While Whitney's been away I've been watching loads of British television, and one of the things I'm catching up on is a TV discussion programme called You Have Been Watching - it's a panel quiz in name only, being the most free-form excuse for an actual quiz I've yet seen in the genre, and is really a vehicle for grumpy old Charlie Brooker and his chums to mock the world's ready supply of particularly awful television. And it's very funny, but there was one section that I felt horribly uncomfortable watching even within the additional frame of satire. I think you'll probably know by now that it takes a lot to prompt me to react like... oh, I don't know - this, for example:

Jesus Christ, this is absolutely fucking hideous

Having been beaten into being a cynical misery-guts from late school age, I've always had great discontent with the idea of purely cosmetic surgery, but my dislike of it started well before I could fully realize how hateful it was - it's used as a gateway to further objectify women, a process to turn people into what they think the world wants them to look like, simply to cut them apart and put them back together in a way that instantly cures them of the ugliness that they perceive themselves to have thanks to the pressure that we put on to them. As said later on in the video, what this televisual atrocity is doing is saying that they're absolutely right - that they shouldn't have any self-esteem for who they are, but that we can save them by drawing up a plan to change them, adding to or slicing out the pieces of their faces and their bodies, reassembling them bit by artificial bit to make them look acceptable and replace their old selves with this universal pre-packaged silicone grimacing standard in a primitive form of roboticization.

Normally at this point I would blame America for being the only society remotely capable of giving this to the world, but this is really on a whole new level - I can't unload the blame on to one country this time, I'm just ashamed that it existed. Besides, the television that is vomited on to me daily here is so appalling that this programme unfortunately didn't come as any great surprise. Listen to the comments from the three panellists as the nightmarish vision goes on, and especially the little interjection at 6:55 - Frankie Boyle is disgusted with it. That's how wrong this is. If that doesn't tell you about the sheer scale of the problem, then nothing will (apart from the blunter conclusion at 8:35).

Actually I've decided it's America's fault after all. Thanks a lot. (It's worth mentioning that even their press was revolted by it - they've got to have some standards.)