Prone to telling a few porkie pies

I don’t know about any of you, but I think Nip/Tuck is a great show. I probably think that because I’ve always had absolute contempt for cosmetic plastic surgery and probably will until I’m both old and rich, which may be never.

While most practising plastic surgeons have been men, most of their clients have been women. It’s a little akin to men mutilating women’s genitals in Muslim countries, except that women actually ask for it, although it could be argued that a society which is increasingly focussed on physical beauty might make them feel compelled.

Increasingly, though, in a more equitable world of gender relations, many men feel the pressure to be beautiful as well, and many are having operations like pectoral implants which make them look like wildly misproportioned freaks. Others have penis extensions, which aren’t really extensions at all, but a cutting away of the bone at the base of the penis which can lead to something called “hairy donut syndrome” which is better left to your imaginations.

Nip/Tuck actually leaves very little to the imagination. To me it seems replete with a Puritan belief that beauty is a reward for pain and suffering, though it’s written and performed by people with Irish-sounding names which suggest that the surgery clients have to go through what they do because of some sin they’ve commited. (It’s called Catholic Guilt)

What seems to underline the show is that cosmetic surgery is all one big lie, a lie that allows us to pretend that we are younger, or thinner, or of a different ethnicity. The characters lie to each other all the time, in particular Christian (!) who lies to get women to sleep with him, lies about who he’s slept with and keeps the fact that he’s really Matt’s father from him.

In contrast Sean is so honest that you wonder how he got into this line of work in the first place.

Plastic surgery has become so pervasive that I don’t know if I’ve ever implicitly rewarded someone for having an operation, even just by looking at them more than once when they’ve passed me on the street or dancing in a nightclub.

On the other hand, I was really shocked when my ex-girlfriend from Southern California wanted to make sure that I didn’t want her to have breast implants, as some of her ex-boyfriends had. I was so indignant that she’d even ask that I told her how many trachomioctomies could be paid for for the cost of one pair of tit implants, a trachomioctomy being an operation to give sight to an African of Asian child, and the number being around 200.

Going out with a girl who has big tits isn’t as important to me as having vision is to 200 African children, but it must be to some people. But what sort of people?

Stand up, Terry Prone, author of Confessions of a Plastic Surgery addict.

She’s head of Carr Communications, a public relations firm which is kind of neat as that’s basically another form of institutionalised deceit. She also writes for the Irish Examiner (No Comment) and recently penned a piece in the Irish Times defending Kevin Myers, which is the surest way to get on the wrong side of me.

She argues that in the 70’s and 80’s iconoclasts were welcomed in Irish society but now political correctness means that all columnists have to sing from the same hymn sheet. This reminds me of during the divorce referendum when Emily O Reilly said she suddenly knew how it felt to be out of the liberal media loop when she opposed divorce. So, she thinks abused wives should be forced to live with their husbands, but apart from that, she’s a liberal.

I’d love if what Prone said was true, that the country had been taken over by a liberal elite, or that, contrary to what we read in the history books, the Ireland of the 70’s or ‘80s was a place of diverse thought rather than a narrow, inward-looking society where many books were banned and a bookshop in Cork was burned down for selling the thoughts of Chairman Mao.

I’d love if the putative liberal elite were as ruthless in imposing their agenda as Theocrats like John Charles McQuaid were in imposing theirs, as then we might have the same laws on issues like abortion, licensing, drugs and pornography as they do in other European countries. But of course we don’t, in spite of what Prone would have us belief.

Then last week she argued that anyone who opposes incineration but travels by plane is a hypocrite. This struck me as being puzzling, as there’s so many alternatives to incineration but no environmentally friendly way to travel long distances in a short space of time, though it could be argued that some journeys are unnecessary.

Yet this Sunday I find out that Prone herself, a self-confessed plastic surgery addict, flies regularly to Florida, the home of Christian and Sean, just to have plastic surgery performed on her. And she accuses people like me of being hypocrites?

If she’s concerned about the environmental impact of flying, there’s things that she can do to offset the impact, though I doubt she does. Once the incinerator is built, there’s very little any of us can do to limit it’s impact. Prone dismisses our concerns facetiously by saying that dioxins can get arrested for looking at someone the wrong way, but offers no support for this argument. It’s an intellectually dishonest piece from a mendacious woman.

Which probably explains why she empathises with Kevin Myers so much.

But it doesn't explain why the Examiner gives a platform to this vain, self-regarding woman.