“I asked myself, ‘am I crazy to get this done?’, but the way in which people treat me now makes it value it.” Just a few years ago, Harry* had surgery on his tibia and his femur to go from 5’7” to five’11”. Like many other men who’re turning to this increasingly popular cosmetic procedure, he feels liberated from his insecurities after a surgeon broke his leg bones and pulled them apart with clamps every six hours as they tried to fuse back together. Starting from £15,000 to over £100,000 in some cases, it takes months, if not years, to totally recuperate complete mobility, battling infections, nerve damage, and insomnia. Given the risks and costs, why would Harry, or anybody, select to do that seemingly mediaeval procedure? The final result: potentially 10 extra inches.
Limb lengthening is a surgery which increases the length of a bone in a patient’s arm or leg while also stretching the encompassing muscles, tendons and ligaments. The surgery is medically performed mostly for those needing physical adjustments resulting from limb length discrepancies, says Dr Nima Heidari, an orthopaedic and trauma surgeon, but it is usually done for individuals who ask for it voluntarily, most frequently “young men who fixate on height being a reason for his or her lack of success and so they’re willing to undergo an enormous amount of pain to alter that.”
About 75 per cent of patients inquiring about this surgery are men. Dr Assayag, from the International Center for Limb Lengthening, says that almost all of his patients often work in finance or IT, “where they’ll do a chronic journey while still working from home”. Not all are wealthy – most in truth have been saving for years, treating this surgery “like a money down on a house”, with some even entering into debt to cover unexpected costs from complications down the road. There appears to be no slowing down either: one clinic claimed that patient interest of their surgery has quintupled every yr.
Harry, a software engineer, saved for years for this surgery, combating depression and body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) to the extent that he was performing poorly at work because he couldn’t consider anything apart from his height. It’s hard to evaluate just what number of men specifically struggle with BDD, as stigma tends to stop them from coming forward to hunt help, but one study suggested that as many as 90 per cent of men struggle with body dissatisfaction and negative emotions. Dr Assayag believes that nearly all of patients who undergo this surgery experience it to some extent. “In the event you’re willing to get each legs broken and undergo a six month to a yr process, I feel it’s, by definition, body dysmorphia,” he says. In some cases, he has referred people to psychologists to handle their problems beforehand.
Ryan*, a tech entrepreneur, grew from 5’4” to five’7”. With the added height gained from his surgery, he says jokes from his friends finally halted and ladies became more prone to approach him. In Ryan’s view, the social respect a person gains from becoming taller is akin to the status women acquire from shedding weight. It frustrates him that he felt compelled to get this surgery, but adds that “regardless of how much we virtue signal, at the top of the day we’re robots. We’re measuring other people for breeding, we’re asking sexually in the event that they are a correct mate, it’s ingrained in us.”
Ryan’s view is extreme – lots of us would likely take issue together with his essentialist position that individuals are all pre-programmed “robots” for breeding – but he’s right to indicate that society rewards individuals who conform to dominant beauty standards. Studies have found that taller people make more money, are more likely to be promoted, and CEOs tend to be significantly taller than average. Men, particularly, often feel the pressure to be tall since masculinity is so often tied to height. For this reason, Alyssa Davis, a gender studies researcher, says, one reason why this surgery greatly appeals to men is since it “reaffirms their gender”.
One in ten young men aged 16-24 said that they had considered getting leg-lengthening surgery, in accordance with a recent study by Better. With warped ideas of masculinity and dangerous body-mod discussions happening all around the web, not only on looksmaxxing forums, the issue and the apparent “solution” is spoon fed to young men. Harry, like Ryan, expressed feeling an amazing sense of release after the surgery, categorically insisting that their psychological problems had been cured. Nonetheless, cosmetic surgery is a person solution and never one which fixes the underlying conditions that lead people to temporarily cripple their legs so as to feel higher about their bodies. It’s these conditions and the pressures around body image that men are feeling, that have to be spoken about.
People think boys are tremendous with their body image but they’re not, and so they haven’t been for a really very long time – Mike Nicholson
Mike Nicholson, the founding father of Progressive Masculinity and a former teacher, works with schoolboys within the UK, running workshops to assist them communicate their anxieties. He argues that body pressure in young men is massively ignored, particularly in schools. “People think boys are tremendous with their body image but they’re not, and so they haven’t been for a really very long time,” he says. The answer, he believes, is to take heed to them in a non-judgmental way. “Most of them don’t have an environment where they feel they’re not gonna be judged. You should have these conversations in the true world, so that they don’t gravitate towards the digital world where quite a lot of the problems are.”
While Ryan and Harry do seem happier, even they’d admit it could be higher in the event that they had been in a position to love themselves and feel accepted at their natural height. Like with all discussions around beauty standards and decisions around getting cosmetic work done, it’s hard to know the way much responsibility each individual has. Do these people bear the total weight of righting the wrongs of the patriarchal conceptions around masculinity by not undergoing this surgery, nevertheless gruesome and intense it could be? Or is that this an out, an escape to the pressures that these men have carried their whole life, and unfair responsible them for a possibility to feel “normal”?
Dr Pritchard identifies this hate-the-game-not-the-player dilemma: “I can’t blame an individual for doing it, but as an alternative of fixing these people, why don’t we just be more accepting as society and alter those representations, those attitudes? But after all, that’s tougher. It’s easier to alter the person.”
*Ryan and Harry asked to stay anonymous and these will not be their real names.
