Beautiful People

Regina Cano

As life expectancies have increased, many humans have been gradually deciding that they need to do reconstruction on what ultimately droops or what they physically lack.

Satisfaction with one’s self especially demands “good taste” in their own appearance, which is also demanded from others.  This counteracts aging and narrows — seemingly — the difference between the young and old as the search for solutions to such natural points of decline is intensified.

My curiosity with the issue began when I was undergoing physiotherapy outside of my neighborhood.  Entering the facility was a young woman — blond, pretty, and sure of her being so.  Time suddenly stopped and those who were attending the two other patients (among them me) suddenly became silent; previously they had been talking among themselves as usual.

The blond went behind a hospital partition, although before entering she was already undoing her bra, until the physiotherapist behind the screen told her: “Sit down on the gurney.”  Still, the universe didn’t recover its rhythm for those on this side of the partition.

This was the moment that one of the physiotherapists said to the other in his ear, “She’s a (unintelligible), and takes ultrasound (unintelligible), they look like lumps (unintelligible) it doesn’t excite me.”

Please excuse the “unintelligible” whispering that couldn’t be heard, though the words that could be discerned were probably sufficient.  What one of the therapists told me was that the blond had previously gotten silicon breasts and that now it seemed she had lumps, which was as “unpleasant as treating balloons that could explode at any moment,” in his opinion as a man, and which was shared by those who also worked there.

Could it be that these are normal opposed reactions that are beginning in Cuba in light of aesthetic surgery with “silicon” since these have now stopped being done in a hidden fashion (though they are still a small minority) because injections for breasts and lips have been most frequent in the gay world?

How much will this young woman and others have to go through before it’s accepted that some people — the complete owners of their bodies — can mutilate and mistreat them at their whim, since they themselves pay the price for their experiential responsibility with their joys and sufferings.

And they’ll now have plenty to suffer.  However, though they can be warned, we shouldn’t treat them like people with smallpox.  I think that what should first prevail is respect, even if we don’t agree with something that I suspect is insane.