Keeping up appearances

Our obsession with body image is a serious public health issue for both men and women, says a Cambridge philosopher.

- ANGELA BARNETT

We judge butt implants and boob jobs but we don’t judge pinna-plasty (ear-pinning surgery). We are critical of taking steroids and abdominal etching but not pumping iron at the gym. We mock women with moustaches but approve of getting body hair lasered off. We judge skin colour everywhere but not skin lightening or tanning creams. Instead of judging individuals who modify their bodies to fit into perceived social norms of acceptance, says British philosopher Clare Chambers, “we must judge the systems that tell anyone their body is not good enough”.

From the title of Chambers’ new book, Intact: A defence of the unmodified body, you would think she would be against any modification at all. But in true philosophical fashion, she is not saying don’t – or do – but just to think about it.

We modify our bodies all the time for enhancement, lifestyle or health reasons: laser eye surgery, hip replacement, tattoos, piercings, cochlear implants or juice cleanses. But what we want to avoid, she says, “is a society that causes suffering and then pushes modification as the only solution”. Or, obversely, when people are under strong social pressure to modify – circumcision due to religious beliefs, a nose job after childhood bullying or a sales rep pressured to get Botox to stay a certain age – that “we don’t then condemn them for doing so”.

Chambers, 46, is a professor of political philosophy at the University of Cambridge and author of many books and papers in which she tackles lofty subjects. Her first book, in 2008, was entitled