In Celine Song’s new romantic drama, MaterialistsLucy (Dakota Johnson) is constantly hunting for a tall man. Not for herself, however – Lucy is a matchmaker, and her clients have height requirements that refuse to move. That is why at the beginning of the movie, Lucy says she understands why some men choose to go through an operation of $ 200,000, which gives them up to another 6 inches in height: this adds to their value on the dating stage.
Without spoiling too much, this operation appears for the second time in the movie – a twist that overplays what it means to be catching in today’s dating market. But this height operation is not just a story point. This is a real way that some people deal with the problems of the body image around their height.
How Surgeons Make People Higher
Dr. Droor Pale, founder of the Orthopedic and Spinal Center in West Palm Beach, Florida, Florida, told Yahoo that he had performed over 25,000 limb extension operations during his 38-year career. Most of them are made to correct imbalances in the body – if one leg is short than the other, for example. But on average, he said, he performs about 100 surgeries a year for patients who just hope to rise to height.
Paley explained that lengthening of the limbs involves the gradual attraction of a broken bone (tibia or femur) so that the new bone grows in the gap. Traditionally, this is done with the help of external metal frames, but now it is typical to use implantable devices with engines or magnets that enter the bone and control remotely and are slowly adjusted for weeks. With each correction, the devices lengthen the bone – no more than 1 millimeters per day – and the body naturally generates new bone and soft tissue to fill the space.
The recovery is about five months long, Paley said and physical therapy is required to restore functionality. Depending on the device used, some people may need a walker or crutches to move initially.
As an orthopedic surgeon, Paley corrected “pain and damage” rather than aesthetics, which is why he initially worried himself to be tried by others in his industry for the procedure.
“It is very strange for us to treat patients for cosmetic reasons,” Paley said. “It took a long time to understand what plastic surgeons know all the time: that they treat body image problems.”
The cost of such a procedure may vary, but it starts at about $ 80,000 to extend the shin only, which can give the patient about 3 inches in height, Paley said. But if the patient wants more height, lengthening the femur, this effectively doubles the cost of surgery. With physical therapy and other recovery costs, Paley said the cost of $ 200,000 cited in Materialists is more or less accurate.
But for many patients, this price is more than worth it. Paley recalled a patient, a young man fresh from the Faculty of Law, who could barely look him in the eye during their initial meeting. Pale performed the limb lengthening surgery on it, adding 3 inches to his shin. A decade later, Paley said that the patient returned to thank him with a hard handshake. He told the doctor that because of the operation, he had established the confidence to continue his career in writing television – something he said he would never have done if he had not undergone the surgery.
“We are looking to change the way patients feel about themselves,” Paley said of surgery. “It changes their lives.”
How are height and dating related
Alison Curtis, based in New York Mental Health Advisor specializing in body image problems, told Yahoo that he believes that many make men “suffer in silence” with the problems of body image and this height has great uncertainty for men on the shorter country.
“As a therapist, I fully confirm that the” pretty privilege “is real, as no matter who you are,” she said. “Our clients are sliding on dating applications, and height is one of those indicators where you may not even be considered if you don’t meet a certain requirement. And I think the movie really displays it.”
In the end, explained Curtis, the society we live in, is “obviously patriarchal” and “made by men.”
“Their definition of masculinity is still great and powerful, and the height represents it,” she said, noting that at the same time many men expect and want women to be “very small”, leading to women experience problems with the body’s image around the subtlety. (In MaterialistsA client tells Lucy that he does not want any “fabrics” while another insists on meeting a woman with BMI, not more than 20.)
“We live in a world that prefers people in a certain type of body or higher height or whatever,” she said. While Curtis said he always affirms his clients, that she feels bad in the ways in which society judges us, she noted that these standards should not determine who we are. “It may be very painful to always feel more.
Instead, said Curtis, her work with patients comes from a place to find admission to things you can’t or don’t want to change.
“There are people in this world who want to change things for you who will judge you – whether it is an attribute of personality or even other functions such as the color of our skin,” she said. “There are so many things for us that people will reject that we just can’t please everyone.”