fem2 | Center For Research

by Diana Zuckerman, PhD

April 11, 2013

Cross-posted from Fem2.0 with permission.

More than 300,000 teens and women in the U.S. decide to get breast implants every year. To hear them talk about it, you’d think they were getting therapy instead of surgery. They almost never say “I want larger breasts” (or even “I want better boobs.”)

What they say is “I don’t like my body and I want to feel better about myself.” And plastic surgeons will tell their patients “this will really improve your self-esteem.” But their advertisements seemed designed to make us feel insecure about our bodies, not better about ourselves.

Unfortunately, breast implants don’t deliver on that promise of feeling more self-confident.

On the contrary, the breast implant companies’ own studies prove it. There are 2 major breast implant companies in the U.S., Allergan and Mentor. Both tried to prove to the FDA that breast implants helped women’s self-esteem and both failed miserably. Allergan used 12 different quality of life measures to compare augmentation patients before surgery and 2 years later. Nine of the 12 (75%) were worse after the women got their breast implants, including self-esteem.

The results were similar for women getting Mentor breast implants. The women got worse in their self-reported physical health and mental health, with most showing no difference in their self-concept or how they felt about their body.

Why do they feel worse? For some women, it is the disappointment that even after plastic surgery they are still not beautiful enough. And for some women, the complications from breast augmentation — numb nipples, hard or painful breasts, and for some women chronic fatigue or other problems – make them feel physically messed up and guilty because they “made a stupid decision and now I’m paying for it.”

Myth and Reality

Where does the myth of breast augmentation as therapy come from? Wouldn’t you think that any cosmetic surgery would make women feel better about themselves?

If you ask women (or men) who had plastic surgery how it influenced them, many will say that they feel better about themselves. But, memory can play tricks on us. For example, some of us have mostly wonderful memories of our childhood and others have mostly sad memories, but those memories aren’t always accurate. The best way to find out what the impact of breast augmentation – or any cosmetic surgery – is to interview the people before the surgery and again after they have completely recovered from surgery and gotten used to the “new me.”

Study after study shows that men and women who get plastic surgery usually feel better about the body part that was “fixed” but they don’t feel better about themselves and they don’t feel better about their relationships or their lives. How we feel about ourselves is a central part of who we are. It doesn’t change easily. For example, a “good hair day” or a great outfit can help us feel more attractive, at least for a while, and can help us have a good day, but it doesn’t make us feel more worthwhile as people or happier in our lives in general.

Psychologists explain that this is the difference between a “state of mind” (feeling good because I’m having a good hair day) and a personality trait (how I feel about myself because of my high or low self-esteem).

Plastic surgeons like to believe that they make magic by making people feel better about themselves. And the “beauty industry” helps convince us that if we just buy the right product (whether it is a cosmetic, an outfit, or a surgery) will make all the difference. For example, “makeovers” – whether in magazines or on TV – work by making the women feel awful about themselves at first and then “curing” their shortcomings.

Teenagers are the most vulnerable

Teenagers are especially likely to feel bad about how they look. But every year throughout the teen years, boys and girls tend to feel better about how they look. By the time they are 18, they feel much better than they did at 13 or 14, for instance. If they get plastic surgery as teens, they think that’s the reason they feel better, but the truth is that even teens who don’t get plastic surgery and don’t necessarily look better than they used to, still feel more comfortable with how they look as they get a few years older.

One more thing to keep in mind: women who get plastic surgery once tend to want more plastic surgeries. In other words, after fixing one perceived flaw, they find other flaws that bother them and that they want to fix. That’s another sign that breast augmentation and plastic surgery are not the way to improve self-esteem.

Therapy vs. Plastic Surgery

Why are so many women so unhappy with how they look, and especially with their bodies? The standards seem to be getting more unattainable. Let’s face it: thin bodies with very large breasts don’t happen in nature very often.

I’ve talked to actresses about this and I call it the trickle down insecurity effect. Beautiful women are more likely to become actresses or models than plain Janes, but as they struggle to make it in Hollywood or the beauty industry, they are told they are not quite beautiful enough. They try extreme diets, personal trainers, professional make-up artists, the best hairdressers, and the most gorgeous outfits. When even that isn’t enough, they get plastic surgery. Then regular girls and women see them and feel inadequate as they think “Why can’t I look like that?”

Of course, even movie stars don’t always look as good as they do in magazines or movies. In real life, there is no photoshoping, airbrushing, or flattering lighting to fix the imperfections.

But the bottom line is: if you want very large breasts, breast implants can help. If you want to feel better about yourself, breast augmentation isn’t the answer. Therapy might be. And, it can also help to stop comparing yourself to women whose images aren’t real, but have instead been manufactured into unattainable ideals of beauty.

by Diana Zuckerman

Updated January 9, 2013

Cross-posted from Fem2.0 with permission.

Thanks to extensive media coverage, almost everyone in the country knows that Notre Dame lost their championship football game to Alabama. But despite last year’s coverage on CBS, MSNBC and the Washington Post, few Americans are aware of Notre Dame’s cover-up of rapes by Notre Dame football players. Why is the football team’s championship game so newsworthy, and their rape cover-up so, well, successfully covered up?

