
continued and all-encompassing sweep is certainly proof enough. It is
hardly useful, therefore, to deny its impact on women. Similarly with the
media generally. To say it is influential and influences women, like men, is
not to categorise women as incapable or mindless or lacking in intellectual
capacity.
When in 2013 the UK Department of Health undertook its Review
into the Regulation of Cosmetic Interventions ,77 it commissioned a review
of the impact upon young women of the search for bodily perfection
through aesthetic, cosmetic and plastic surgery. The findings of the inde-
pendent report, Regulation of Cosmetic Interventions —Research among
Teenage Girls,78 tends to replicate the work of Suzanne Fraser carried out
in Australia, with recourse to UK and US sources, published ten years
earlier. Fraser’s book, Cosmetic Surgery, Gender and Culture,79 looked
particularly at the magazine industry. She found that nature, agency and
vanity were recurring themes in the motivations lying behind women’s
entry into the world of bodily alteration through surgery. However
not only did they surface in women’s magazines, they were replicated
commonly in popular culture as well as feminist, medical and legal
writing and discussion about cosmetic surgery.80 Most articles assumed
that women’s pursuit of beauty ‘is a natural and unquestionable prac-
tice’, albeit the ‘occasional piece’ projected the view that ‘personality,
not appearance, is what matters’. Longer articles ‘primarily informed
readers about the possibilities of cosmetic surgery, offering an emphasis
on best-case results, and engendering a generally positive attitude towards
cosmetic surgery’. The journalist going incognito or under cover to
sample the clinics’ approach and discover what was available was not
uncommon.81 Articles reviewing instances of celebrity surgery ranged
from the titillating ‘where the reader is invited to wonder at the strange,
sometimes sad and often extravagant cosmetic surgery experiences of
famous people’. Curiosity, horror, pity and admiration were encapsulated
within these tales, says Fraser, sometimes all at once. Magazines in the
glossy and more expensive category ran advertisements for surgeons and
products as well as the stories, which Fraser surmises ‘presumably helps to
shape the positive tone in which the articles [appearing in Cosmopolitan,

Cleo and Elle] are written’.82
Fraser found that articles appearing in the early 1990s not infrequently
touched on the ‘negative effects of silicone breast implants’, this coin-
ciding with debate in the United States and Australia about the availability
of these prostheses and their impact.83 Overall, her review led her to
conclude that the notion that a monolithic view of cosmetic surgery
projected by women’s magazines was unsustainable. It was ‘not feasi-
ble’ to postulate that women’s magazines ‘are universally positive on the
subject’. Nevertheless, her findings in relation to the late 1990s seem
to confirm that the breast implant scare was not lasting, with the need
for any warning or cautioning to readers being far from the minds of
magazine writers and editors: ‘articles opposing cosmetic surgery [were]
found less frequently in magazines published in 1999, compared with
those published at the beginning of the decade’. Additionally, through
the 1990s, ‘advertising and editorial functions increasingly merged to
produce features promoting cosmetic surgery and providing lists of
surgeons and clinics’. Criticism did not disappear entirely, but ‘advertising
techniques changed as higher advertising budgets were made available,
and a much larger presence in women’s magazines resulted’.84
Ten years on, the United Kingdom study, the Regulation of Cosmetic
Interventions , found that the teenage girls were ‘surrounded by images
that either “talk of” cosmetic interventions or allude to them’.85 Prin-
cipal sources of a ‘first impression’ that people could alter their bodies
by recourse to surgery were ‘programmes on television, magazines …
and other digital and social media …’. The conclusion was that these
teenagers developed an awareness of surgical alteration and enhancement
being available, through their exposure to media that was ‘accessible and
appealing to children’, despite is being aimed ostensibly at adults. Some-
times ‘mainstays’ of the girls’ reading, and sometimes ‘guilty pleasure’,
celebrity magazines including ‘OK, Heat, Closer, Look, Star, Bella and
More were … extremely influential’. These were ‘prime sources of mainly
gossip and speculation about the famous and cosmetic procedures’.86 The
study concluded that the media and advertising industries were highly
influential in the girls’ lives, just as they would be in the lives of their adult
counterparts. Some of the girls had, through accessing sites or reading
spam emails, or by the operation of cookies or pop-ups, unintentionally
invited providers into their lives:
16 J. A. SCUTT
While this research did not back up [an] earlier suggestion that providers
may be ‘grooming’ young girls of 16+ to have procedures when they
turn 18, it provides a picture of young girls being confronted by TV
programmes, adverts, emails, Tweets, videos and other social media
promoting cosmetic interventions and specific providers in different
ways.87
The findings were that ‘while many of the girls claimed to ignore’ these
influences, ‘some campaigns are clearly making an impact’. Furthermore,
some of the girls had engaged in ‘some limited sampling of the offers’.
4 My Body, Your Opinion

Peer pressure was identified by the Regulation of Cosmetic Interventions
as a significant factor for both girls and adult women, propelling them
into an acceptance of ‘the body beautiful’ to be determined by refer-
ence to cosmetic surgery standards, and to be obtained by recourse to
cosmetic procedures.88 Such sources and influences communicated expec-
tations which some of the girls recognised as ‘putting unrealistic pressure
on young people and feeding the greatest pressure of all for teenagers, the
judgement of their peers’.89 This matched earlier research looking at the
impact on adults, which found peer pressure operating significantly, too.
‘People within their extended network who had had procedures … exer-
cised a powerful influence on adults in their circle’.90 Despite this, women
tend to shy away from acknowledging the pressure to conform to conven-
tional or traditional standards of beauty comes from without. As Anuschka
Rees reports in Beyond Beautiful , in 2010 Dove conducted a study which
found 72 per cent of women saying they experienced ‘a huge amount of
pressure to look attractive’.91 Yet they attributed the pressure to them-
selves, nullifying the influence of peers, society, cosmetic companies, the
fashion industry, the beauty industry or the advertising daily imprinting
itself on their brains in the way of celebrity surgeons making celebrity
bodies into the surgeons’ conceptions of beauty. For Rees, outside influ-
ences do matter. She notes that ‘only a decade ago’ (circa 2010) cosmetic
surgery was ‘a hush-hush topic’:
Now, magazines review the newest procedures [just as] they review
designer collections, and people openly talk about trying out lip fillers for
fun and how their boob job was the best thing they ever did for themselves.
Celebrities [once] came under fire for getting plastic surgery; nowadays, no
one bats an eye when teenage celebrities show up with a whole new face
and become social media stars with beauty empires.92
This, she says, constitutes ‘the normalization of “getting work done”’,

asking whether this is ‘harmful, helpful, or no big deal’.93
Yet the continuing emphasis that aesthetic, cosmetic or plastic surgery
renders women’s bodies or parts thereof ‘normal’ or that the procedures
create ‘natural’ features is insidious if it leads girls and women into a
belief that they must achieve ‘normality’ or a ‘natural appearance’ by
resorting to the clinic and operating table. By what sleight of hand, or
resort to fallacious argument can it be asserted that ‘the natural’ proceeds
from the unnatural … namely the insertion of foreign objects (implants
for example) or products (dermal fillers, Botox et al.) into women’s
bodies? As Suzanne Fraser says, ‘nature is a culturally produced cate-
gory, containing elements that shift over time and are themselves shaped,
enabled and procured by humans’.94 Thus one finds numerous refer-
ences to natural products and procedures that will produce a natural look.
Dermal fillers are promoted as an ‘increasingly popular treatment choice
among patients in the 40-60 age group as they offer age appropriate,
and long-lasting results with very low risks of complications’.95 A ‘nat-
ural looking enhancement to lips’ is manufactured by multiple injections
of dermal filler, the discomfort being minimalised by another injection,
this time of lidocaine gel.96 These examples are replicated throughout
the literature, whether popular media or clinical treatises.
A concern that young women and girls are being led inexorably into
this world of the ‘unnatural natural’ is not where the matter should end.
Adult women are beguiled into believing that their bodies are wrong
and must be righted, with contentions that they act entirely of their own
freewill being lauded despite the danger and damage that they ‘welcome’
thereby into their bodies and lives. As Simone de Beauvoir said in the
middle of last century, ‘every individual concerned with justifying his [or
her] existence experiences his [or her] existence as an indefinite need to
transcend himself’. But, she continues:
… what singularly defines the situation of a woman is that being, like all
humans, an autonomous freedom, she discovers and chooses herself in a
world where men force her to assume herself as Other: an attempt is made
18 J. A. SCUTT
to freezer her as an object and doom her to immanence, since her tran-
scendence will be forever transcended by another essential and sovereign
consciousness.97
‘Women’s drama’, she adds, ‘lies in this conflict between the fundamental
claim of every subject, which always posits itself as essential, and the
demands of a situation that constitutes her as inessential’. Thus, one must
ask:
How, in the feminine condition, can a human being accomplish herself?

What paths are open to her? Which ones lead to dead ends? How can she
find independence within dependence? What circumstances limit women’s
freedom and can she overcome them?98
When woman has been defined as Other, how is feminine reality consti-
tuted?
In The Woman in the Body—A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction,
Emily Martin refers to the way anthropology, through a critical perspec-
tive on ‘underlying cultural assumptions in scientific visions of the body’
can ‘document ways that bodies of women and men are inevitably entan-
gled in the operations of power’. Certainly, anthropological analysis of the
aesthetic, cosmetic and plastic surgery industry would discover a cradle
of masculine power. The industry is, in the main, populated by male
surgeons. Male surgeons, in the main, carry out their work on women
patients. Far from escaping her role as ‘Other’, the woman is confirmed
in it by the very nature of the patient–doctor relationship combined with
the female–male diadem. This not to say that she is a dupe, swindled
into subjecting herself to the scalpel. But the notion that she is fully
autonomous both in that relationship and in the world which constrains
women’s freedoms through culture, socio-economic values and realities,
and the intersectionalities of class, status, race and ethnicity must be
challenged or at least questioned.
Apart from the minor incidents of concern that women are presenting
with body dysmorphia or body dysmorphic disorder (BDD), these
doctors accept that women’s concerns about their bodies are founded
in fact and that their psychological well-being is at risk if the procedures
requested are not carried out. No medical operation is lawful unless there
is a valid consent from the patient, and the operation is for the patient’s
benefit.99 As there is no physical benefit in inflicting grievous bodily harm,
actual bodily harm or unlawful wounding upon a woman’s body, which

cutting into her torso or legs, or arms or face or other body part, or
extracting or injecting fat or some other product into her body consti-
tutes, then lawful justification must be found. This requires identification
of a benefit accruing to her in the nature of well-being. Here the psycho-
logical dimension comes into play. As Virginia L. Blum says, cosmetic
surgery is arguably distinctly different from that of a general surgeon
whose work involves efforts to save lives. This is because in cosmetic
surgery ‘harm is done to a healthy body, cuts being made, blood flowing
for no known medical reason’.100 Hence, plastic surgeons are bound
to justify the work they do by recourse to the claim of psychological
necessity. The purported need to repair psychological damage replaces
the general surgeon’s role of restoring physical impairment.101 Healthy
bodies are pathologised, though care must be taken to ensure that this is
not to the extent of diagnosing body dysmorphia (BDD).
Why do these surgeons so readily accept women’s medical need to
undergo aesthetic, cosmetic or plastic surgery, when the medical world
is notorious for its failure to accept conditions classified as ‘women’s
ills’ as real? When women on the contraceptive pill presented with ‘side
effects’ in the 1960s, their complaints were rejected as psychosomatic.
Recognition of their complaints as based in reality came about only when
medical practitioners began publishing articles in respected medical jour-
nals such as The Lancet .102 Maya Dusenbery writes, in Doing Harm—The
Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed,
Misdiagnosed, and Sick, of women’s struggle to have chronic fatigue
syndrome or myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME/CFS) accepted as a phys-
ical medical condition, not as evidence of women’s purported propensity
to developing psychosomatic ‘illnesses’ or engaging in malingering.103
Maya Dusenbery reports that an Australian study carried out in 1996
and involving fifty patients found that albeit eventually diagnosed with
ME/CFS, in their search for an explanation, more women (85%) than
men (30%) had received psychiatric diagnoses:
Their expressed emotion or signs of distress appear to have influenced

the diagnosis, regardless of other symptoms. In contrast, men’s accounts
of their symptoms and their choices about treatment were usually given
credence.104
20 J. A. SCUTT
Aesthetic, cosmetic and plastic surgery remains gendered.105 Most

patients are women. Yet rather than be dismissed as pathologically chal-
lenged, the women are accepted as having real conditions requiring real
solutions involving surgery. It seems that the aesthetic challenge of ‘beau-
tifying’ women’s bodies has greater appeal than taking seriously those
medical conditions that are misdiagnosed and dismissed as all in women’s
minds.
Yet the risks and danger constituted by body beautifying treatment
in surgeries, clinics and salons, are real. The possibility of recourse to
legal action by women who have been harmed is ever present, raising
the potential application of the law. In this regard, what to make of the
assertion that women seeking this treatment and subjecting themselves to
it do so by way of untrammelled agency and unprescribed autonomy? Is
the contention that women who suffer harm and damage are entitled to
legal solutions to be dismissed as ‘victim feminism’?
5 The Body as ‘I’

