A topic of debate that has been around for quite some time is: do appearances really matter? And the general consensus has been that it doesn’t. But in this time and age, looks have become more and more important. People buy things because they’re aethetically pleasing. People will pay a higher price for a different color. People spend hundreds, thousands, millions of dollars on clothes, shoes, makeup to better their own appearance. The opportunities to make something more pleasurable to look at are endless. Having a bigger, better decorated house and having a flashier car are just some of the many. People are willing to do anything to comform to the idea of beauty in every aspect, and plastic surgery proves this. Both women and men will spend money they don’t need to spend on fixing something that would not have needed any fixing at all were they not caught up in a fixed idea of beauty. Society is “effectively trying to define ugliness as a disease. Looks are, after all, a biological condition.”

Within the last decade, belief that appearances are important have taken the next step, and in 2003, Virigina Postrel brings to our attention in her article Going to Great Lengths, a new drug that has appeared on the market. This drug, called Humatrope, is for children who are abnormally short, and can add several inches to a person’s height without harming them in any physical way. The idea of this seems preposterous, that such a thing as height should really matter enough for a person to take such measures.

But in society today, it appears as if being less than average height, or weight or just not being pretty enough is all the reason a person needs to feel the need to change themselves. “…being short does, on average, hurt a person’s prospects. Short men, in particular, are paid less than tall men. The tall guy gets the girl. The taller presidential candidate almost always wins.” Postrel gives us several examples where society has given us reason to believe that the better the appearance, the better treatment you receive from society. Given that, the idea of using a drug to change something natural about yourself doesnt seem so preposterous after all. If appearances didn’t actually matter, the world wouldn’t be as it is today. “The power of aesthetics”, as Postrel calls it, is quite impressive.

Going to Great Lengths

http://www.dynamist.com/articles-speeches/opeds/greatlengths.html