So, I was out of town for Christmas this year. I was staying with the in-laws (a most negative thing – the mother-in-law managed to put 5 lbs. on me this time) up in the Koots, so I was up to my neck in hippies, natch. I can’t remember how it came up but there is apparently some laser-eye surgery that can be used to change the colour of one’s eyes permanently, though at quite the cost; apparently glaucoma isn’t an unusual side-effect of this. If you’re interested, go Google it. Anyway, my sister-in-law and her boyfriend both thought that this was just a disgusting practice, particularly because it’s likely going to be non-blue eyed people getting their eyes turned blue, which in turn means some of those people will be non-whites who are adopting Western (white) beauty standards!
Note: I am actually on-board with their dismay, here. For one, it looks absurd when people who are not-white alter parts of their cosmetic appearance to ‘look white’. But more importantly, it is sad to see so many different sorts of beauty be deliberately dismissed by those that have it in order to chase some illusion no-one will really buy anyway. End of digression.
It got me thinking though. What they find wrong specifically about having this procedure done relates to matters of race, standards of beauty and self-perceptions. It isn’t the permanency, because such types are in principle generally very accepting of tattoos and other such permanent body-modifications (in point of fact, the boyfriend has quite his own collection of ink). Indeed, thinking about how some would defend the right of self-expression of freaks like this to project whatever image of themselves that it pleases them to do but still protest that such a relatively minor change of hair or eye colour in this other case is somehow wrong or undesirable seems contradictory. Evidently, such types plainly believe that one’s appearance, insofar as it is genotypically determined, is something that one ought to celebrate (and failing that, stoically accept, for the sake of others sharing your genetic make-up).
But there are obvious contradictions here for our average college-leftist. For example, what if there is someone who is of mixed-race and at a very young age believed that his eyes were blue, like his father’s? (I am, of course, speaking about someone I know.) What if such a person were to grow up always feeling that his eyes ‘ought’ to be blue – would his getting the procedure be bad? Think about the parallels here between this operation and sex-change operations - what significant difference should there be between accepting what you look like in racial terms and in terms of one’s sex (also genetically determined)? If one believes that sex-changes are necessary and good because the outside doesn’t correspond to the inside, then one cannot accept that such a person as I have described ought not to have his eye-colour (or hair, or skin, or whatever else) changed. Further, what is the operative distinction between ‘wants’ and ‘needs’ to have the outside match the inside? Surely we cannot defend lizard man’s choices on the basis of his feeling like a reptile on the inside; I would tend to think that he only wants to look like a reptile. Yet his bodily modifications are far and away more extreme than simply wanting to look like a different sort of human – he actually wants to look like another species! How then can we condemn much less extreme alterations of appearance like the blueing of eyes, even if motivated by mere wanting to look different?
EDIT: Fixed a couple of links and spelling.
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