Make Me Heal is an insidious website. By its title, you think it’s for people trying to recover from something terrible. Actually, it’s a site that promotes cosmetic plastic surgery and anti-aging treatments. So what it actually helps you with is recovery from your self-perceived ugliness from not having perfect features and the perfect figure, or from plain ageing. I hate to drive traffic to this site by pointing to it from this blog, but I believe our community needs to understand what kind of twisted thinking has infiltrated our culture. So here’s the link.

I did come across an interesting post about Cate Blanchett, though, who has spoken out against teen plastic surgery and against cosmetic surgery in general. Here are some highlights:

“It’s a big difference women in their 60s or 70s finally deciding to get their eyes done. Who knows what you’re going to think? But when you’ve got an 18-year-old daughter who says ‘Mummy can I get a boob job?’ and you go ‘Sure honey’.”

“I mean their bodies haven’t even finished evolving. The fact that you’ve got a magazine, you know all these magazines for teenage girls about consuming and they’re so fragile. I’ve got sons. I don’t know what I’d do if I had a daughter.”

“I see someone’s face, someone’s body who’d had children and I think they’re the song lines of your experience, and why would you want to eradicate that?“

Bravo, Cate, for pointing out that plastic surgery in teens is frightening. Also, that these young girls are not done developing yet! A beautiful woman, in an industry that thrives on looks, sees the value of inner beauty and aging gracefully! Now if only we could get more actresses to be responsible, speak up and honor themselves and women…

I totally understand Cate’s fear of having girls and her relief at having boys. With all I have been through, I can relate. At one time, I hoped to have a boy too. Knowing what a girl can go through with body image, I thought I wouldn’t be able to deal. But the fates sent me a girl and my beautiful Sydnee was born.

I now have three teenage daughters, and believe me, there IS pressure to look a certain way. Even thought they don’t LIKE Britney or Lindsay, they still are exposed to these young celebrities just by growing up in America, and images contain subliminal messages about girls’ body image! MY girls have the benefit of my experience, but they still feel it. In a culture shaped by programs like Nip/Tuck and sites like Make Me Heal, it can be really hard to teach young girls the value in themselves. But it is so important.