Cosmetic Surgery Regrets: A Decisive Paradox

When did I realize that I’m more physically, viscerally, animal bodily attracted to larger women? Women with curves and thick thighs. Women with substance. Women who crush me a little under the weight of them.

I'm nothing if not decisive. On a bad day, you could call me impetuous; the subtext there implies that I am too hurried and unthinking at times with big, highly consequential decisions. Often this practice has rewarded me in the end. A few times though, one especially, I landed in a place of sincere regret. This is the story of one of those times.

It wasn't until I emailed photos of myself in my underwear to a total stranger that I wondered whether I should go a different way. She responded that I would be really happy with the results. I didn't need much in the way of a sales pitch. All I wanted was to change the way I looked in my underwear, and fast. A woman seven years my junior had been flirting with me. She had texted me photos of herself in her underwear, and her body was a thing of exquisite perfection. I was intimidated, unwilling to let her see me sans my clothes unless I could work some miracle that would remove a layer of fat from my middle.

While in the best shape of my life, amid practicing CrossFit several times a week, and just after running what was to be my last marathon, I crashed my motorcycle. My fit body was ripped apart. I lay in a hospital bed unable to move and in severe pain for two weeks. I withered away— my muscles quickly atrophied. Skin hung loose like a stretched out old bathing suit from my middle, my arms, my thighs. In the years following my miraculous survival and recovery, I'd been working out daily but along with the muscle I built was a layer of fat on my abdomen that was stubborn and unmovable. So now what?

I found myself responding to one of the ubiquitous advertisements for aesthetic surgery in San Diego, the capital of the Beauty Industrial Complex. After moving there from Boston, I thought I was an intellectual with a snobby disregard for such nonsense. Why not put that effort into what's between your ears and develop the capacity to hold an intelligent conversation rather than worry about how bleached your asshole is and how taut your belly? It seemed hetero men could be as frumpy and unattractive as they pleased and not lose points for it with the women they courted.

It was poetic justice that I ended up walking a mile in those shoes. Hurrying to the nearest old chubby man with a magnifying glass, and his assistant, who was maybe older than me but without a single wrinkle and with lips more puffy than can be found in nature on any species. She was the one promising I would be happy with the results. I told her I needed to look good naked in ten weeks, and she assured me that I would. That was the amount of time I was making the new girl wait before I was willing to sleep with her.

Getting liposuction wasn't the only decision I made for her. She also wanted to be ethically non-monogamous. She was more attracted to me when I had other love interests. So I sought someone out, just to manufacture more interest. I ended up being more attracted to the second girlfriend—the one who was not objectively flawless and didn't feel the need to appear that way. Her comfort inside her own skin, her kindness coupled with her intelligence, made her hotter than my swimsuit model millennial with a grumpy disposition could ever hope to be. More poetic justice, I guess.

I was ready to admit that my attraction to the younger, hotter girl was driven more by the status symbol she would be for me, like a shiny trophy that I could hold up and say, see? I won! She would reflect favorably on me, make me look hotter, worthy. But then the shallowness and meanness I encountered in her left me feeling less attracted. And her level of concern about appearances, both her own and mine, was too much. She was highly dependent on a constant stream of attention from strangers.

The less conventionally attractive girlfriend, in contrast, seemed kind, nurturing, intelligent and mature. This was increasingly appealing. More, I found that I personally preferred the larger body size aesthetically. I find voluptuous curves far sexier than a slender, flat frame. Around the same time, I noticed the social media posts by Ginelle Testa, who was making a name for herself as a body positive influencer on Instagram. She posted short videos of herself in bikinis or in her undies boldly showing off her larger size and her curves, claiming them as sexy and labelling herself as hot. The confidence and flirty playfulness she exuded was, in fact, very attractive.

And yet. The fact remains that I went through with the liposuction, I found myself imitating my own corpse on a chrome operating table as the fat was removed from my midsection. In bold spite of my intellect, some part of me believed it would improve my chances of having and keeping the younger, hotter girl. Edges blurred. The air turned satin. The valium was taking effect. Sober people like me, who work a recovery program and commit to change who we are, not merely abstain — we call this a freelapse.

The cosmetic surgery center was different from the hospital environment, which was the only other place I’d ever been prepared for a surgery. There, I was never given a valium. Here, it was like the appetizer given before a fine meal. The blurred softness gave way to the blank in-between, I was kept alive by a tube forcing air in and out of my lungs. I saw my body as though from above: already thin, naked, pale skin surrounded by mirror-clean metal while a tube was inserted under my skin and yanked around to tear apart and suction out the fat.

That night, I stood before a mirror and saw the effect: my brutalized torso. Its shape was the same, but smaller, and in pain. The bruising was extensive and deep, echoing back the wails of deeper wounds still too fresh, trauma carried long in the body. Red and purple and blue and black, my skin throbbed, both anew and in remembrance. The new wounding beckoned the old, and not even that old, but merely two years before, when I was torn apart and fitted with metal and mettle. The trauma that still lived under the surface rose, the helplessness and fear and grief surfaced with it. I fell into my bed alone and curled up tight. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” I said to my skin.

The surgeon had used the scar over my pubis as an entry point. At each end of it was a single stitch and a scab. I lay my palms over them and closed my eyes. My body shone and shivered with hurt and regret. My mind was nothing but apology.

With the fat magically removed, what remained was muscle. What had been unfirm was firm. Abdominal muscles looked so prominent in the mirror, they cast shadows on my skin. To the touch, the place just under my skin was hard, not soft like before. Even the fat that remained was hard and tunneled. There was a strange pattern of corrugations under the skin of my abdomen, which was from the suction wand creating small tunnels around which some of the fat had hardened.

Unable to face the humiliation and embarrassment I felt, I lied to my family and friends. I told them I had a procedure to remove scar tissue from my pelvis. My made-up story was that the abundance of scar tissue caused pain around my metal parts, and the removal of the excess tissue would likely ease that pain. It was a half-truth, as I do have scar tissue, and it did cause pain. Still, it was secondary though to the purely vain motive I did not discuss, that I secretly had to look better naked. I was insecure about the ugliness of all my scars, which I could do nothing to improve. Making my abdomen flat and taut could allow my scars to be less objectionable in the balance.

Why was it OK for me to care vainly about my scars but not OK for me to care vainly about fat? No answers came, only more questions. I upheld the dishonesty; was lying foremost to myself.

As you might have predicted, the relationship with the younger non-monogamous girl didn't last long. After it ended, when she told me she missed me, it wasn't even me that she missed. It was my abdomen. The object I had pummeled into shape for her benefit. I succumbed to the dictates of the Beauty Industrial Complex despite knowing that anyone interested in me for my looks isn't really interested. The force-feeding of misogyny to the American public is something we all suffer. Are we blameless victims in that sense? Yet, we have agency, and there is accountability, and I am responsible for my choices.

Another perspective: if it makes you feel more confident in your own skin, why not? Perhaps there is feminist power in eventually owning that decision as one that I no longer regret. Though it caused me pain and bruising, it also afforded me experiences I may not have had otherwise, like the experience of being uninhibited sexually. If that's what it took to get me there, so be it.

I'm nothing if not a paradox.