Paul
Goble
Staunton, March 3 – A year ago,
Marina Saidukova, a Buryat writer, said how devastating it was that one of her
teachers told her that “you are so beautiful that you are almost a Russian,” something
so offensive and damaging that she has never been able to forget it (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2014/02/window-on-eurasia-buryats-cri-de-couer.html
But now there is a truly disturbing
development which suggests this racist view is metasticizing: Women who now
live in Russia but who come from Central Asia are turning to plastic surgeons
to make them look more like European Russians, in a development that Yevgeniya
Keda calls “ethno-plastic surgery” (nazaccent.ru/content/15033-etnoplastika.html).
Otari
Gogiberidze, a plastic surgeon in Moscow, said that “international statistics
really show that in recent times so-called ethnic blepharoplasty has become
popular among plastic surgeries … In Russia,” this procedure which changes the
shape of the nose or eyes, “also is enjoying demand, but it is done most often
to fight aging,” he said.
In
his clinic and in others like it in Moscow, many people from Georgia, Armenia,
Azerbaijan and other republics of the Caucasus seek to “correct the shape of
their noses.” The typical patient is a young woman between 18 and 25. People
from other non-Russian areas seek to have the shape of their eyes changed, but
he said he argues against that.
No
one should deny anyone the right to pursue their own idea of beauty via plastic
surgery or other means, but to the extent that it is not their own but rather
someone else’s, that is a most unfortunate form of cultural oppression and one
that should be opposed rather than dismissed as something that isn’t important.
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