In the 1990s, authors such as Christine Hoff Summers in Who Stole Femi-
nism claimed that feminism was being undermined by ‘fainting couch
feminism’106 or, as Naomi Wolf expressed it in Fire With Fire, femi-
nist assertions that women were ‘beleaguered, fragile, intuitive angels’
weakened the feminist project.107 Women, it was contended, were being
pressed into acting as victims when they should be standing up straight,
ignoring the slights and, worse, crimes committed against them. Date
rape was no offence, simply a college student who changed her mind.
Rape was exaggerated in the name of seeking sympathy. Criminal assault
at home was the fault of women seeking to get back at beleaguered
husbands, sexual harassment resulted from women’s own inappropriate
conduct and clothing on the job … Consistently with this philosophy,
women who complain about negative consequences of aesthetic, cosmetic
and plastic surgery are, like the woman date raped, seeking compensation
for having willingly hired a surgeon and should bear the consequences.
Yet do these contentions stand up to scrutiny? Women are victimised
by unlawful acts. Women suffer damage and injury through civil wrongs.
Why should women abjure legal remedies for fear of being classed as help-
less, hopeless and lost, incapable of standing up for themselves, or denying
the agency and autonomy that got them into whatever situation they are
in, in the first place? When the legal system exists to provide compensa-
tion for damage to the person no one asserts that men should not avail
themselves of it. Men are not denied the right to take legal action, or told
it is ‘victimising’ themselves to do so. Why should women be deprived of
recourse to law?
The answer requires an exploration of the multiplicity of proce-
dures now available for the manipulation of women’s bodies into bodies
conforming to external visions of female beauty and feminine form. It
demands a reply through an analysis of laws available to redress proce-
dures gone wrong. As Hannah Abel-Hirsch says of Sara VanDerBeek’s
exploration of representations of the female form in ‘Birth & Being’, an
exhibition of women’s photography:
From the earliest iterations of the female form, women have been both
empowered and burdened by symbolism. Their body is never just their
own …108
The question is whether women can regain control over our person and
personality, through actively using the law to assert rights to our own
bodies. Some would argue that through having acquiesced to external
demands of what our bodies should be, like the girl who is raped on
a date, women are denied this right. Others would say that having
readily adopted measures that recreate our bodies, women’s active agency,
ready acquiescence or compromising complicity rules out any rights to
legal redress. Ironically, this harbours a contradiction. The assertion that
women exercise untrammelled agency in changing our bodies, absent
any influence of peer pressure, advertising, custom or fashion, ironically
stands in the way of women exerting agency in claiming rights to the
law. By this diktat, women must forever be in performance, our bodies
recreated by the knife of the surgeon reducing us to plastic iterations
of our bodies ourselves. The words of Luce Irigaray sound a warning.
In Through the Looking Glass she pictures herself, standing silent for a
moment, musing. Her voice recovered, she ponders, then speaks out loud
to herself. ‘Then it really has happened, after all! And now, who am I?
I will remember, if I can!’ She is determined to do so, to regain her
memory, to remember herself. Yet determination is little help for, after
a lengthy period of puzzlement, the conundrum continues to confront
her. Who is she? She answers, the only answer she can find: ‘L, I know it
begins with L’.109
22 J. A. SCUTT
Do the changes women are making, now, to their bodies, in clinics

and surgeries and salons and beauty parlours, challenge both their and
our reality, the realities of our bodies, our brains, our intellect, our very
selves. In the process of wrapping ourselves in the plastic of procedures
undergone for perfection, do we risk, like Luce Irigaray’s alter ego, the
danger of forgetting who we are.
Notes
1. Self -Portrait in a Red Blouse, held by the Tate. See Cecily Langdale,
Gwen John, p. 18; cited Sue Roe, Gwen John—A Life, Vintage/Random
House, London, UK, 2002, pp. 33–34.
2. Sue Roe, ibid., p. 34.
3. Ibid.
4. See for example ‘Ten Female Sculptors’, Widewalls, https://www.
widewalls.ch/10-contemporary-female-sculptors/ (accessed 20 January
2020).
5. See for example ‘Judy Chicago—Biography and Legacy—American
Painter, Sculptor, and Installation Artist’, The Art Story, https://
www.theartstory.org/artist/chicago-judy/life-and-legacy/ (accessed 20
January 2020).
6. See for example Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, ‘Dorothea Lange—
American Photographer’, Encyclopaedia Britannica, https://www.britan
nica.com/biography/Dorothea-Lange (accessed 20 January 2020).
7. See ‘Judy Chicago …’, ibid.
8. ‘Kathy Mueller—Creative Community Consultant’, au.linkedin.com,
https://www.linkedin.com/in/kathy-mueller-a119a03/?originalSubd
omain=au (accessed 20 January 2020).
9. See for example Stella Duffy, ‘Here’s Why We Have to Stop
“Empowering” People’, Visionary Arts Foundation, 30 September
2019, https://visionaryarts.org.uk/stella-duffy-heres-why-we-need-to-
stop-empowering-people/ (accessed 20 December 2019); Charlotte
Higgins, ‘Women in the Theatre: Why Do so Few Make It to
the Top?’ Guardian, 10 December 2012, https://www.theguardian.
com/stage/2012/dec/10/women-in-theatre-glass-ceiling (accessed 20
February 2020); StageMilk Team, ‘What Does a Theatre Director
Do?’ StageMilk, https://www.stagemilk.com/what-does-a-theatre-direct
or-do/ (accessed 20 February 2020).
10. Personal communication, Italy, 19 February 2020; see also ‘Karen
Buczynski-Lee,’ U -tube, https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCj
l86eP-330cT6LY5f7IkZw (accessed 20 January 2020); ‘Karen
Buczynski-Lee—Professional Filmmaker’, au.linkedin.com, https://au.
linkedin.com/in/karen-buczynski-lee-73172119 (accessed 20 January

2020); ‘Tag—Karen Buczynski-Lee’, Women’s History Network, https://
womenshistorynetwork.org/tag/karen-buczynski-lee/ (accessed 20
January 2020).
11. Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, ‘Camille Claudel—French Artist’
(also known as Camille-Rosalie Claudel), https://www.britannica.com/
biography/Camille-Claudel (accessed 20 January 2020). Unfortunately,
as noted by the Editors, Camille (also known as Camille-Rosalie) Claudel
had her career as a sculptor ‘cut short’ when she was committed to an
asylum. Not uncommonly, women combining the role of muse with that
of artist-in-her-own-right experience tempestuous lives with tempestuous
endings or, sometimes, survival. See for example Naomi Blumberg, ‘9
Muses Who Were Artists’, Encyclopaedia Britannica, https://www.bri
tannica.com/list/9-muses-who-were-artists (accessed 20 January 2020).
12. On male dominance in painting and the failure to acknowledge women
in the role see for example Germaine Greer, The Obstacle Race: The
Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Work, Martin Secker & Warburg,
New York, NY, USA, 1979; reprinted Tauris Parke Paperbacks, New
York, NY, USA, 2001.
13. See Liz Conor, The Spectacular Woman—Feminine Visibility in the
1920s, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN, USA, 2004.
14. Abigail Solomon-Godeau, ‘The Legs of the Countess’, The MIT
Press, vol 39, Winter 1986, pp. 65–108, https://www.jstor.org/stable/
778313 (accessed 20 January 2020).
15. Ibid., p. 68.
16. Karl Marx, ‘The Fetishism of Commodities’ in Ian McIntosh, Classical
Sociology Theory—A Reader, New Edinburgh University Press, Edin-
burgh, UK, 1997, pp. 68–71; see also Rebecca Tromsness, ‘Marx:
Summary of “The Fetishism of Commodities”,’ OwlCation, 20 June
2014, https://owlcation.com/social-sciences/Analysis-of-Marx-The-fet
ishism-of-commodities (accessed 20 January 2020).
17. Matthew 6:28–29, 6:25–34, ‘Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious
about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your
body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body
more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor
reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are
you not of more value than they? And which of you by being anxious
can add a single hour to his span of life? And why are you anxious about
clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil
nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed
like one of these …’, or Luke 12:27, ‘Consider the lilies, how they grow:
they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory
was not arrayed like one of these.’ See ‘Consider the Lilies of the Field’,
24 J. A. SCUTT
Open Bible, https://www.openbible.info/topics/consider_the_lilies_of_

