Who needs plastic surgery?

Kate Chelmensky wrote this for the Daily Iowan. Enjoy!

Juan Ponce de León's quest for the mythical Fountain of Youth ended in the early 1500s with fruitless results, but America has continued this quest for agelessness with increasing zeal 500 years later. The myth of the Fountain of Youth says that Ponce de León sailed off in search of the Island Beniny with dreams of glimmering waters granting endless youthfulness with one sip. Instead, he found the sticky, swampy wetlands of Florida and forests teeming with stinging insects and indigenous tribes, which we can gather were anything but youth-granting.The Fountain of Youth may be a myth, but modern culture refuses to stop the search for the secret of ageless beauty. Instead of sailing across the world for fountains, we turn to modern technology to bestow the power of nearly endless beauty at the cost of heinously painful operations. Modern culture's obsession with youthfulness is expanding to terrifying new heights.If you flip through television stations most nights, you will find a horrifying collection of shows that glorify perfection and agelessness: "True Life: I'm Getting Plastic Surgery," "Dr. 90210," "Nip/Tuck," and the most deranged of them all, "I Want a Famous Face." In some of these shows, skinny 18-year-old girls go into the plastic surgeon's office wanting breast implants and receive suggestions from the pseudo-doctors for liposuction under their belly button and between their tiny thighs in addition to what they came for. We see face lifts, liposuction, tummy tucks, lip injections, nose jobs, boob jobs, butt jobs. There is an actual procedure that exists for calf-implantation.What kind of people are so insecure they need to implant calves? Who wants to live in this kind of culture that promotes trading your God-given features for Jennifer Aniston's cheekbones and Jessica Simpson's nose? What ever happened to self-acceptance? It has obviously been lost somewhere between Rogaine and Botox.