BEAUTY HURTS: MODERN METHODS OF CREATING BEAUTIFUL IMMORTALS

The traditional view that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" is confronted with the modern mechanistic understanding of the human body and with the scientific interpretation of the primacy of human beauty's biological givens and its importance. Authoress has brought this assumption into question by considering historical changes in defining the beautiful that is dependent primarily on the social context. Media establishment of ideals of physical beauty as well as the development of medical and technical advances has encouraged the emergence and popularization of new forms of body modifications and identity plays. Taking this into account authoress discussed in detail body modifications resulting from aesthetic surgery and from directed physical/sporting activities with bodybuilding as the best known representative. Aesthetic surgical practices are traditionally negatively associated with the "hiding the sins of flesh" while cosmetic surgery itself was being characterized as fundamentally opposed to the principles of medical treatment of disease. Partly because of the political and metaphysical changes in understanding of physical beauty and body and partly because of the scientific and medical changes in understanding of health and disease (physical and mental), aesthetic surgery has become a proclaimed method of forming not only a beautiful body but also a beautiful soul. Sports practices also did not stay immune to the dominion of "lookism" which is often manifested in the sacrifice of health for the sake of creating the desirable body. The entrance of science and medicine in sport facilitated social control over bodies and influenced the removal of elements that were traditionally associated with sport - fun, relaxation and games. In the present aesthetic transformations of the body are parts of normalizing and disciplinary social mechanisms. This is why the issue of aesthetic body modifications should not be entirely reduced to individual's vanity or self-project because it ignores the broader social responsibility regarding discrimination against the unattractive and the ethical and political background of medical and scientific interventions into human body.