the_field (accessed 20 February 2020).
18. Ibid.
19. Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the
Body, University of California Press, Berkley/Los Angeles, CA, USA,
1995 (original publication circa 1993), p. 165.
20. Ibid., p. 167.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid., pp. 165–166.
23. Virginia L. Blum, Flesh Wounds—The Culture of Cosmetic Surgery,
University of California Press, Berkley/Los Angeles, CA, USA, 2003,
p. 81.
24. Ibid., p. 13.
25. Ibid., p. 76.
26. Robin Tolmach Lakoff and Rachel L. Schurr, Face Value: The Politics of
Beauty, Routledge, London, UK, 1984, p. 171.
27. Virginia Blum, ibid., 2017, p. 76.
28. Susan Brownmiller, Femininity, Linden Press/Simon & Schuster, New
York, NY, USA, 1984, p. 23.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid.
31. Eugene Lee Yang, Mark Celestino and Kari Koeppel, ‘Women’s
Ideal Body Types Throughout History’, Buzzfeed, https://www.buz
zfeed.com/eugeneyang/womens-ideal-body-types-throughout-history
(accessed 20 January 2020).
32. Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter—Women’s Lives in Georgian
England, Yale University Press, New Haven, CN, USA and London,
UK, 1998, pp. 174–176.
33. ‘Poem Given Me by Mrs Parker of Marshfield’, quoted Amanda Vickery,
ibid., p. 178.
34. Elizabeth Jenkins, Lady Caroline Lamb, originally published Victor
Gollancz, London, UK, 1932, Cardinal/Sphere Books, London, 1972,
p. 10.
35. Ibid., p. 9.
36. Eugene Lee Yang et al., ibid.
37. Kathryn Hughes, Victorians Undone—Tales of the Flesh in the Age of
Decorum, 4th Estate/HarperCollins, London, UK.
38. Ibid., p. 217.
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid., pp. 220–221.
41. Liz Conor, ibid.
42. Lev Kuleshov, quoted in Jay Leyda (ed), Voices of Film Experience: 1894
to the Present, Macmillan, New York, NY, USA, 1977, pp. 249–250;
quoted Scot McQuire, Visions of Modernity: Representation, Memory,
Time, and Space in the Age of the Camera, Sage, London, UK, 1997,
p. 80; Liz Conor, ibid., p. 1.
43. Ibid.
44. Kathryn Hughes, ibid., p. 221.
45. Camille Nurka and Bethany Jones, ‘Labiaplasty, Race and the
Colonial Imagination’, Australian Feminist Studies, vol 28, no
78, 2013, pp. 417–442, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08164649.2013.
868332 (accessed 20 October 2019).
46. Ibid., p. 422.
47. Ibid., p. 436.
48. Ibid.
49. See for example ‘The Dangers of Using Skin Whitening Prod-
ucts’, Oxford Biolabs, 21 June 2018, https://uk.oxfordbiolabs.com/
blogs/news/the-dangers-of-using-skin-whitening-products (accessed 19
December 2019); Caleb Backe, ‘The Dangers of Hair Straightening
Explained’, MapleHolistics, 11 November 2018, https://www.mapleh
olistics.com/blog/dangers-hair-straightening/ (accessed 19 December
2019).
50. Kashyap K. Tadisina, Karan Chopra and Devinder P. Singh, ‘Body
Dysmorphic Disorder in Plastic Surgery’, Interesting Case, 21 June 2013,
www.ePlasty.com(accessed 12 January 2020).
51. Ibid.
52. Ibid.
53. Ibid.
54. Eva E. Fisher, ‘Am I Ugly or Do I Have BDD? Personal Disclosure
and Social Support on a Body Dysmorphic Disorder Online Forum,’
PhD Dissertation, Colorado State University (CSU), Fort Collins,
Co, https://www.academia.edu/40247165/DISSERTATION_Am_I_u
gly_or_do_I_have_BDD_Personal_disclosure_and_social_support_on_a_
Body_Dysmorphic_Disorder_Online_Forum?auto=download&email_
work_card=download-paper (accessed 19 April 2020); https://mounta
inscholar.org/handle/10217/176770 (accessed 2 August 2020).
55. Tadisina, Chopra and Singh, ibid.
56. ‘Body Dysmorphic Disorder’, NHS, https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/
body-dysmorphia/ (accessed 19 December 2019).
57. See for example Kathy Davis, Reshaping the Female Body—The Dilemma
of Cosmetic Surgery, Routledge, New York, NY, USA, 1995, pp. 88–92.
58. See for example Elizabeth Haiken, Venus Envy: A History of Cosmetic
Surgery, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD, USA,
26 J. A. SCUTT
1997; Motivation and Emotion/Book/2014/Cosmetic Surgery Motiva-

tion, https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Motivation_and_emotion/Book/
2014/Cosmetic_surgery_motivation (accessed 20 January 2020). Also
Virginia Blum, ibid., pp. 76–80, citing the plastic surgeon’s view.
59. See for example Sander L. Gilman, Making the Body Beautiful—
A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery, Princeton University Press,
Princeton, NJ, USA, 1999.
60. See for example Kathy Davis, ibid., chapter 6 generally and particularly
pp. 60–64, 117, 157.
61. Zona Black, ‘Zoom Calls Have Australians Rushing for Cosmetic
Surgery’, The New Daily, https://thenewdaily.com.au/life/wellbe
ing/2020/07/20/cosmetic-surgery-coronavirus-popular/ (accessed 16
August 2020).
62. Elizabeth Morgan, The Complete Book of Cosmetic Surgery: A Candid
Guide for Men, Women, and Teens , Warner, New York, NY, USA, 1988.
63. Sanders L. Gilman, ibid.
64. Sanders L. Gilman, ibid., p. 41.
65. Ibid., p. 39.
66. Susie Orbach, Bodies , Profile Books, London, UK, 2009, 2010, 2016,
p. 81.
67. Ibid.
68. Farida Dawkins, ‘Theora Stephens’, Face2FaceAfrica, 20 March 2018,
https://face2faceafrica.com/article/womens-history-month-meet-the
ora-stephens-inventor-refined-pressing-curling-iron (accessed 20 January
2020); ‘Theora Stephens and Lyda Newman’, Black History Month,
https://www.bustle.com/articles/67033-african-american-female-invent
ors-who-created-the-beauty-products-that-we-love (accessed 20 January
2020).
69. ‘Lyda Newman (bc 1885)’, Biography, https://www.biography.com/act
ivist/lyda-newman (accessed 20 January 2020); ‘Theora Stephens …’,
ibid.
70. ‘Power Beauty Since 1902’, Helena Rubenstein.com, https://www.hel
enarubinstein.com/ (accessed 20 January 2020).
71. Laurie Penny, Meat Market—Female Flesh Under Capitalism, Zero
Books, John Hunt Publishing, Alresford, UK, 2011, p. 1.
72. Ibid.
73. See for example Kathy Davis, ibid., pp. 88–92.
74. Daniel Man and LC Faye Shelkofsky, The Art of Man: Faces of Plastic
Surgery, Beauty Art Press, Naples, FL, 1998.
75. Ibid., p. 34.
76. See for example Virginia L. Blum, ibid.
77. Department of Health, Final Report —Review of the Regulation of
Cosmetic Interventions, 2013, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/
government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/192028/
Review_of_the_Regulation_of_Cosmetic_Interventions.pdf (accessed 20
October 2019).
78. Independent Research, Regulation of Cosmetic Interventions —Research
among Teenage Girls, Department of Health, Job No. 623/Version
1, 11 March 2013, https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/
review-of-the-regulation-of-cosmetic-interventions (accessed 20 October
2019).
79. Suzanne Fraser, Cosmetic Surgery, Gender and Culture, Palgrave
Macmillan, Basingstoke, UK, 2003.
80. Ibid., p. 61.
81. Ibid., p. 62.
82. Ibid., pp. 62–63.
83. Ibid.
84. Ibid., p. 63.
85. Independent Research, ibid., p. 12.
86. Ibid.
87. Ibid., p. 5.
88. Ibid.
89. Ibid.
90. Ibid.
91. Anuschka Rees, Beyond Beautiful , Ten Speed Press/Crown Publishing,
Emeryville, CA, 2019, p. 39.
92. Ibid., p. 176.
93. Ibid.
94. Suzanne Fraser, ibid., p. 67.
95. Ian Strawford, ‘Understanding Collagen-Stimulating Dermal Fillers’,
Aesthetics Journal, vol 7, no 2, January 2020, pp. 41–43.
96. Sharon Bennett, ‘The Secret to Beautify Lips with Restylane Kysse™’,
Aesthetics Journal, vol 7, no 2, January 2020, p. 60.
97. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1949, trns Constance Borde
and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, Vintage/Jonathan Cape, London, UK,
2011, p. 17.
98. Ibid.
99. GT Laurie, SHE Harmon and G. Porter, Mason & McCall Smith’s
Law & Medical Ethics, 10th edn, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK,
2016, chapter 4 ‘Consent to Treatment’.
100. Virginia L. Blum, ibid., p. 13.
101. Ibid.
102. ‘The Side Effects of The Pill’, American Experience, https://www.pbs.
org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/pill-side-effects/ (accessed 19
January 2020).
28 J. A. SCUTT
103. Maya Dusenbery, Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine
and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick,
HarperCollins, New York, NY, USA, 2018.
104. Cited Maya Dusenbery, ibid., p. 257.
105. Kathy Davis, ‘A Dubious Equality: Men, Women and Cosmetic Surgery’,
Body and Society, vol 8, no 1, 2002, pp. 49–65.
106. Christine Hoff Summers, Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have
Betrayed Women, Touchstone, New York, NY, USA, 1995.
107. Naomi Wolf, Fire With Fire: New Female Power and How It Will Change
the 21st Century, Vintage/Random House, New York, NY, USA, 1993.
108. Hannah Abel-Hirsch and Sara VanDerBeek, ‘Birth and Being’, Female in
Focus—A Celebration of Women in Photography, https://femaleinfocus.
com/ (accessed 20 January 2020).
109. Luce Irigaray, Alice’s Adventures Through the Looking Glass, chapter 3,
cited Carolyn Burke, ‘Irigaray Through the Looking Glass’, Feminist
Studies, vol 7, no 2, Summer 1981, pp. 288–306, p. 298, https://www.
jstor.org/stable/3177525 (accessed 20 February 2020).
CHAPTER 2
The Body Beneath the Knife
Women’s bodies
Targets
Under the surgeon’s knife
Every body part besieged by
Botox
Laser/
Liposuction
Hair extensions
False nails
Implants and fillers,
foot, face, breast and bottom
Brows brushed thick

Eyelashes extended
Labia narrowly trimmed
Neatly packed and tended
Knifed into submission, natural
Legs remoulded
Ankles narrowed, knees reshaped, toes shortened, lengthened, straightened
Hips and shoulders realigned
Remade, refashioned, redesigned

Reformed, remodelled
Whittled, carved, sculpted, shaped
© The Author(s) 2020 29

J. A. Scutt, Beauty, Women’s Bodies and the Law,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27998-1_2
30 J. A. SCUTT
Nothing sacred, not really ours

Nor really us
Plastic prevails
So
In the mirror
Who stares back?
1 The Body in the Beauty Parlour

The proposition that women’s bodies can be allowed to walk daily on the
street, exist in the paid workplace or appear anywhere in public without
enhancement or embellishment is becoming less and less acceptable. Just
as clothing maketh the woman, with employer demands that women
wear high heels to the office, renounce trousers or pants in the execu-
tive suite, behind the receptionist desk, working at a computer terminal,
seated in a work cubicle or anywhere else on a business premises, so
too with women’s personal attributes. Once, make-up, false eyelashes,
tattooed eyeliner and false bosoms were the signature of a woman on
the stage, or a signal that she haunted alleys and backstreets in hope of
a paying customer, or appeared in movies labelled ‘porn’. In the twenty-
first century, these are signifiers of mainstream woman. Hence, in 2011 a
‘team of scientists and psychologists’ from Harvard and Boston Univer-
sities in collaboration with the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, disclosed
data gleaned from their study that women wearing make-up are perceived
as ‘more competent, attractive, likeable and trustworthy’.1 The study’s
finding was that this follows, whether women are made-up in a ‘natural’,
‘professional’ or ‘glamorous’ style, and whether the images are flashed
before the eyes of participants in the study or are viewed by them for
more lengthy periods.
Funded by Procter & Gamble, a huge conglomerate making much
of its money through selling cosmetics (mainly to women), the study
was labelled ‘independent’. The implication? It must be believed. This,
at least, was the thrust. The message to all women seeking survival or
promotion in Western democracies was unmistakeable. To get on in busi-
ness or succeed in professional life, women must first spend extravagantly
at cosmetic counters all over the country then get out the make-up
palette. Better still, make their way to the nail salon, the hairdresser,
2 THE BODY BENEATH THE KNIFE 31
the spa and cosmetologist for the experts to apply lotions, unguents,
creams, gels, ointment, balms—and on top of all that, the make-up.
Even the prospect of working from home, engaging in online confer-
encing and scheduling meetings via Zoom in the time of Covid-19 has
its implications for beauty and beautification.2 The hiatus in hairdressing
appointments, temporary closure of nail salons and an interruption in
the activities of clinics has not inhibited the beauty industry. Achieving
‘medical-grade skincare’ is essential when Botox wears off and, ‘with
everyone on home quarantine’, a woman’s business profile is threatened
by ‘unflattering zoom angles’. One New York plastic surgeon relates to
Forbes that ‘without disclosing numbers’, growth in her medical-grade
skin care line has ‘exceeded 500%’.3 Online cosmetic sales burgeon, and
even the cancellation of elective surgery has not prevented a steady stream
of enquiries about aesthetic, cosmetic and plastic surgery possibilities. This
spawns the advice from yet another plastic surgeon to ‘stay home, stay
safe’, whilst using the time productively in ‘researching about a procedure
or treatment you have always wanted’.4
The creation of a woman through deft and deliberate use of cosmetic
sculpting and camouflage is, however, not new. In The Spectacular Modern
Woman—Feminine Visibility in the 1920s, Liz Conor reflects on the
early twentieth-century invention of the woman as spectacle. Women
emerged as types, the approach driven by innovations in visual tech-
nology, particularly the cinema. Liz Conor cites Russian filmmaker Lev
Kuleshov inventing cinematic techniques placing the ‘spectacle of the
“new woman” before the public’.5 This development occurred simulta-
neously with the 1920s identification of women as being or becoming
classified as ‘the modern woman’: the City or Business Girl, the Screen
Star, the Beauty Contestant, or the Flapper. Women had for long been
represented in art as body types—the full-bodied type more frequently
dominant, the less pronounced endowments of others nonetheless having
some prominence. Peter Paul Rubens’ (1577–1640) voluptuously config-
ured nudes stimulated notions of desire as located in the Rubenesque
model. The earlier curvaceousness of the Venus de Milo combined sleekly
rounded body lines with the modesty of hand-over-pudenda, a hidden
yet exposed sexuality projected through a visual image. And, earlier
than that, the Venus impudica or Venus impudique (‘immodest Venus’)
with her rounded abdomen and thighs supporting pendulous breasts
projected passion as associated with womanly flesh. Yet Edgar Degas’
(1834–1917) slender-bodied, lithe limbed dancers swirled and twirled
32 J. A. SCUTT
into fashion alongside the vogueishness of Amedeo Modigliani’s (1884–

