Cyberpunk was meant to be a cautionary tale. Cutting away healthy body parts and replacing them with machines to create a profane mockery of the natural form. There are often consequences to this, either becoming dependent on anti-rejection drugs or the risk of going insane from your mind screaming that your body is all wrong. All in service to soulless consumerism. Keeping up with the Jonses with a body horror aspect. Speaking of body horror, that's just cybernetics. Fleshcrafting is typically portrayed as innately evil in fiction. A robot arm is a robot arm, but grafted tentacles or claws or anything organic is abominable.
Plastic surgery has cover because so much of it is restorative. So it is allowed. Well, all is allowed. And then you get into these... elective... cases. Somebody wants their buttcheeks the size of basketballs. Someone wants their dick cut off. The moral case of it just goes downhill.
Plastic surgery is done in basically every single major procedure. Jokes aside the "plastic" refers to plastic deformation. If someone gets jaw surgery and they need to move the gum tissue that's plastic surgery, if you've got to repair mangled muscle or skin after an accident that is too.
It's just we don't call that "plastic surgery" casually.
Well for the former it's probably a xerox/bandaid thing. For the latter I'd say follow the money. For-profit medicine doesn't want insurance to pay for people to get better, they want you to stay just sick enough to work but always be hooked on something. Hence denigrating a lot of preventative or curative procedures that you can technically live without as "elective".
Cyberpunk was meant to be a cautionary tale. Cutting away healthy body parts and replacing them with machines to create a profane mockery of the natural form. There are often consequences to this, either becoming dependent on anti-rejection drugs or the risk of going insane from your mind screaming that your body is all wrong. All in service to soulless consumerism. Keeping up with the Jonses with a body horror aspect. Speaking of body horror, that's just cybernetics. Fleshcrafting is typically portrayed as innately evil in fiction. A robot arm is a robot arm, but grafted tentacles or claws or anything organic is abominable.
Plastic surgery has cover because so much of it is restorative. So it is allowed. Well, all is allowed. And then you get into these... elective... cases. Somebody wants their buttcheeks the size of basketballs. Someone wants their dick cut off. The moral case of it just goes downhill.
Plastic surgery is done in basically every single major procedure. Jokes aside the "plastic" refers to plastic deformation. If someone gets jaw surgery and they need to move the gum tissue that's plastic surgery, if you've got to repair mangled muscle or skin after an accident that is too.
It's just we don't call that "plastic surgery" casually.
“Plastic” vs “Cosmetic”, yes…
Somehow two not entirely synonymous things became conflated to the point of the distinction being lost…
People also no longer understand that “elective surgery” ≠ “cosmetic surgery”, or, at least, it doesn’t always mean that…
I can’t help but think the conflation is deliberate. At least for the first two. 🤷🏻♂️
Well for the former it's probably a xerox/bandaid thing. For the latter I'd say follow the money. For-profit medicine doesn't want insurance to pay for people to get better, they want you to stay just sick enough to work but always be hooked on something. Hence denigrating a lot of preventative or curative procedures that you can technically live without as "elective".