During last year’s trial of Jerry Sandusky, football fans across the country were horrified to learn about the rapes of dozens of young boys that would not have occurred if it hadn’t been for the cover-up by the Penn State football leadership and highest level administrators. Penn State’s football team, and therefore the college, was punished for the cover-up – including the team members who were completely innocent of the crimes. But those victims were young boys. Apparently, the same outrage doesn’t apply when the victims are young women.

Melinda Hennenberg, a Notre Dame alumna, is one of the few main stream journalists who has written about this travesty, in an article published in the Washington Post last month:

Of the two reported rapes, one of the victims is dead and the other, according to Hennenberg, “decided to keep her mouth shut at least in part because she’d seen what happened to the first woman. Neither player has ever even been named, and won’t be here, either, since neither was charged with a crime.”As luck would have it, federal investigators were on the Notre Dame campus to investigate how the college handles rape reports when the second rape occurred. Hennenberg points out that:

“with its Title IX funding on the line, the university marked the 40th anniversary of coeducation in 2012 by changing the way it investigates sexual assault for the second time in two years.”

Almost 20 years ago, I spoke with government officials about the widespread cover-up of rapes on college campuses. I was sure that if colleges accurately reported rapes, it would greatly influence decisions that college women and their families made about where to attend college. And, similarly, if college campuses were forced to accurately report rapes, they would do a much better job of preventing them.

But, despite some progress, many colleges have concluded that cover-ups are the best way to protect themselves. Notre Dame is the poster child for that strategy, and how successful it can be.

Here’s what Hennenberg eloquently reported in the Washington Post after investigating the rapes for several months.

“Two years ago, Lizzy Seeberg, a 19-year-old freshman at Saint Mary’s College, across the street from Notre Dame, committed suicide after accusing an ND football player of sexually assaulting her. The friend Lizzy told immediately afterward said she was crying so hard she was having trouble breathing.

Yet after Lizzy went to the police, a friend of the player’s sent her a series of texts that frightened her as much as anything that had happened in the player’s dorm room. “Don’t do anything you would regret,” one of them said. “Messing with Notre Dame football is a bad idea.”

Lizzy Seeberg at a tailgate party with family and friends, September 2010. (Courtesy of the Seeberg family)

At the time of her death, 10 days after reporting the attack to campus police, who have jurisdiction for even the most serious crimes on school property, investigators still had not interviewed the accused. It took them five more days after she died to get around to that, though they investigated Lizzy herself quite thoroughly, even debriefing a former roommate at another school with whom she’d clashed.

Six months later — after the story had become national news — Notre Dame did convene a closed-door disciplinary hearing. The player testified that until he actually met with police, he hadn’t even known why they wanted to speak to him — though his buddy who’d warned Lizzy not to mess with Notre Dame football had spoken to investigators 13 days earlier. He was found “not responsible,” and never sat out a game.

A few months later, a resident assistant in a Notre Dame dorm drove a freshman to the hospital for a rape exam after receiving an S.O.S. call. “She said she’d been raped by a member of the football team at a party off campus,” the R.A. told me. I also spoke to the R.A.’s parents, who met the young woman that same night, when their daughter brought her to their home after leaving the hospital. They said they saw — and reported to athletic officials — a hailstorm of texts from other players, warning the young woman not to report what had happened: “They were trying to silence this girl,” the R.A.’s father told me. And did; no criminal complaint was ever filed.

…..Among those being congratulated for our return to gridiron glory is ND’s president, Rev. John Jenkins, who refused to meet with the Seeberg family on advice of counsel, and other school officials who’ve whispered misleadingly in many ears, mine included, in an attempt to protect the school’s brand by smearing a dead 19-year-old…. At first, officials said privacy laws prevented them from responding. But after some criticism, Jenkins told the South Bend Tribune he’d intentionally kept himself free of any in-depth knowledge of the case, yet was sure it had been handled appropriately.”

On January 7, 2013, the day of Notre Dame’s championship game, Dave Zirin, a writer for Sports Illustrated, wrote an excellent article about this travesty of justice in The Nation. Zirin points out “the sports media have chosen not to discuss the fact that this football team has two players on its roster suspected of sexual assault and rape; two players whose crimes have been ignored; two players whose accusers felt harassed and intimidated; two players whose presence on the field Monday night should be seen as a national disgrace.”

What’s Notre Dame’s official position on rape? Well, they do offer a self-defense class for their own women students: What will it take to convince the Notre Dame leadership and their alumnae that isn’t enough?

In the last few weeks, the deadly rape of a college student on a moving bus in India has finally forced that country to acknowledge that raping women is a terrible crime that needs to be taken seriously by police, the public, and the media.

And, in recent days, the rape of a Steubenville, H.S. student by members of that school’s football team has also captured national attention on NPR and elsewhere, but only because some of the boys joked about it on YouTube.

Notre Dame’s championship football game was an was an opportunity for the media to bring long-overdue attention to the cover-up on that campus, and across the country. That didn’t happen. Notre Dame lost the game, and only time will tell if the “Fighting Irish” will lose their championship effort to cover-up the very credible accusations of rape by their football players.

Photo Credits: freeflight046 via the Creative Commons License.

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Breast implants as therapy? Not so much