1920) models’ elongated faces and lean bodies. Some women would have
been influenced by these images. Those whose lives were led in the public
eye, whether as artists’ muses themselves, actresses or ladies of the night
would have been particularly susceptible to the fashion of the body.
The modern era of public transport, together with the development
of department stores, released many more women into public space. Liz
Conor reflects on this as setting the stage for women to reflect more criti-
cally upon their own appearance, with their appearance being subjected to
more intense critique. ‘Public womanhood’, she writes, ‘gained “cultural
influence” by earning academic degrees, lecturing and speaking in public,
travelling alone, attending theaters and dance halls, shopping in depart-
ment stores, and riding bicycles’.6 So, too, with the growth of office jobs,
librarianship, nursing and teaching. These new avenues of paid employ-
ment led women and girls onto streets and ferries, and into omnibuses,
then onto the tube as it became more acceptable. Along with this freedom
of movement came subjection to the male gaze. Public exposure made
women more aware of their bodies, of how they looked—and were looked
at. Sitting on public buses or in railway carriages meant opening oneself
up to public scrutiny. Some women relished the attention which came
from being under observation. Footpaths and offices becoming ‘theaters
to these types of City Girl, places where [they] distracted, displaced, and
visually overpowered men’. They wanted, says Conor, ‘to be part of the
scene as spectacles, reputedly shortening their skirts to excite more atten-
tion …’.7 One ‘smart Yankee tourist’ met with the ire of the notorious
Australian daily the Truth when she appeared on one of Melbourne’s
major thoroughfares parading ‘in an extra short skirt, … her stockings
rolled down below the knees’. This ‘bare-legged belle’ responded to crit-
icism with a retort that in New York City ‘everyone is wearing bare knees
… rouged and tattooed’.8
Beauty contests, often aimed at attracting women as competitors with
the lure of a Hollywood contract, became de rigueur. Newspapers ran
competitions and photographers and other professionals began to dictate
women’s bodily and facial perfection. This analysis followed the pattern
adopted towards the end of the preceding century by famed criminolo-
gist Caesare Lombroso in his search to identify the ‘perfect criminal’ by
measuring every conceivable facial feature. Closely positioned eyes, low
hanging forehead, large flapping ears, thin cruel lips signified criminality.9
The beauty contestant analysists selected features and their relationship to
each other arriving at the antithesis of the Lombrosian type. For them,
the perfect face comprised symmetrical features with a precise distance
required between wide-set eyes, a retroussé nose rather than a Roman
one, forehead exact in its dimensions, lips full but not too full, upper lip
proportionate, chin delicately rounded. Not only were these studies in
perfection utterly different from Lombroso’s. They focused on purity in
breeding. Notions of ethnic and racial superiority, albeit not necessarily
stated, crept in, ordaining what was, and was not, ‘beauty’.10
Women who did not conform to the perfect type sought to do so.
Despite a backlash from sections of the popular press, and protesta-
tions from feminists that beauty competitions ‘judged and measured’ each
entrant ‘as though she were an animal’,11 some women were caught up
in striving for perfection. That they were obliged to seek out means of
doing so did not discourage them. Being charged with vanity and self-
obsession was no deterrent. In Australia, the Sunraysia Daily condemned
‘vain women’ who appeared ‘to be watching themselves while they speak,
listening to themselves, visualising themselves’. Being ‘greedy for admira-
tion they … [were] too engrossed in themselves’, so that even ageing did
not stand in the way of self-admiration. Their vanity would ‘not allow’
the ageing woman ‘to admit that her day is over’.12 Increasingly artifi-
cial means came to create or enhance beauty, and age did not admit of
defeat. Clinging to youth or its pretence was reinforced by the growing
self-help industry of dyes and potions that could be administered at home,
and the increased commercialisation of the beauty industry. To quell the
belief that women were self-obsessed narcissists, bodily perfection as a
health goal became fashionable. Products advertised originally as magical
or glamourous were converted into natural adjuncts to healthy living.13
Yet ‘how do I look’ continued as one of the most commonly asked ques-
tions whether by a woman of her best friend, husband or partner, or
(in the tradition of fairy tales) her mirror. Women’s bodies and women’s
beauty took centre stage.
The pre-eminence of one shape over another may prevail, but the
message remains. The 1920s bosomless look is replaced by the Marilyn
Monroe breasted hourglass, thence to the slender limbed Twiggy of the
1970s, and into the 1980s where pronounced breasts compete with the
bulging bottoms of the 2000s, and budding lips expand exponentially
into full-blown swellings—yet bodies and beauty remain determinative of
what is a woman.
34 J. A. SCUTT
In light of this, what of demands from the 1970s and earlier strug-
gles for entry to university, the professions and trades? Do these calls for
women to be recognised as more than mannequins or ornaments for a
man’s arm, dressed up dolls with little but marriage on their minds, slaves
to the kitchen or to mind-numbing work in an office, a factory or field
have meaning? Have we ‘come a long way, baby’, or are women inex-
orably enmeshed in a culture that sees artifice as more acceptable than
the reality of women’s physiognomy? Are women’s real bodies ‘out’,
whilst contrivances projected as ‘real’ women constitute the perfection
and beauty for which (once) real women must aim?
In Bodies , first published in 2009, Susie Orbach observes that over the
thirty years prior to her writing, ‘an obsessive cultural focus on the body’
has developed.14 Everywhere, she writes, ‘we see evidence of the search
for a body’. Whether it is presented as ‘preoccupation, health concern
or moral endeavour, almost everyone has a rhetoric about trying to do
right by their body’. This enforces and reinforces the notion that the
body is unacceptable as it is. It is ‘not at all right’. Orbach concludes
that the body is now a focus for ‘our malaise, aspiration and energy’.15
In this, she is both right and wrong. In 1970 Germaine Greer’s Female
Eunuch acknowledged the problem existing then, as it had for centuries,
of women’s bodies ‘being treated as aesthetic objects without form’.16
This was so for women themselves, in regarding their own bodies, as
well as for the men in whose gaze they registered their existence.17 In so
doing, said Greer, both the bodies and the whole woman are deformed.
The various usages of women’s bodies, whatever their shape or char-
acter, ‘are deformations of the dynamic, individual body and limitations
of the possibilities of being female’.18 However, the key truth of Bodies is
Orbach’s recognition of the crushing obsessional nature of today’s focus
on the body. Young women, old and older women, indeed women of
any age and often not even into puberty do not learn only that their
bodies are defective. They learn constantly through social and mainstream
media, advertisements, film, television series, the ubiquitous red carpet of
Hollywood and Cannes that anything, any body part can be fixed.
In the 1970s, women were concerned about weight, diet, bodily
appearance as exemplified by the weight (losing weight) industry already
working overtime, and women’s magazines laden with fashion, recipes,
how to dress (the mantra of perpendicular stripes, not horizontal), make-
up and diets. Orbach herself recognised this in her early work, Fat Is a
Feminist Issue.19 But despite this age-old malaise, the 1970s aspiration
and energy were directed towards shifting from this concern to position
women substantively in the world. Women claimed a right to become
and to be legitimate operators at all levels of society and in all institu-
tions, without reliance on frippery or furbelow. Kate Millett in her own
original work, Sexual Politics , effectively revived Simone de Beauvoir’s
Second Sex from twenty years earlier, Millett engaging in her own critique
of literature, art, culture from the perspective of an American scholar.20
Earlier Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique contested the notion that
woman’s place was in the suburbs, content with three children, cat, dog,
people carrier and a husband returning from his daily effort in the city
designed to keep woman, children, animals and both cars (his and hers)
afloat financially.21 Schulamith Firestone in The Dialectic of Sex added
intellectual ballast and ten years later Susan Brownmiller followed up her
peon against women’s subjection to rape, Against Her Will , with her
new book, Femininity.22 Robin Morgan led in the radical movement,
challenging the myth of bra burning, whilst leading women together on
demonstrations and sit-ins, their bodies freed from brassiere and step-
in constraints.23 Jo Freeman published her vital work on the Women’s
Liberation Movement’s organisational approach to securing change, The
Tyranny of Structurelessness ,24 advocating that attention be paid to power
hidden under the cry for freedom from constraining organisational and
hierarchical demands. Then, after doing a journalistic stint as a Playboy
Bunny at Hugh Hefner’s club, Gloria Steinem wrote her expose decrying
the institutionalised objectification of the woman under the Bunny ears.25
Almost instantly, however, the 1970s saw a raft of books and articles
published as an antidote to the rejection by the Women’s Movement
of lipstick, bras and step-ins (a modified corset or girdle), and the
replacement of stockings and suspenders with pantyhose. When American
women demonstrated in Atlanta at the Miss American contest, throwing
underwear (including bras) and other paraphernalia into a ‘Freedom
Trash Can’, it was inevitable that the establishment would respond.26
Marabel Morgan’s The Total Woman, advertised as having sold more than
ten million copies, was perhaps the most popular of the anti-feminist
tomes of the time.27 She advocated that women enfold themselves in
saran wrap—a transparent plastic used to preserve left-over food—before
greeting a husband just home from work. An alternative was to spread
oneself liberally in jam or honey whilst making supper for a husband lying
prone on couch or carpet watching evening television. In this context,
‘wife’ was supposed to equal ‘supper’.
36 J. A. SCUTT
Although the book and her accompanying seminars had a reputedly

