The Surgery That Wasn’t About Her

Some gossip site was passing around a story about Selena Gomez supposedly planning surgery, the implication being that she wanted to be more attractive for a guy. I don’t even know if it’s true—none of us do—but that’s not really the point. The point is how instantly believable it is that a young woman would hate her own body badly enough to go under the knife, and how perfectly that fits the narrative we’ve all been sold about what women are supposed to look like and what they’ll do to keep a man’s attention.

I’ve never understood the energy people spend on celebrity bodies. But then I read something like this and I get why it matters, even though it’s stupid to care. Because the message isn’t really about Selena. It’s about every person who’s ever looked in the mirror and thought they were wrong somehow, not enough, not the right shape. The fact that it gets packaged as gossip, as entertainment, as something to speculate about over coffee—that’s the real problem.

What bugs me is how casual it all is. The assumption that you’d restructure your body for someone who doesn’t deserve the thought. That your worth is tied to someone else’s desire, and that desire is fixed, measurable, improvable. You know it won’t fix anything, but you go anyway. You read the gossip. You form an opinion. You feel a little bad about yourself without quite admitting it.

I don’t know what Selena Gomez actually did or didn’t do with her body. I don’t think I should. But I know the culture that would make it seem reasonable, even sympathetic, that she’d want to. That’s the part that sits with me wrong.