I’m at the airport in Rome, scrolling through Instagram.
A reel pops up trying to teach me tricks to be skinny. ‘Too late for that’, I think. I’ve just been on a five-week European extravaganza; eating and drinking my way through la dolce vita. This influencer, with hollowed out temples and clavicles like a chin up bar, would have been disgusted to witness Mumma in full euro-summer-treat-myself-mode. Whatever. My body, my choice. I scroll on.
I come across a reel from another Australian woman, also in transit. She and I have had very different holidays. While I was on the hunt for the perfect tiramisu, she was on the hunt for the perfect face. Turkey. Six highly invasive procedures and now her entire head is wrapped in bandages. Even though I might think she was hotter before she was sporting the alien-burn-victim look, who am I to judge? My body, my choice. It applies to her too, right?
Growing up as the daughter of a doctor and a surgeon, our dinner table ran on medical speak; throats were pharynxes, fingers were digits. This gave me the completely baseless belief that I am also a doctor, and one of my favourite hobbies is diagnosing myself, friends and randoms on the internet with new conditions (I’m a lottttt of fun, trust me). I diagnose this Instagram woman with body dysmorphic disorder. I might even be right. For the first time. Studies show that BDD affects between 6% and 15% of cosmetic surgery patients – up to fifteen times the rate in the general population – and those affected are significantly more likely to seek multiple procedures, each time with diminishing satisfaction.
Despite these grim statistics, cosmetic surgery, however extreme, is broadly and increasingly accepted when its goal is to bring a body closer to society’s current standard of beauty. If my lady online achieves her objective of becoming “snatched” (briefly define this), most of us will accept (and some even celebrate) what she’s done. My overconsumption of carbohydrates is also broadly accepted, and celebrated (by me). Both of us did what we wanted with our bodies on our holidays. One of us just had more gelato.
They say playwrights spend their entire careers trying to figure out one specific thing, and each play is another ill-fated attempt to do so. For me, it’s exploring the friction between existing as an individual within a greater system, and how that distorts our desires and actions. I like to explore this through the body – whether that’s someone wanting to change their physical self to fit into the system, or someone whose image falls outside what the system considers desirable, or, as in my play “First, Do No Harm“, someone who wants to change their body in a way the system finds unthinkable.
I first encountered this mysterious condition when I was studying medical law. It’s so rare and so stigmatised that precise prevalence rates remain unknown. Most sufferers never confide in anyone, let alone seek treatment. I couldn’t wrap my head around why someone would want to change their body in this disquieting way. “My body, my choice” wasn’t stacking up for this one. I called my Dad, the surgeon, to debrief. Despite never having heard of the condition, he didn’t share my shock. He said that the way we desire to change our bodies probably lies on a spectrum of social acceptance. We don’t bat an eyelid when people get preventative botox or use aggressive retinoids to combat skin discolouration. From there, it’s easy to graduate to one end of the surgical spectrum: rhinoplasty, boob job. Gender affirmation surgery, now broadly recognised as medically or socially necessary, sits somewhere in the middle, while the condition explored in my play sits somewhere at the largely unchartered end beyond that. Society, Dad said, has accepted only part of that spectrum. And that, he said, is precisely what had induced my shock and horror. My unfamiliarity with the condition had made it monstrous to me. But it couldn’t be that simple, could it? Could it? And I couldn’t be that closed minded, could I?! COULD I?!
That is the engine of my play. While the surgery sought by the character typically produces excellent outcomes, the play relies, at least initially, on the character’s desire not being fully understood or accepted. By the end, maybe that will have shifted. Hopefully the audience will have sat with the questions I keep returning to: what, if anything, makes one body modification acceptable and another unconscionable – other than how long we’ve had to get used to it? And who gets to decide when ‘my body, my choice’ applies, and when it doesn’t?
First, Do No Harm is playing at KxT on Broadway from June 24 to July 4 and is presented by NIDA. Tickets are available here.