massive audience, it is doubtful that many women went to the lengths
Marabel Morgan suggested.28 Yet perhaps a return to her bizarre instruc-
tions for feminine enhancement would be less damaging to women than
a visit to today’s beauty parlours, and—extraordinary though it may
seem—even less dangerous or humiliating. And certainly, less expensive.
Australians are reputed to spend ‘a collective $AUS 1billion-plus’ on
cosmetic procedures annually, calculated as coming in at 40 per cent
more (per capita) than the United States.29 In June 2019, the Sydney
Morning Herald reported that spending on basic beauty routines ‘is
out of control’. ‘Basic’ maintenance for women in their early twenties
and thirties ‘is costing [them] the equivalent of a house deposit’.30 At
a conservative estimate, approximately $AUS 14,000 (some £8000) is
spent by each woman on ‘standard’ treatments. This includes ‘six to
eight-weekly haircuts and colour, regular blow waves, (preventive) Botox,
non-fat fillers, professional teeth whitening, eyelash extensions and refills,
microdermabrasion, SNS nails [Signature Nail Systems], pedicures and
laser hair removal’.31 Over and above this, cash is being laid out on
skin care and make-up in the privacy of a woman’s own bedroom or
bathroom, plus salon facials, waxing and spray tans, as well as ‘special
events’ including the racing season, the festive season and celebrations
such as birthdays, weddings and Valentine’s Day. Adding these into the
estimates of women’s annual expenditure would amount to ‘hundreds of
thousands of [dollars] over the course of a woman’s life’.32 Investigating,
writer Kasey Edwards asked a trader in stocks and shares to estimate how
an alternative approach of investing the $AUS 14,000 would look. On
the basis of ‘net returns of about seven to eight percent’, over about
a decade that figure ‘could be rapidly swelling towards $AUS 250,000’
(£140,000). Even if simply left in a bank term deposit for some six years,
that same $AUS 14,000 could gain a woman a six-figure sum.33
Yet entering a beauty parlour is not the only way a woman can be
regaled with methods and mechanisms for spending money to become
beautiful. In London, venturing into a large department store in Oxford
Street means being assailed on all sides by ‘product’ representatives
bearing potions, lotions and pastes in tubes, jars and containers of all
dimensions, or brandishing hair wands, lash curlers or body shapers
of all sorts and sizes. Sauntering into shopping malls brings with it a
need to avoid salespeople imploring passers-by to sample a wide variety
of perfume, cosmetics and beauty treatments. American, Australian and
other major capital cities carry their own brand of cosmetic confrontation,
with department store refurbishments undertaken regularly to position
make-up and perfume counters at the forefront of luring the customer. In
the 1980s, competition between Opium, Obsession, Tresor and Shalima
was at its height.34 In 1983 in Melbourne and Sydney, New York and San
Francisco, department stores positioned scent-bottle-atomisers at every
major entryway, spraying Angel on every woman passing through their
doors. The scent wafted inside between display counters, into elevators
and up the escalators, filling passageways and drifting outside into the
malls. Meanwhile, in the 2000s, beauty salons adopt more and more
fanciful methods of pampering the body, more and more ways of ensuring
that women’s pockets and purses open wide in the search for the perfect
body with flawless features, and the face of beauty—according to conven-
tional diktat. Even pop-up or home-based practitioners can be found
providing such services at reduced rates.
Want puffed-up lips? This comes not by the sting of a bee, but through
the injection of chemical fillers, or agitating the lips with capsicum or
chilli. Collagen and more recently developed products using hyaluronic
acid operate akin to scaffolding, although ‘care must be taken’ to avoid
‘creating ridges’ giving the mouth ‘an ugly edge’.35 Silicone implants
or ‘Permalip’ last longer—though they cost twice as much: $AUS 2000
to $AUS 4000 (some £2000) as opposed to $AUS 1000 to $AUS
2000 (some £1500) for several months of a protuberant pout. Then—
it’s back to the beauty (sic) parlour to be relieved of another hefty
sum to refurbish the lips now threatening to droop or deflate. Worried
about fading eyebrows or wanting better defined arches? Microblading
at $AUS 1000 (£600) ‘is not that painful’, it’s ‘pretty quick’, and you
can have high arches or straight arches or mildly curved arches tattooed
into your brow.36 It takes anaesthetic cream, the wielding of a ‘scalpel-
like instrument’ (microblade), scratching pigment into your skin, two
weeks of healing, at least five applications of aftercare cream, wearing
a plastic head-shade in the shower and three follow-up visits. But, hey
presto, the arches are well-defined … Then again, it’s trimming, plug-
ging, waxing or threading as usual. Still, what about an end to wrinkles?
This requires a good dose of botulism or, as advertised, its commercially
named Botox. Rather than the death that follows upon a botulism bout,
Botox targets ageing’s most visible facial indicator, the dreaded creases,
folds and furrows. Of course, this has costs, too. Yet perhaps rather than
the monetary outlay, the so-called ‘side’ effects should be centre stage.
38 J. A. SCUTT
Lessening or alleviating frown-lines may cause life-threatening conditions

that, once detected—even at their most mild stage—dictate an immediate
call to the doctor or the nearest hospital’s emergency department. These
include short-term and sometimes long-term ‘side effects’:
• Problems with swallowing, speaking or breathing, caused by weak-

ening of facial or throat muscles;
• Loss of strength and ‘all-over muscle weakness’, as well as double
or blurred vision, ‘drooping or swelling’ eyelids, dry eyes, loss of
capacity to speak, hoarseness or inability to articulate clearly, loss of
bladder control;
• Dry mouth, discomfort or pain at the site of injections, tiredness,
neck pain, headaches;
• Allergic reactions including ‘itching, rash, red itchy welts, wheezing,
asthma symptoms, dizziness or feeling faint’.37
Even so, said one Botox website in November 2011, ‘no confirmed
serious case of spread of toxin effect’ has been reported from between-
the-eyes Botoxing.38 Nonetheless, if these symptoms occur, a sufferer
ought not to ‘drive a car, operate machinery, or do other dangerous activ-
ities’.39 Readers may wonder about unconfirmed serious cases—and what
classifies as a confirmed non-serious case, but merely receives advice that
the ‘potential risk of spreading viral diseases’ such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob
Disease (CJD) via human albumin—present in Botox—is ‘extremely rare’:
‘no cases of viral disease or CJD’ have ‘ever’ been reported ‘in association
with human serum albumin’.40 In 2019 the site warned that Botox ‘may
cause serious side effects that can be life threatening’ advising that if ‘any
of these problems’ is experienced ‘hours to weeks’ after a Botox injec-
tion, then medical help should be sought immediately.41 The problems
listed included those relating to swallowing (which ‘may last for several
months’), speaking or breathing, attributed to weakening of associated
muscles. These ‘can be severe and result in loss of life’. An additional
warning flagged the highest risk as present if such problems existed prior
to injection.42
This and other services, treatments and products provided by salons in
the pursuit of women chasing beauty raise the question of legal liability.
What responsibilities devolve upon those providing the products and
delivering the services? Product liability is governed by negligence law
and statutory provisions. In the United Kingdom, operating alongside

common law negligence, the Consumer Protection Act (‘the Act’) covers
statutory liability for defective products. Similar laws exist in other juris-
dictions, including the United States and Australia. This means that where
defective products cause harm to the bodies of those upon whom they
are used, the client or patient can sue for compensation. Strict liability
is imposed on defective product manufacturers, meaning that there is no
need to prove negligence. Under the Act, the onus lies on the patient or
client to prove, on the balance of probabilities, that:
• The product complained of was defective; and

• The product was the most likely cause of the injury of which the
client or patient complained.
Action can be taken against the manufacturer of the product or of

a component part of the product and/or against any party respon-
sible for any essential characteristic of the product resulting from an
industrial or other process. An injured person can also include, in their
action, a respondent party with their name or trademark attached to the
product and so holding itself out as the producer. Action is also available
against a respondent party who imported the product into the European
Community.43 As the Act provides, product safety encompasses:
• Monitoring the safety of products;

• Providing consumers with information enabling them to understand
risks,
• Warning consumers of potential risks; and
• Taking action where a safety problem is detected.
A key issue is ‘what is a defect’ or ‘what is defective’. In Wilkes v DePuy 44

the court determined the question by reference to an objective test, based
on what the public at large are entitled to expect of the product. The
case involved not a cosmetic or cream or similar beauty product, but a
metal hip replacement implanted for mobility (not aesthetic or cosmetic)
reasons. However, the principle applies to product liability generally,
including cosmetics, hair and eyelash extensions, false nails and other
products of the hair salon and beauty parlour.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
land came into the possession of Yuri Dolgoruki, he built a village on
an elevation and called it Moskva. There was feasting and gift-giving
now in Moscow, but also much serious work. Yuri furnished warriors,
led by his son, and fresh troops of Polovtsi came to Sviatoslav; thus
he had power to take the offensive. This he did with effect, and when
a third force of Polovtsi came, the effect was decisive. All the
posadniks installed in Vyatichi towns by the sons of David fled
quickly, and Sviatoslav sent in new men to replace them. Both sons
of David withdrew from the north to Chernigoff, and sent peace
proposals to Sviatoslav. Those same sons of David now turned
traitorously on the Kief prince, to whom they sent this faithless
message: “Sviatoslav has taken Vyatichi lands. Come with us to
attack him. When we have driven him away we will march with thee
against Yuri, and make peace or war with him.”
Izyaslav agreed, but Sviatoslav, son of Vsevolod, to make sure of

carrying out his own plans and escaping beyond reach of the Kief
prince in season, came to Izyaslav, and said to him, “Let me go to
Chernigoff, my father. I wish to get lands from my cousins.” “Thou
hast thought this out well,” replied Izyaslav. “Go straightway.” He
went, and the whole affair was fixed surely, as they thought. He and
the sons of David were to seize the Kief prince the moment he set
foot in Chernigoff. As he delayed, they sent envoys to hurry him.
“Our land is perishing,” said they, “and thou wilt not come to assist
us.”
Izyaslav summoned his boyars and warriors and the people, and
said to them: “I am going with the sons of David to war against
Sviatoslav, and Yuri my uncle. I must go, for Yuri is [70]helping my
enemy, Sviatoslav.” “Go not against Yuri,” said the people. “Make
peace with thy uncle. Lend no ear to the sons of David, take not the
same road with them.” “I must go,” replied Izyaslav; “they are my
allies.” “Take it not ill of us,” continued the people, “we cannot raise
hands against a son of Monomach. But if thou wilt march against the
house of Oleg, we will not only go with thee, but take our sons also.”
The prince, however, asked for volunteers to attack Yuri, and a large
number went with him. On passing the Dnieper, he sent Ulaiba, his
boyar, to learn what was happening in Chernigoff. The boyar hurried
back, bringing news that the allies of the Kief prince were acting with
Sviatoslav. Chernigoff friends also sent to Izyaslav, saying that his
allies were deceiving him foully. “They wish to slay or to seize thee,
and liberate Igor. They have kissed the cross to Sviatoslav, and also
to Yuri.”
The Kief prince now sent envoys to confer in his name with the sons
of David: “We agreed on a great work, and kissed the cross to each
other,” said the envoys. “Let us kiss it again, so that there be no
disagreement hereafter.” “Why kiss again? We have kissed already,”
replied the sons of David. “What harm in kissing the cross?” said the
envoys. “The cross is salvation.” But they refused to kiss it a second
time. The envoys repeated now these words from Izyaslav to the
sons of David: “I have heard that ye are deceiving me, that ye have
sworn to Sviatoslav to seize me or to kill me because of Igor. Is this
true, brothers, or is it not true?” They would not answer. At last one
of them said to the envoys: “Withdraw, we will summon thee later.”
They consulted long, and then called the envoys.
“We have kissed the cross to Sviatoslav,” declared they frankly. “We
grieve over Igor, our cousin. He is a monk now; set him free, and we
will ride at thy stirrup. Would it please thee if we held thy brother?”
The treaty papers were cast at their feet, and these words were
added in answer: “Ye took oath to be with me till death, and I gave
you the lands of both sons of Oleg. I expelled Sviatoslav; I won his
lands and gave you Putivl with other places. We divided Sviatoslav’s
property between us. I took Igor’s. And now, brothers, ye have
broken your oath. Ye invited me hither intending to kill me. Let God
be on my side and [71]the power of the life-giving cross. I will manage
as the Lord may assist me.”
The prince asked Rostislav, his brother, to bring Smolensk forces

