Plastic fantastic?

I think it’s safe to say that most of us turned our heads away from the projection at some point or another during last Friday’s screening of The Lives and Loves of a She-Devil. There were quite a few grotesques up there, not least of which was Ruth’s first extra-marital lover -- of whom I was reminded as I read over the word “secreting” in the Russo chapter. Ew. That. Stye. A rather public, icky-looking disease is one of the few things I can think of that seems to count against a man as much as female bodily taboos such as age and obesity (and warts) do. (I should think, with the outpouring of pregnancy films (Knocked Up, Waitress, Juno) wherein the female protagonist is represented as a hottie throughout, that the pregnant female body is less a taboo [although, yes, the prospect of late-term sex is certainly cause for caution on the part of Seth Rogen’s character in Knocked Up].)
The issue I had the most difficulty parsing in The Lives and Loves of a She-Devil was the plastic surgery. I couldn’t tell if I was for or against.
Bordo says that women who try to conform to the limitations of popular femininity “are anything but the masters of their own lives.”
And yet … Unlike Mellencamp, who saw Bobbo as Ruth’s excuse to obtain her desired object, “the classical body of Mary Fisher,” I viewed Ruth’s twisted transformation as an assertion of total mastery over Mary Fisher and herself. (Psh -- she didn’t want Bobbo.) In this way, I suppose my reading suggests I’m more sympathetic to Radner’s ideas on plastic surgery. She compares that particular process of changing one’s body through pain -- of becoming both product and producer -- to working out, something I was waiting for Morse do in her essay on exercise, “Artemis Aging,” but no joy. (I consistently thought of the muscular, oft-maligned body of present-day Madonna while reading “Artemis.” How times have changed.)
What none of the authors seemed to address in talking about exercise is the role that simple body chemistry plays. Can it be that the only reason we work out is for one gaze or another? For control of excess? That’s oversimplifying. Maybe that’s why you start, but that “good feeling” Fonda talks about having after she works out is probably more than control of her body. Surely it also has something to do with the release of endorphins, which are similar to opiates in nature, and increased serotonin levels?
Finally, briefly, totally unrelated: Is it just me or did the whole Vista Rose thing seem like a wink at Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls?