Botched Plastic Surgery and Victim Blaming

Victoria Pitts-Taylor, Wesleyan’s new professor and chair of Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies and a specialist in body image, spoke to The Atlantic magazine about the latest reality TV show, Botched, to focus on plastic surgery gone bad. The two doctors who star in the show are frequently seen castigating patients who suffer unfortunate after-effects from botched plastic surgery. Pitts-Taylor says the show exposes “blame games and accusations toward victims” that are common from the plastic-surgery establishment, in which surgeons eager for a profit often behave unwisely, resulting in disaster.

“Who is blamed in the narrative for the situation that they’re in?” Pitts-Taylor says. “I think we’re all being a little bit too willing to accept these narratives of blame of individual patients for being too crazy, or being too careless, and there’s certainly not enough critique of the industry as a whole.”

Read the whole article here.