I’ve been following the stories about Charice Pempengco getting treatment from Vicki Belo which has left her followers aghast. The treatment has included injections of Botox on her face to make it less rounded. Belo herself proudly announced the procedure some weeks ago, saying Charice felt the huge pressure of competition in Glee, the American TV series she has been recruited to, and wanted to leave no stone, or bone, unturned to get a, well, cutting edge. Other stories would later suggest she herself proposed the idea to Charice. Whatever the case, what is known is that she herself made it known to make it known she was the doctor to the stars. What God has rent asunder, Belo will put together.
The reactions have consisted of shock and awe. I read my friend Rodel Rodis’ account of how the news was greeted in America. One morning news host, Tamron Hall, couldn’t understand why an 18-year-old would want to have her face injected by bone-jarring drugs and wondered what the world was coming to. Similar comments erupted from the New York Magazine, CNN, People, US Weekly, Associated Press, and various blogs. One blogger wrote: “Who the eff would do that to an effing teenager in good conscience?! (Charice) is already a successful singer, having received a major career boost from appearing on The Oprah Winfrey Show and The Ellen DeGeneres Show, but she—who, it bears repeating, is 18 years old!—feels enough pressure from Hollywood to have undergone a skin-tightening procedure.”
I empathise completely. There’s something horrendously wrong with the world when a teenager gets to feel pressured enough to want to alter her face to get by, or ahead. And there’s something horrendously unreconstructed about some people’s brains when they parade their authoring of it as though it were the most wondrous thing on earth. This is not a procedure to repair a harelip or some other facial deformity. This is a procedure to reconstruct a perfectly healthy face. I know the Venezuelan contestants to world beauty pageants, who are often teenagers, undergo that routinely, producing an entire tribe of cosmetic surgeons to meet the demand. Why in hell should we follow?
But it’s more than that. The problem isn’t merely that the procedure was done on a minor, such as an 18-year-old could still be regarded as so. And which can always be argued on the grounds that this is still a free country, people, young and old, are free to look what they want, even if it means altering permanently the one that they have, even if it does not always result in an improvement, or indeed even if what one has to go through to do it looks every bit masochistic. The real question is not why a teenager would so desperately want her face to be rearranged, it is what a teenager would so desperately want her face rearranged into.
That is what elevates this into more than a tempest in a teacup.
That is not Hollywood’s fault. Or not directly. Of course, Hollywood has also been responsible for decreeing the standards of beauty, however implicitly, however surreptitiously, by trotting out the kind of icons over the last century that the world has been at pains to imitate, some imitation going beyond flattery to surgery. But even Hollywood has vastly changed over the years. The reason it sent out an invitation to Charice is that it was captivated by her ethnicity, her specificity, her looking the way she does. That, and talent, which has almost drowned out everything else. Such has the competition gotten there a pretty face no longer hacks it.
That’s what makes Charice’s move dismaying, and that’s what makes Belo’s urgings below the belt, or the blandishments of that slithering creature in Eden. At the very least, why on earth would you like to look generic? Why on earth would you like to look just like the other girls in Glee? Why on earth would you not like to stand out in all your heaven-sent glory?
At the very most, which follows from the last, why on earth would you look at a roundish, or even perfectly round, face as somehow being a blemish, if not an infirmity, and not as definitely being a blessing, if not a magnificence? What the hell is wrong with a round face? Orientals have naturally round faces, and they are some of the most beautiful people on earth. If you want to be a little uppity, you can always say you’re lucky you were born with a face that does not naturally resemble a horse’s.
It’s really nothing more or less than racial inferiority, or the mentality of the colonised, the same poisoned well whence springs the Filipino’s desperate need to whiten his skin, a desperation that has led to an impoverished country awash in skin-whitening products. Whose absurdity you see in the hordes of fair-skinned foreigners who risk cancer roasting themselves in the sun on a beach to look like toasted pan de sal.
Charice might want to look at a couple of role models to help her decide her future.
One of them is Jennifer Hudson who paid her dues in American Idol and various singing gigs, not unlike Charice, before bursting into the scene with Dreamgirls, which won her a bunch of awards. The success hasn’t spoiled her, she continues to persevere, armed with an incredible voice, to reach greater heights. She certainly has not tried to alter her looks other than by aid of makeup, or makeover, whichever is the more radical, being heir also to human vanity. This is no flash-in-the-pan, this is someone who looks headed to be there for a long time. Last I looked, she was all set to play the part of Winnie Mandela, Nelson’s lovely wife. Oh yes, lovely: black, glowing skin, finely chiseled bones.
The other is Michael Jackson. Look at the grotesque mask he is wearing in This Is It, and ask yourself:
Is this it?
