Rhinoplasty and the freedom of choice

If it works for you, then what’s the problem?

Mina Atia, Staff Contributor

So, here’s the deal: I’m sitting at the Killam and notice a parade of girls with post-op patches on their nose walking with heads held high, and I wonder: If that was me, and I just had a nose job, would I ever show my face outside the comfort of my own home, let alone roam around campus and attend classes regularly? No, I would not even dare!

The next question was ‘why’? Nose jobs have become an up-and-coming trend, ever since the late 1970s, and a very popular practice in our modern society; it even pulled the rug from underneath boob jobs.

Some of my lady friends keep mentioning all the flaws they see about their noses and ask me, “does my nose look good?” “Does it feel sexy?” Eventually, I started asking myself:  are they damsels in distress, or just damsels with stress? What kind of problems does the nose present to make them consider going through the excruciating process of rhinoplasty?

One of my friends is a post-op hopeful, who, for obvious reasons, wished to remain anonymous. “It would certainly boost my confidence and the way I feel about myself,” she said. “It is about me, not other people … I am the one who looks at myself in the mirror.”  But these choices, no matter how personal, aren’t made in a vacuum. What role do the role-models and celebrities we idolize have in influencing our decisions? Shirley Tillotson is a history professor at Dalhousie and the co-ordinator of Gender and Women’s Studies program. “There are many kinds of feminism. I won’t speak for all of them,” she said over email.

“But most feminists will point out that personal choices are always also social choices, both in what pressures and promises influence the choice and what the choice means. As a feminist, I’m always going to ask myself and encourage others to ask themselves what effect any kind of body modification might have on the kind of world we want to live in (and not just what kind of nose I want to have).”

Ultimately, there is no harsh dichotomy between choices we ‘make for ourselves’ and choices we make because society validates them for us. Our choices are influenced by societal aspects and then modified with our personal ideals. In turn, our personal attributes affect which societal aspects we take to heart.

And yes, for some people, those societal aspects might include the way they’re perceived by those around them. Symmetry and proportion influence our attraction to potential sexual partners. And the nose is right there, in the middle of your face. Let’s be honest: who doesn’t fixate on the nose when checking someone out?

As Dr. Sharon Moalem clearly states in his book How Sex Works: “It’s not the size of your nose on its own that affects your attractiveness; it’s how much the size of your nose deviates from (the) average face.”

An elective surgery could be the answer for many women, as well as men in many cases, who think that their nose makes it difficult for them to feel sexy or attractive.

So to all the girls around the Killam Library with post-op patches, we salute you. We know what you have done, or got work done on in this case, and we commend you for your courage to seek the option of making a change. You recognized something about yourselves that you didn’t find satisfying, and you decided to do something about it. May we all attempt to follow a similarly brave path.