from all sides. He sent to Kief also, explaining the conduct of the
sons of David, and reminded the people of what they had promised.
The Kief men decided immediately to go forward in boats and on
horseback to help him. “We rejoice,” declared they in a message,
“that God has preserved thee. We come and bring our sons with us,
according to promise!” When thus excited, some man in the throng
called out loudly: “We will fight for our prince, but think first of one
important thing. Here in this city is the enemy of our prince. Let us
slay him to finish that family in Chernigoff, and then go!” The people
rushed to the monastery, and before Prince Vladimir, the
metropolitan, or the commander in the city, could stop them they had
seized Igor, and slain him.
Izyaslav was at the edge of Chernigoff when news of Igor’s death

came to him: “If I had thought of this, I should have guarded him
more carefully,” said he to his warriors. “Men will say now that I
wished to kill Igor, but God knows that I did not.” “Be not concerned,”
answered his warriors. “God knows, and people know, also, that not
thou, but his own cousins killed him; they who took an oath to thee,
and then conspired traitorously to kill thee.”
Izyaslav seized Kursk, where he placed his son, Mystislav, and thus
barred out the Polovtsi. But Glaib, son of Yuri, came later with
Sviatoslav to take the place. The people would not raise a hand
against Glaib, since he was a grandson of Monomach. They would
have fought against Sviatoslav had he come unassisted, as they
informed Mystislav, who returned to his father.
Glaib, after installing posadniks, left that region, and the Polovtsi
were free to appear again. Rostislav of Smolensk led in large forces
to help his brother, the Grand Prince, and after an involved and
tedious war, ending rather against Izyaslav than for him, the
Chernigoff princes were unable to continue the struggle; their
territory was stripped of provisions, and ruined in great part; they had
no food for their warriors, and could not pay Polovtsi allies. Yuri had
sent a son with forces, but he would not go with his main strength in
person, and without Yuri the Chernigoff princes were unable to stand
against Izyaslav and his brothers. [72]
In such straits, they sent these words to Yuri: “Thou didst kiss the
cross to go with us against Izyaslav; thou hast not done so. Izyaslav
came, burned our towns, took our country. He came a second time;
he burned and seized what he spared at the first attack, but thou
hast neither come to us nor fought against Izyaslav. If thy wish is to
march now against the Kief prince, we will go with thee; if not, we are
freed from our oath; we have no wish to perish in war unassisted.”
From Yuri came no answer of value, hence they turned with

proposals to the Kief prince. He replied that he would consult with
Rostislav and then answer finally. He consulted with his brother for
form’s sake, and then made peace with the princes of Chernigoff,
who took oath to forget Igor’s death, and be in friendship for the
future. Kursk remained in their possession.
At this time Rostislav, Yuri’s eldest son, once prince in Novgorod,

came to Kief, declaring that he had quarreled with his father, who
refused him land in Suzdal; hence he had come to Izyaslav with
homage. The Kief prince gave him those five towns held formerly by
Sviatoslav, son of Vsevolod, and also Gorodok, where Izyaslav did
not wish to see Yuri’s son Glaib, to whom he sent this command:
“Find lands with the sons of Oleg.”
In autumn, the Grand Prince went to Gorodok, taking Rostislav with
him. The sons of David were there, but no son of Oleg. When
Izyaslav mentioned this, the princes replied: “We are here. It is
indifferent whether they come or not; they and we took the oath to
make common cause with thee, and to go with thee against Yuri,
starting when the rivers should be frozen.” They who had been Yuri’s
allies a short time before had now become his enemies, and allies of
Izyaslav. When the time came, Izyaslav left Vladimir, his brother, in
Kief, and visited Smolensk, to confer with Rostislav.
Novgorod had assembled large forces to march against Yuri, and

now sent many warriors, as did Smolensk. They moved down the
Volga, and, finding no trace of Yuri, ravaged both sides of the river
as far as Uglitch. Here news came that the sons of David, with
Sviatoslav, brother of Igor, had marched to assist them, but had
halted in the Vyatichi country to see who would be victor, the Kief
prince, or Yuri.
“Let them come or stay,” replied Izyaslav, and he sent Novgorod men
and others to take Yaroslavl on the Volga. This they [73]did after
much effort, and returned with great booty. A week before Easter the
weather became so warm that the army could not remain in the
country. Horses walked to their bellies in water. Rostislav went back
to Smolensk, and Izyaslav to Novgorod and thence to his capital.
This campaign cost Yuri’s country seven thousand men led away
captives, besides all the property burned and ruined. Upon Izyaslav’s
return to Kief, he learned from his boyars that Yuri’s son, Rostislav,
had worked against him in his absence, and had said to the people:
“If God helps my father, he will visit Kief and take Izyaslav’s house
from him, and also his family.” “Send this traitor back to his father;
thou art keeping him here to thy ruin,” said the boyars. The prince
summoned Rostislav, and, without receiving him, gave this message:
“Thou didst come to me and say that thy father was unjust and would
give thee no land. I took thee in as a brother, I gave thee lands, and
now thou wouldst seize Kief from me.” Yuri’s son sent back this
answer: “Neither in my heart nor my mind was the thought which
thou hast mentioned. If he who has lied is a prince I am ready to
meet him, if of lower degree, either Christian or pagan, judge thou
between us.” “Ask no judgment of me,” replied Izyaslav. “I know what
thou wishest. Go back to thy father.”
The boyars put Rostislav in a boat with three men and sent him up
the river. His warriors were retained, and his property taken.
Rostislav bowed down to his father in Suzdal, and said: “The whole
Russian land desires thee. Men say in Kief that their prince has
dishonored them. March thou against Izyaslav.” These words imply
clearly that Yuri’s son had worked with zeal against Izyaslav, and that
the complaint of the boyars was well founded.
Such an “insult” to Rostislav greatly offended Yuri, who demanded

angrily, “Is there then no place for me or my sons in Russia?” He
assembled his forces quickly, hired Polovtsi, and was soon ready for
action.
It was not anger alone which roused Yuri; he believed that his day
had come, the long deferred day of triumph. His son’s report that he
would find in the south serious allies, decided his movements, and
he marched forward with all speed. He had reached the land of the
Vyatichi, when Vladimir, son of David, warned Izyaslav, saying: “Be
ready for action; thy uncle is marching.” [74]Izyaslav prepared, and
with the sons of David sent envoys to Sviatoslav, brother of the late
Igor, reminding him of their treaties.
Sviatoslav gave no answer at first, but guarded the envoys to keep

men away from them. Meanwhile he consulted with Yuri. “Art thou
going against Izyaslav? Tell me truly lest I ruin my lands without
reason.” “I go, of course,” replied Yuri. “My nephew made war in my
lands and set fire to them. He drove out my son, and insulted me. I
will avenge the wrong done, or I will lay down my life.”
On receiving this answer, Sviatoslav, unwilling to break his oath,

without reasons which men might hold sufficient, commanded his
envoys to speak thus to Izyaslav: “Return Igor’s property, and I will
be with thee.” “Thou hast kissed the cross to put aside enmity
because of Igor and his property,” replied Izyaslav, “but now thou
dost mention them when my uncle is marching against me. Keep thy
oath, or else break it.”
Sviatoslav joined forces with Yuri. Yuri and Sviatoslav then sent the
sons of David a message, but they sent the answer only to Yuri: “In
the last war thou didst swear to be with us. But when Izyaslav took
all our lands and burned the towns in them, thou wouldst not come to
us. Because of this we kissed the cross to Izyaslav, and we cannot
jest with salvation.”
Yuri marched southward, expecting the Polovtsi and awaiting

submission from Izyaslav, his nephew. Rostislav of Smolensk, with
large forces, hastened to strengthen his brother. Yuri advanced to
Pereyaslavl, thinking that Izyaslav might yield; but Izyaslav did not
yield. “If my uncle had come with his sons only,” said he, “he might
have had the best province in my possession, but as he leads in the
hated Polovtsi, and with them my enemy, I am forced to the field by
his action.”
Izyaslav talked thus to persuade Kief men to march against Yuri.

They had insisted on peace, and declared that they could not raise
hands against a son of Monomach. But, influenced by Izyaslav’s
words, they at last consented to go, though unwillingly. Crossing the
Dnieper, the Grand Prince met Yuri’s army, the advance troops being
Polovtsi, and repulsed it. Then the two armies stood all day and night
facing each other. In the night Yuri sent to his nephew this message:
“Thou hast ravaged my country, thou hast taken seniority from me,
but spare Christian [75]blood now. Let me seat a son in this city of
Pereyaslavl, and rule thou in Kief. If not, let God judge between us.”
Izyaslav detained the envoy, and led out all his men to meet Yuri.
Next morning the bishop, with tears in his eyes, begged thus of
Izyaslav: “Make peace with thy uncle. If thou do so, thou wilt save
the land from sore misery, and have great reward from God.” But the
prince would not listen. The armies were face to face that day till
evening, the river Trubej between them. At a council called by
Izyaslav, some favored crossing the river: “God gives thee the
enemy; seize him,” said these men. “Remain where thou art,” said
others. “Thy uncle is wavering, he will vanish in the night. Let him go,
do not touch him.” The first advice pleased the prince, and he
crossed the river. Next day at noon the armies came very near
fighting, but Yuri halted, and in the evening withdrew. Again there
were two minds in Izyaslav’s council: “Thy uncle is fleeing,” urged
one mind; “attack him before he escapes thee.” “Follow not,” urged
the other; “there will be no battle; thou wilt have victory for nothing.”
This time too Izyaslav took the first advice.
At daybreak next morning the battle began. It was resolute at the

opening and venomous on both sides, but soon all of Izyaslav’s
contingents from the Ros River fled. Seeing this, the sons of David
and the Kief men fled also. Pereyaslavl, persuaded already by Yuri’s
son, Rostislav, opened its gates without fighting, and thus the battle
was ended.
Izyaslav had pierced an opposing regiment, but when in the rear of it

he saw that all had deserted him, and knew that nothing save flight
remained. He reached Kief with only two attendants, and went
immediately to Volynia; but he withdrew to reopen the struggle.
On reaching Volynia Izyaslav sent to Poland, Bohemia and Hungary

for aid. Aid was promised, but he wished aid itself, and not promises,
hence he sent envoys a second time bearing rich presents, with the
injunction to get what he asked for. Knowing now what it was to fight
against his uncle when the people were indifferent or opposed to
him, he sent these words to Yuri’s elder brother, Vyatcheslav: “Be my
father and take the throne of Kief; if not I will ruin thy country.”
Vyatcheslav, alarmed by the threat, sent this message to Yuri:

[76]“Make peace, defend my country, come hither thyself; we shall
then see what to do. If thou come not, I must act as seems best to
me.” Yuri set out at once with his troops, taking Polovtsi also.
Izyaslav marched from Volynia against him. To Vyatcheslav came
Rostislav and Andrei, sons of Yuri, and soon Yuri himself came.
Vladimirko of Galitch moved to the boundary and thus checked
Poles and Hungarians.
The Poles, greatly alarmed by news from their own land that
Prussian tribes were attacking them, went home. Hence the allies
sent these words to Yuri and Vyatcheslav: “Though ye are as fathers
to Izyaslav, ye are now warring against him. As Christians and
brethren we should all be united. Can you not arrange peace with
your son and your brother? Ye might remain in Kief. Ye yourselves
know who should be there. Let Volynia and whatever else is his go to
Izyaslav. Let Yuri give back the Novgorod tribute.”
“God reward you,” replied Yuri and his brother. “Since ye ask for
peace and wish well to us, let Izyaslav return to Volynia, and go ye to
your own lands; we will discuss then with Izyaslav.” The allies
withdrew, and the uncles proposed terms to their nephew. But the
affair halted because Yuri’s eldest son and a nephew advised with
great earnestness not to make peace with Izyaslav. Yuri took this
advice all the more readily, since Izyaslav’s allies had gone to their
own lands, and he thought it easy to force down his nephew. “I will
expel Izyaslav and take his lands,” said Yuri, and he moved with his
brother to do this.
Yuri and his forces invested Lutsk, and for many weeks fought
around the city. The besieged lacked water greatly. Izyaslav strove to
aid them, but Vladimirko of Galitch barred the way; he desired victory
for neither side. Volynia, independent of Kief, was what he wished.
Izyaslav sent to him, saying: “Reconcile me with my uncle Yuri.”
Vladimirko was willing, in fact he was very glad to attempt this.
Andrei, Yuri’s second son, was for peace and counseled his father.
“Give no ear to my brother or cousin,” said he. “Make peace, O my
father, do not ruin thy possessions.” Vyatcheslav favored peace also.
He had his own reasons for doing so. “Make peace,” said he to Yuri.
“If not, and thou go, Izyaslav will destroy my country.” [77]
Yuri finally agreed to peace. His nephew yielded Kief, and Yuri gave
back the Novgorod tribute. Izyaslav visited his uncles, and all sides
promised to return booty taken since the action near Pereyaslavl.
After that Yuri went back to Kief, and wished to give it to Vyatcheslav,
to whom it belonged by seniority, but the boyars dissuaded him. “Thy
brother could not hold Kief,” said they. “It will be neither his nor thine,
if thou yield it.” Yuri took his son from Vyshgorod, and gave the place
to Vyatcheslav.
Meanwhile, 1150, Izyaslav sent to find herds and property seized

before peace was concluded, but when his men had found what they
were seeking, and asked for it, Yuri refused it, and they went back
empty-handed. Thereupon Izyaslav sent a complaint and threat to
his uncle: “Keep thy oath, for I cannot remain thus offended.” Yuri
made no answer, and Izyaslav took arms again, urged, as was said,
by Kief people.
At this time Yuri’s son Glaib was encamped not far from Izyaslav,
who suddenly attacked him in the night. Glaib escaped with much
difficulty, having lost everything he had. Next day he sent to his
cousin this message: “Yuri is my father, so art thou, and I render thee
homage. Thou and Yuri will settle all questions. But give thy oath that
thou wilt permit me to visit my father. If thou do, I will come and bow
down to thee.” Izyaslav gave the oath. Glaib went to Yuri, and
Izyaslav hastened to the steppe to get aid from the Black Caps, who
rejoiced with unbounded delight when they saw him.
Yuri, on hearing that his nephew had gone to the Black Caps, left
Kief at once, crossed the Dnieper and hastened to Gorodok. As soon
as Yuri withdrew from Kief, Vyatcheslav entered. The Kief people
went out in great crowds to meet Izyaslav, who was not slow in
coming. “Yuri has left us,” said they. “Vyatcheslav is in the palace,
but we do not want him. Go to Holy Sophia, and then take the throne
of thy fathers.” “I gave thee Kief,” said Izyaslav, in a message to his
uncle, “but thou wouldst not take it. Now when thy brother has fled,
thou art willing. Go to thy Vyshgorod.” “Even shouldst thou kill me for
staying, I would not go,” answered Vyatcheslav.
Taking a few attendants, Izyaslav went to his uncle and bowed down
before him. Vyatcheslav rose, kissed him and they sat down
together. “Father,” said Izyaslav, “I give thee homage, [78]I cannot do
what thou wishest, such is the power of the people. They are
opposed to thee. Go to Vyshgorod; from there we two will manage.”
“When thou didst invite me to Kief,” answered Vyatcheslav, “I had
kissed the cross to Yuri. If Kief is thine now, I will go to Vyshgorod.”
And he went.
Meanwhile Yuri called on the sons of David and Oleg for assistance,
and Vladimirko was marching from the west. Izyaslav, greatly
alarmed, prepared for defense very promptly and went with boyars to
Vyatcheslav in Vyshgorod. “Take Kief,” said he to his uncle, “and with
it what lands thou desirest; the rest leave to me.” Vyatcheslav was
offended at first. “Why didst thou not give me Kief when thou wert
forcing me out of it shamefully?” asked he. “Now when one army is
moving against thee from Galitch and another from Chernigoff, thou
givest me my inheritance.” “I offered thee Kief, declaring that I could
live with thee, but not with Yuri,” said Izyaslav. “Thee I love as my
father. And I say now again: Thou art my father, and Kief belongs to
thee.” These words softened Vyatcheslav and he kissed the cross to
consider Izyaslav as his son, and Izyaslav swore to regard him as a
father. “I am going to Zvenigorod against Vladimirko,” said Izyaslav.
“Be pleased thou to enter Kief and let me have thy warriors.” “I will
send all of my warriors with thee,” replied Vyatcheslav.
Vladimirko was now in the field to help Yuri, and Izyaslav marched
westward at once to hasten the struggle, but when he came near the
enemy his men forsook him. “Vladimirko has a countless host,” cried
they. “Do not destroy us and forfeit thy own life. Wait till another
time.” “Better die here than suffer disgrace such as that!” exclaimed
Izyaslav. Nevertheless all fled the field, and the Kief prince was left
with only his personal following. He fell back on the capital safely,
though he might have been captured. Vladimirko thought the whole
movement a strategy, hence he followed on cautiously, looking for
ambushes everywhere. Izyaslav found his uncle in Kief, waiting
anxiously. They counseled awhile and then sat down to dinner.
During dinner news came that Yuri was crossing the Dnieper, and
with him the men of Chernigoff. “This is not our day!” exclaimed the
two princes, and they fled from Kief, Vyatcheslav going to
Vyshgorod, and Izyaslav back to Volynia. [79]
Next day Vladimirko and Yuri met outside Kief and greeted each
other on horseback. The Galitch prince visited all the holy places in
the city, and then bade farewell to his father-in-law in friendship. He
took with him Yuri’s son, Mystislav, and installed that prince on the
boundary of Volynia. Later on Yuri gave this whole region to his best
son, Andrei.
Andrei fixed his camp in Peresopnitsa, and during the winter Izyaslav
sent an envoy to him. “Reconcile me with thy father,” said he. “My
inheritance is not in Hungary or Poland. Ask from thy father the
return of my land on the Goryn.” He sent this request, but bade his
envoy look sharply at all things. He was planning to fall on Andrei, as
he had fallen on Glaib, Yuri’s other son, some time earlier.
The envoy found everything in excellent order, and a strong force of

warriors in readiness. Andrei, unsuspicious, or feigning to be so,
turned to Yuri in favor of Izyaslav, but Yuri would not yield a whit to
his nephew. “My uncle,” declared Izyaslav, “would drive me to exile.
Vladimirko of Galitch has taken my land at command of Yuri, and is
now making ready to march on Vladimir, my capital.” So he sent
Vladimir, his brother, to Hungary to ask aid of the king, who marched
straightway with an army on Galitch. “I, thy brother, have started,”
wrote the king. “Join me at once with thy forces. Vladimirko will see
the men whom he has offended.”
Vladimirko had friends in Hungary, who sent him information, hence

he left Bailz, where his camp was, and hastened forward to meet the
Hungarian forces at Peremysl. There he discovered that he was no
match for the king in the field, so he begged the archbishop and two
bishops from Hungary with certain influential boyars to help him. He
lavished gold without stint on these prelates and boyars, and they in
return urged the king to go home and make war at another time. He
yielded, and sent this explanation to Izyaslav: “The Greek Emperor is
moving against me; I must return to my own country to meet him, but
next summer I can send ten thousand men, or even more if thou
need them.”
The Hungarian force vanished, and was as if it had never seen

Galitch. Izyaslav, foiled for the moment by his enemy, sent Vladimir a
second time to Hungary with this message: “Vyatcheslav’s boyars,
the people and the steppe tribes have sent for me. [80]If thou must
stay at home to prepare for the Greek Emperor, send me the aid
which thou hast promised, and I will be with thee hereafter at all
times.” The king sent him now ten thousand men, and with these
warriors he set out against Kief.
On the way news was brought to him that Vladimirko was following.
A council was summoned, and the boyars spoke thus: “Thou art
marching on Yuri, and Vladimirko is pursuing; our position is
perilous.” “Ye have come out of Kief,” replied Izyaslav; “ye have lost
land and property, ye have lost all. I have lost my inheritance. I must
get back my own and win yours in the same effort. If Vladimirko
comes, God will decide between us. If Yuri should meet me, the Lord
will judge also in his case.” And leaving Sviatopolk, one of his
brothers, behind in Vladimir, his capital, to guard the place, he
moved forward with the Hungarians and his own men.
On the way Vladimirko was joined by Andrei, and both forces

followed together. Though sometimes at skirmishing distance,
Izyaslav wisely abstained from action, and sent on Vladimir to
Bailgorod, where Boris, son of Yuri, was feasting. If a collector of
taxes had not raised the bridge, Boris would have been seized at
table. Unable to get possession of the place without a battle,
Vladimir rejoined Izyaslav, and they hastened on toward Kief. When
Vladimirko’s men came up, they approached and sounded a
trumpet. People ran out and lowered the bridge willingly. This
advance force entered Bailgorod, and Boris hurried away to his
father. Yuri, greatly alarmed by the strength of the enemy marching
against him, left Kief at once, crossed the Dnieper, fled on, and took
refuge in Gorodok.
All Kief went out to meet Izyaslav. The delight of the people this time
seemed real. Yuri, whom the city never really liked, had become
most unpopular, and they now rejoiced to be rid of him.
On the west, beyond Bailgorod, Vladimirko and Andrei were

manœuvering for battle with Izyaslav, when suddenly news reached
them that their enemy was in Kief with his forces, and Yuri powerless
in Gorodok. Vladimirko’s rage was unbounded. “I cannot see how my
father-in-law manages,” said he to Andrei. “I cannot understand how
ye, his sons, help him. Thou, Andrei, hadst thy camp on the Goryn;
Boris was in Bailgorod. We might have [81]forced Izyaslav to action
and lamed, or defeated him, but Boris left us and gave the road to
our enemy. Thy father then abandoned Kief, and Izyaslav is now
Grand Prince. To-day the whole Russian land is on his side. I leave
you, and go now to Galitch.”
Yuri had no friends in the south, where all had hoped for his
downfall. The campaign seemed indeed like some folk-tale. A battle
might have ruined Izyaslav; a quick march secured him dominion.
Vladimirko turned home, but to each town he said as he came to it:

“Give me the silver and gold that I ask of you. If ye refuse I will take
what I find at the sword’s point.” No town or city had the silver or
gold, or the coin or utensils to meet this demand of Yuri’s ally, hence
people were forced to take every ornament from the necks and the
arms of their women, and give them to the master of Galitch.
Vladimirko took from all in this way till he reached his own boundary.
At last the hour of triumph had sounded for Yuri’s simple-minded
brother. On the day after his entrance to Kief, Izyaslav sent this
message to his uncle: “I salute thee, my father. I have sinned before
thee, but I repent. I have sinned a first, and a second, and a third
time. I repent now of all these transgressions, and, if thou forgive,
God will pardon me. I give thee Kief; come thou and sit on the throne
of thy fathers.” Thus Izyaslav acknowledged completely the right of
uncles as opposed to the sons of their elder brothers, a right against
which even personal qualities, or the respect of people availed not.
“God give thee strength, my son,” replied Vyatcheslav, “because

thou hast given me due honor. It was thy duty thus to act long ago.
Thou hast given honor to God by the honor given me. Thou sayest
that I am thy father; I say that thou art my son. I have no son, and
thou hast no father; thou art my son, thou art also my brother.”
Uncle and nephew now kissed the cross to each other not to part in
defeat or in triumph. The Hungarians were feasted, received rich
presents, and went home. The two princes sent Izyaslav’s son on a
mission to Hungary, to assure the Hungarian king of the Kief princes’
gratitude, and to make offer of service, asking, too, that if the need
came the king would send troops, as he had sent them recently.
Rostislav of Smolensk was invited to aid in liberating [82]Kief, for they
thought, and thought rightly, that Yuri would not yield without a
struggle.
Yuri now summoned all his allies. Sviatoslav moved promptly and
met Vladimir, son of David, in Chernigoff; then their forces sailed
down in boats to Gorodok, where they joined Yuri. Izyaslav, the other
son of David, joined the Kief princes. Rostislav of Smolensk came to
Kief early with his forces. Yuri moved with his allies from Gorodok to
the Dnieper and strove hard to cross, but was foiled in each effort by
his nephew. Strengthened now by large forces of the Polovtsi, he
marched toward the south and crossed at the second ford, below
Kief, then turning back, he advanced on the capital. Izyaslav and his
uncle, disposing their men in the city and around it, waited for the
coming conflict.
“We are now ready for battle,” said Vyatcheslav to his nephews. “Yuri
is my brother, though younger, and I wish to bring my seniority
before him. God in his judgment considers the right side.” So he
summoned an envoy and gave these instructions: “Go thou to Yuri,
my brother: bow down to him in my name and say these words from
me: ‘I have said often to thee, Yuri, and to Izyaslav, shed not
Christian blood, ruin not the Russian land. I have tried to restrain
thee from war. I have regiments and power of my own which God
gave me. Still I have not fought for myself, though thou, Yuri, and
also Izyaslav have deeply offended me, not one time, but many.
Izyaslav, when going to fight against Igor, said that he was not
seeking Kief for himself, but for me, his father. Then, when God gave
him victory, he kept Kief for himself, and took also Turoff and Pinsk
from me. That is how Izyaslav offended, but I, keeping Christians in
mind and the Russian land, did not remember it against him. Thou,
brother Yuri, when going to Pereyaslavl to fight against Izyaslav,
didst say: “I seek not Kief for myself. I have an older brother who is
to me as a father; I am seeking Kief for that brother.” But, when God
aided thee to take Kief, thou didst keep it. Thou didst seize from me,
besides, Dorogobuj and Peresopnitsa, and gavest me only
Vyshgorod. Thus did ye wrong me. All this time I sought no redress
out of love for the Russian land and for Christians. Ye would take no
decision of mine; ye sought war. I strove to dissuade thee from war,
but ye would not listen. Thy answer was that thou couldst not give
homage to a junior. But Izyaslav, though he has failed [83]twice
before in his word to me, has given now what is mine; he has yielded
up Kief, and calls me father. Thou hast said: “I cannot bow down to a
junior.” I am older than thou not a little; I was bearded before thou
wert born. If it is thy wish to defy my seniority, God will render
judgment.’ ”
To this Yuri answered: “I bow down to thee, brother; thy words are
true, and well spoken. Thou art to me in the place of a father, and if it
is thy desire to arrange matters clearly, let Izyaslav go to Volynia and
Rostislav return to Smolensk. I will settle all questions then with
thee.” “Brother Yuri, this is what I will say in answer,” retorted
Vyacheslav. “Thou hast seven sons, and I do not hunt them away
from thee. I have two adopted sons, Izyaslav and Rostislav, with
some others still younger. I will add this: Do thou for the good of the
Russian land and of Christians go to Pereyaslavl, thence to Kursk
with thy sons, and beyond is Rostoff, thy great inheritance. Send
home the sons of Oleg. After that we will settle, and shed no
Christian blood. But if thou must have thy own way, the Purest Lady
and her Son will judge between us.”
Yuri gave no answer to these words, but next morning he appeared

before Kief with his forces. There was nothing but skirmishing till
toward evening, when a part of each army engaged. The Kief troops
drove back their opponents, and fought with such vigor that Yuri
withdrew his whole force and marched westward to meet Vladimirko,
his ally from Galitch, who, as he heard, was now hastening to join
him. He appeared before Bailgorod, from which his son Boris had
fled some time previously, and summoning the citizens, said: “Ye are
my people, open the gates to me.” “Has Kief opened its gates?” was
the answer. The gates remained closed, and Yuri marched farther.
The Kief princes set out in pursuit and overtook him near Rut River,
beyond Bailgorod. There they strove again to make peace, but
failed, since the sons of Oleg and the Polovtsi opposed it.
As they could not come to terms, the Kief princes were anxious to
force a battle before Vladimirko could strengthen their enemy. Yuri
wished to defer the engagement till Vladimirko could join him. His
first intention was to pass Rut River, prevent the Kief troops from
crossing, and wait for his ally in a favorable position. But all his
movements to gain time were useless, and he was compelled [84]to
turn promptly to battle. Andrei, now Yuri’s eldest son, for Rostislav
had died recently, ranged his father’s warriors in order of battle.
“Thou hast striven much for the good,” said Izyaslav and his brother
to Vyatcheslav, “but thy brother opposes at all times. We are willing,
if need be, to lay down our lives to save thy rights for thee.” “My
sons,” replied the old man, “I have been opposed all my life to
bloodshed. We are on this field to-day because of Yuri. God will
judge between him and me.”
Andrei advanced in the front rank, led the battle, and made the first
lance cast. His lance broke, his shield was torn from him, his helmet
was shivered, and he fell from the horse, which was wounded under
him. Izyaslav also engaged in the front rank; thrown from his horse,
he fell and was lost among the slain and wounded.
The battle was brief, but decisive. Izyaslav’s men fought willingly this
time, while Yuri’s showed no heart in the struggle. His Polovtsi fled
without using an arrow. After them fled the sons of Oleg, and next
Yuri himself and his sons. Many prisoners were taken, many men
slain. Among the slain was Vladimir, son of David, Prince of
Chernigoff.
When the victors, returning, passed over the field after hunting their
fugitive opponents, they saw a man trying to rise from a great pile of
dead and wounded. Some foot warriors ran up and struck him. “I am
a prince!” he was able to say. “Thou art the man we are seeking,”
cried they, and slashed at his helmet, thinking him a son of Oleg, or
David. “I am Izyaslav. I am your prince,” called he to them. They
raised him then with gladness, and praised the Lord, who had saved
him.
The Kief princes urged Izyaslav, son of David, to take his brother’s
corpse, hasten with all the strength in him to Chernigoff, and sit on
the throne before Sviatoslav could forestall him. (This was a real
case of running for office.)
From the battlefield Yuri fled to the Dnieper, which he crossed, and
then sped forward to Pereyaslavl for refuge. Sviatoslav fled to
Gorodok, but as the son of Oleg was enormous in person, and
mortally weary from fighting and fleeing, he could not move farther,
though eager to do so. If he had had wings and could have used
them, he would have flown through the air to Chernigoff; as it was,
he sent forward his nephew, son of Vsevolod, who learned [85]at the
Desna that Izyaslav, son of David, was already on the throne.
Vladimirko of Galitch, on hearing of his father-in-law’s defeat,
hastened homeward.
At last Vyatcheslav and his nephew were in safety on all sides. They
returned to Kief, which they entered in triumph, and held the place
with pleasure, at least for the moment.
Vladimirko of Galitch now dealt a sore blow at his enemies. Having

heard that Mystislav, son of Izyaslav the Kief prince, was bringing in
Hungarians, he lay in wait to destroy them. He found means to place
a great quantity of wine within reach of the foreigners and they
seized it and had a rich feast that evening. Just before daybreak
Vladimirko attacked and slew nearly all of them, reserving but few for
captivity. Mystislav escaped with his personal attendants. “If God
give health to the king, and to me,” said Izyaslav, when he heard of
the slaughter, “Vladimirko will pay for this dearly.”

Beauty Womens Bodies and The Law Performances in Plastic Jocelynne A Scutt Full Chapter PDF

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Beauty Womens Bodies and The Law Performances in Plastic Jocelynne A Scutt Full Chapter PDF

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Beauty, Women's Bodies and the Law:

Performances in Plastic Jocelynne A.

The Wiley Handbook on What Works with Girls and Women

Aboriginal Women, Law and Critical Race Theory:

Gendered Identity and the Lost Female: Hybridity as a

Techniques in Ophthalmic Plastic Surgery: A Personal

Bodies, Noise and Power in Industrial Music Jason

Women in the History of Science: A Sourcebook Harrison

The Experience of Beauty in the Middle Ages Mary

Plastic Surgery-Craniofacial, Head and Neck Surgery-

ISBN 978-3-030-27997-4 ISBN 978-3-030-27998-1 (eBook)

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020

Cover illustration: © Alex Linch/shutterstock.com

1 Introduction—The Body Plastic 1

2 The Body Beneath the Knife 29

3 Above the Shoulder Blades 79

4 All Above the Waist 119

5 Below the Belt and Under the Waist … 165

6 Our Rounded Bits … 211

7 Extremities: From the Tips of Her Fingers to the Tips

8 Conclusion: Beyond the Body … 297

Introduction—The Body Plastic

1 Brain & Body, Brain vs Body

© The Author(s) 2020 1

Making a film is like constructing a jigsaw puzzle, moving, thinking and

prostitute, uniting (to paraphrase Solomon-Godeau) in her person both

external regulation, subjection, transformation, improvement’. The ‘cen-

Contrarily, perfection of form in Renaissance Italy was demonstrated by ‘a

2 The Body Perfect/Imperfect

demands placed upon women’s bodies to comply with prevailing social

Shepherds I have lost my waist. Have you seen my body?

Nonetheless the imperative that governs women’s appearance infuses

‘Thanks to my montage’, he averred, ‘I succeeded in creating a woman

plastic surgeons seeking to have this ‘excess’, ‘excessive’ or ‘surplus’ tissue

Nevertheless, perusal of the literature confirms that BDD is attributed

3 The Body as Image

decision-making. It is, however, to give proper regard to the world in

shape the positive tone in which the articles [appearing in Cosmopolitan,

4 My Body, Your Opinion

This, she says, constitutes ‘the normalization of “getting work done”’,

How, in the feminine condition, can a human being accomplish herself?

actual bodily harm or unlawful wounding upon a woman’s body, which

Their expressed emotion or signs of distress appear to have influenced

Aesthetic, cosmetic and plastic surgery remains gendered.105 Most

5 The Body as ‘I’

Do the changes women are making, now, to their bodies, in clinics

linkedin.com/in/karen-buczynski-lee-73172119 (accessed 20 January

Open Bible, https://www.openbible.info/topics/consider_the_lilies_of_

1997; Motivation and Emotion/Book/2014/Cosmetic Surgery Motiva-

The Body Beneath the Knife

Brows brushed thick

Remade, refashioned, redesigned

© The Author(s) 2020 29

Nothing sacred, not really ours

1 The Body in the Beauty Parlour

into fashion alongside the vogueishness of Amedeo Modigliani’s (1884–

Although the book and her accompanying seminars had a reputedly

Lessening or alleviating frown-lines may cause life-threatening conditions

• Problems with swallowing, speaking or breathing, caused by weak-

and statutory provisions. In the United Kingdom, operating alongside

• The product complained of was defective; and

Action can be taken against the manufacturer of the product or of

• Monitoring the safety of products;