Has the American Culture Hit Bottom?
It’s difficult to see it getting any lower than the Brazilian Butt Lift
This might not be news to many Americans, but being an oddball disconnected from the pop culture and trends du jour, it was news to me—and shocking and distressing news at that. I’m speaking of the Brazilian Butt Lift and other medical procedures that have been developed to make women’s butts the size and shape of two side-by-side beach balls.
It might have something to do with the Kardashians. I don’t know their claim to fame but know they are trend-setters and have seen photos of them and their heavy makeup, greasy hair and beach balls.
Mariana van Zeller recently exposed the big business of big butts on her show “Trafficked.” My wife and I had our mouths agape while watching the episode.
Given his natural interest in rear ends, our dog was also fascinated by the show. Thank goodness we don’t have a bull as a pet, for he would’ve eloped with the TV.
The Brazilian Butt Lift entails the surgical removal of fat from some parts of the body and reinserting it in the buttocks. The center of this industry is in Miami, where the procedure is done in surgery storefronts in strip malls, for both American and foreign customers. It’s a bloody, dangerous procedure. Women have died during the operation.
Another procedure for blowing up butts like a beach ball is silicone injections, which are popular in many cities. Like the Brazilian Butt Lift, the injections can have medical complications. They also can lead to severe scarring that requires expensive corrective operations by skilled surgeons.
One scene was filmed inside a high-end strip club in Atlanta, where the dancers pay $1,000 per night to the club and can get ten times as much in tips. According to the dancers interviewed for the show, nine of ten of them have gotten the silicone injections. New dancers have to be inspected in the nude before being allowed to dance at the club, to make sure that they have butts of the proper size and shape. Meat inspectors at a meat-packing plant come to mind.
To use the silly-sounding lingo of the times, all of the women featured on the segment were “people of color.”
One of the women was a former man, who was shown with her naked butt being injected with silicone. Using a popular word of the day, she said that like a lot of people in the transsexual “community,” she had always wanted a curvaceous body.
Maybe some of the featured women were naturally pretty, but with their heavy makeup, fake eyelashes the size of brooms, grotesque tattoos, corpulence, and inarticulateness, there was nothing attractive about them. They oozed shallowness and insecurity. No doubt, the men who find them attractive are even shallower.
Of course, in keeping with journalistic protocols, van Zeller was careful to tell the women that she wasn’t passing judgement on them. After all, being judgmental is a taboo in America among the commentariat, literati, and intelligentsia.
Fortunately, it’s not a taboo in my family. If I were to tell my wife that I wanted to get silicone injections in my Roman nose to make it even larger, she’d tell me that I should get psychiatric help. The same if I were to announce one day that I was Henry the Eighth and began parading around in sixteenth century outfits. For sure, she would have me institutionalized if I started to call her Anne Boleyn and practiced splitting open watermelons with a sword on a chopping block in the backyard.
A glaring societal contradiction can’t be explained. On the one hand, the demeaning of women is tolerated—not only by means of the Brazilian Butt Lift but also in popular entertainment. Take a song by a female “artist” that won a Grammy last year. The lyrics are so disgusting that they won’t be quoted here, but suffice it to say that the song is about a wet and large female body part.
On the other hand, there has been the equal rights movement, the #MeToo movement, the push to get women into positions of power, and the canceling and firing of powerful and influential men who couldn’t keep their hands off women. Having been at the vanguard of the equal rights movement, I know that the goal wasn’t to bring women down to the locker-room standards of adolescent males.
Perhaps the trend of butt injections will run its course and eventually lose air, like a punctured beach ball. But if other trends are a guide, it will first metastasize into something worse. Tattoos are an example. They began as a small personal expression on an arm or leg but spread into sleeve tattoos, neck tattoos, and face tattoos. What was seen as a sign of individuality and rebelliousness has become a sign of groupthink and conformity. Even more inexplicable, people who are compulsive about not consuming chemicals with their food are okay with having chemicals injected in their skin to draw permanent tattoos.
Now women are having chemicals injected in their butts, similar to Thanksgiving turkeys being injected with chemicals by turkey companies to make them plumper.
Has the American culture hit bottom with butt injections? Don’t count on it.
