You know what I don’t hear about much anymore? Cosmetic “plastic” surgery. That used to be a bigger thing in the culture, in the 90s you heard about face lifts, neck lifts, breast lifts, breast implants (silicone AND saline), “tummy tucks”, liposuction all the time.

Is it because people don’t do that so much anymore, the fad wore off, it was an artifact of a high-disposable-income boom time, it was really about the boomers confronting themselves as mortal and decaying things for the first time?

Is it because we’re more body-positive about being lumpy fucks, or that we invest our appearance neuroses into going to the gym instead? (As if the jogging and aerobics fads, NordicTrack, ThighMaster hadn’t been a thing before?)

Is it just no longer novel, something we need to work into our culture, now dog bites man? (I remember later mini-booms of attention around Botox, butt implants, collagen injections that then faded)

Is it that it fit into a authentic/phony binary that used to be a lot more central to understandings of culture – notions of “selling out” and “keeping it real”, white picket fence suburbanism and antidepressants equally disdained as false happiness?