How Many of Your Legs Would You Be Willing to Break in Order to Get Hot?
It’s hard not to gawk at GQ’s recent report on leg-lengthening surgery, ew-ing and ugh-ing at the description of one patient’s post-op limbs. (“A small section of his right femur is still a little soft, like al dente spaghetti.”) It’s easy to balk at the idea: letting a doctor take a literal hammer to your bones with the promise that after months of slow, painful healing, you will be hotter. (Or technically, taller, which, let’s be honest, is culturally synonymous with being hotter...if you’re a guy.) It rises in your throat like a gag reflex, the instinct to scream when you learn that people (mostly men, often in the tech industry) are paying $70,000 to $150,000 for the promise of stretching a mere three inches taller. (By this measure, multiple pairs of Louboutins are a smart, affordable alternative.) As much as I want to snark at the absurdity of such a procedure—one that involves steadily cranking surgically implanted nails in your legs each day, like an orthodontist tightening one’s braces—honestly, I get it.
If there is one thing that binds us all, it is the desire, whether unspoken or shrieked into the void, to be hot. I understand the instinct to contort your square peg of a self into the round hole of desirability, to smooth your edges until you are just a pile of loose spaghetti. I feed that hunger every time I scrub my face raw with another chunky green cleanser that promises to make my skin “brighter.” These scrubs always cost $10 an ounce and smell like the ocean’s asshole. My appetite to be attractive grows stronger as I watch hours of TikToks begging me to try “slugging,” which will make my skin look gooey like a bug (sexy) instead of dry like a human woman (upsetting). I will brag every time I eat my vegetables (consume articles on body neutrality) while pretending I don’t lick my fingers clean after scrolling through my nightly snack of celebrity before-and-afters on Instagram.
There are few things more grotesque than the act of making ourselves pretty. So many modern beauty rituals read like medieval torture: A stranger pours hot wax near your most secret holes in order to rip from its root the hair your body has grown for protection; a different stranger impales you with a little tube to suck the yellow fat out of the softest parts of your self; another stranger still inserts a needle into your Cupid’s bow. Later, you are reborn a perfectly modified baby. Your first words post-op are “Botox.”
The only thing more disgusting than the idea of a doctor manually breaking my femurs is how often I wonder whether I should be “more concerned” about my armpits. As if I am at a parent-teacher conference for my skin discoloration that’s having a hard time focusing in math. The only thing more deranged than spending the equivalent of a house down payment to have a licensed professional smash my tibias is spending so much of my waking hours upset by my body’s audacity to look different than it did in high school. (I’m 32.) Why would I waste tens of thousands of dollars in a single sitting when I can chip away at my bank account from now until eternity one $3.99 face mask at a time?
Some media coverage of leg-lengthening surgery gives it more gravitas than cosmetic procedures of the same ilk—you know, the ones often sought after by women. A BBL is an act of egotism; leg-lengthening is merely a response to a social stigma. “This is life-altering,” one surgeon who specializes in leg-lengthening previously told Buzzfeed News. “It really changes people’s lives. Their whole outlook on life, the way people perceive them, the way they feel about themselves. It really affects all aspects of their life.” Sure, height impacts straight cis men’s dating lives, as GQ’s article acknowledges. However, as the article strains to also point out, taller men tend to make more money than their shorter male peers and are more likely to climb the corporate ladder. As if the desire to be taller is rooted in business savvy, not vanity.
I have no solution to quell the roiling urgency in my body to get sexy quick—I am but a human woman inexplicably striving to make herself look like a wet bug. But I do have a more affordable, less invasive way to achieve what leg-lengthening surgery promises: Heels! Wear heels! True equality is everyone squeezing their calloused feet into an impossibly small pair of stilettos. Real progress is all of us wearing chunky platform shoes that make us the same, perfect height (6'7.75"). The future looks like all of humankind delicately clip-clopping down the sidewalk and trying not to accidentally snap our ankles.
I suppose, in this sense, we are all flirting with the idea of breaking our limbs with the hope that it will make us hotter.
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