Starved for love: Portrait of a plastic person living a little plastic life

By David McElroy · November 8, 2012

The woman appeared to be in a world of her own. That was my first impression. I sat down to eat lunch by myself Wednesday at a small place in a part of town where I hadn’t been for awhile. She was beautiful. Around 28 or 30 years old, I’d guess. But the longer I sat there, the more something about her just wasn’t right.

She had papers and folders spread out on the table where she sat. She was intently studying something, but I couldn’t tell what. She would sometimes pick up a small mirror and look at something closely on her face. Then she’d look back to the papers. She wasn’t aware of anything else.

She finally looked up and stared out the window for a moment. Then she turned in my general direction and said, “Do you think my chin looks wrong? I’m afraid it’s too wide. Or maybe the angle isn’t right.”

She could have been talking to the wall, as far as I could tell, but I was the only other person in the place. Besides, she actually looked as though she expected an answer. The question was a little too odd for me to know how to respond. My initial thought was to tell her — honestly — that her face seemed absolutely perfect to me, but I didn’t know what was really going on, so I just stuck to saying that her chin looked fine to me.

“Are you sure?” she asked. She came over to my table, bringing one of the brochures she had been looking at. It was filled with pictures of close-ups of faces. “This one looks better than mine, doesn’t it? I look so ugly.”

From a closer perspective, something about her face didn’t look quite right. She was stunningly, perfectly beautiful. Yet something was wrong. I couldn’t put my finger on it.

“When I got the nose job, I thought that would fix everything,” she said. “But now that my nose is narrower, maybe the chin should be, too. See this picture? Would I look better if I got that done? I’m so tired of looking at this face in the mirror every day.”

There was something about her that looked unreal. If someone told me that she was an android and this was a test to see if someone could tell the difference, I wouldn’t have been too surprised. She was perfect in the way she was shaped and molded. Yet she felt fake, lifeless and dead.

She kept talking to me about her efforts to fix herself, although it wasn’t clear why she was telling me. It was more like she was just talking and I happened to be the one there.

“I got my boobs done and they look perfect now,” she said.

She pulled down part of her shirt to expose most of one breast all the way down to her nipple.

“You can touch it,” she said. “It feels real. I was afraid it wouldn’t feel perfect, but everyone says they look good and they feel good.”

There wasn’t anything sexual or sensual about her offer. She seemed more like somebody asking a potential car buyer to kick tires to prove that they were good. Her body was just a mechanical device for her to mold and sculpt. She told me she used to be flat-chested, but she got herself enlarged to C cups.

“I wish now I’d done D,” she said. “Boobs are always better when they’re bigger. I should have made them bigger, shouldn’t I?”

I asked her why she had had the nose job and the breast enlargement.

“I was ugly,” she said. “Guys didn’t like to look at me. I’m still ugly, but I’m going to get the rest fixed, too.”

She was dressed impeccably. Her makeup was perfect. She was wearing a pleasant perfume. In every way, she looked as though she had stepped out of the pages of a magazine. Yet this woman thought she was ugly.

She talked a little bit more about having liposuction to have little pockets of fat removed from places I never would have even noticed. I finally asked her what she was trying to achieve in all the changes she was making. She answered without hesitation.

“I want to be perfect,” she said. “If I’m perfect, the perfect man will love me. If I’m perfect, he couldn’t help it, could he?”

I felt sick at the contradiction she was presenting me. She was physical perfection, but she hated herself and seemed empty on the inside. I was reminded of a quote I ran across a few weeks ago that I never found the source for. It says, “Who seeks perfection never understood the beauty of imperfection.”

She was physically beautiful and perfect, yet she was fake, shallow, plastic and unreal. Why would any man want this empty shell of a creature? How could anyone love someone who hated herself so much? How could someone love a woman who was so vapid on the inside?

And then she was back to her own table and her brochures and papers. She never told me her name. She never asked for mine. Those things didn’t matter. I wasn’t a real person to her. She was so absorbed in herself that the rest of the world didn’t exist.

She’s a sad zombie stumbling mindlessly through the world, on a search for perfection that doesn’t exist — in order to somehow gain acceptance or a cheap substitute for the love she’s desperate to feel.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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