--- title: "Are we pushing our bodies too far?" date: "2026-06-02T06:06:00+01:00" modified: "2026-05-28T17:07:19+01:00" url: "https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/are-we-pushing-our-bodies-too-far/" post_id: 10537 --- # Are we pushing our bodies too far? ![An illustration of a mechanical body](https://newhumanist.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/05/jc_humanist_cover_hi_1-edited-scaled-jpg.webp)In our age of Ozempic and “looksmaxxing”, we’re under huge pressure to alter our bodies, while a brutal online dating culture ranks us as rivals. Changing our physique gives us freedom and agency. But where do we draw the line? We asked five experts on bodies, power, love and desire. ![](https://newhumanist.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/05/Pini-jpg.webp) **Don’t pressure athletes to dope** By Ryan Pini Olympic swimmer and chair of the World Anti-Doping Agency’s Athlete Council *Editorial Note: The Enhanced Games, a global sporting contest that encourages athletes to use performance-enhancing drugs, took place in Las Vegas in late May, backed by venture capitalists. Around 30 elite athletes, including two dozen ex-Olympians, competed for cash prizes of up to $250,000, with $1 million bonuses for setting new records – sparking intense debate in sporting circles and beyond.* When I was a kid – and all through my swimming career – I used to love the few moments before a big race. After a nerve-jangling build-up, I would stand on the blocks, stare down my lane, and everything seemed simple. I set goals, I trained hard, I sacrificed. And on race day I found out how far my body and mind could take me. The stopwatch didn’t just measure speed – it measured how much closer I was to realising my dream of representing my country of Papua New Guinea at the Olympic Games, through discipline, resilience and honesty. That’s why the idea of the Enhanced Games feels so unsettling to me and many athletes like me. Supporters argue that this represents a bold step into the future of sport. In this new arena, athletes would be free to use performance-enhancing drugs “under medical supervision” in pursuit of superhuman performances. But from where I stand, it looks like a dangerous misunderstanding of what sport is. First and most importantly, there is the question of health. Reassurances from the organisers that medical oversight will keep athletes safe ring hollow. Many performance-enhancing substances are prohibited not just because they work, but because they can cause serious harm – sometimes immediately, sometimes years later. Steroids, for example, can increase the risk of heart attack, stroke and liver damage. Human growth hormone can trigger diabetes, heart problems and abnormal growth in organs and bones. The reality is that sports medicine still doesn’t fully understand the long-term consequences of stacking multiple substances together at the doses elite athletes might use to chase records. Medical supervision cannot eliminate those risks. Doctors can monitor your bloodwork today; they cannot promise you won’t pay the price tomorrow or years later. That’s the part people rarely talk about when they frame the Enhanced Games as positive or ground-breaking. Athletes are being asked to gamble with their bodies – the only bodies they will ever have – for a fistful of dollars and a moment in the dubious spotlight that this experiment might generate. Another concern is what this competition normalises beyond its own arena. Sport doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Young athletes watch us. They mimic what they see. Having children of my own now, I feel this responsibility even more strongly. Kids look to sport for inspiration and values. If a major sporting event openly celebrates chemical enhancement, it risks sending a dangerous message to the next generation: that doping is simply part of winning. Sport has always been about discovering the boundaries of human potential – but the key word is “human”. The beauty of clean competition lies in the fact that we are imperfect, we are limited. We train for years chasing fractions of a second or a barely perceptible mental edge, knowing that with true, honest effort there are no shortcuts. The Enhanced Games flips that idea on its head. Instead of celebrating dedication, it rewards pharmacology. And then there are the athletes themselves – the ones who signed up for this experiment. I understand that some see this as a second chance. I also understand that most are doing it simply because of the money. Whatever their motivation, I worry they will eventually regret it, for the physical or reputational costs. I built my reputation on natural performances. It is exactly 20 years since I won a Commonwealth Games gold medal and strangers still come up to me in Papua New Guinea telling me where they were that day and how they celebrated. It fills me with pride that I can continue to reflect on my accomplishments without any sense of guilt or regret. Sport should elevate us, not exploit us. If the future of sport requires athletes to gamble with their health and reputations, then something far more valuable than a world record will have been broken. ![](https://newhumanist.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/05/Bound-Alberti-jpg.webp) **Remember what our faces are for** By Fay Bound-Alberti Writer and cultural historian In June 2024, an Istanbul cosmetic surgery clinic posted a before-and-after transformation on Instagram. The results were extraordinary: a man called Michael appeared to have shed decades, with new hair, a slimmer jaw and a narrowed nose – apparently the product of a facelift, rhinoplasty, blepharoplasty and buccal fat removal. The post gathered 26,500 likes in two days. Amid a flurry of global interest from potential clients, and some scepticism, a Turkish television programme tracked down the man in the “after” photograph. “Michael” had never had those procedures, and he was not the man in the “before” photograph. The clinic had stolen his image. That story, explored in my book *The Face: A Cultural History*, is a parable for our time. We are used to quick-fix surgical solutions as an answer to appearance anxiety – while that anxiety is industrially manufactured, algorithmically amplified and monetised at scale. By 2022, Americans alone were spending $26 billion a year on cosmetic enhancements (for comparison, they spent $10 billion going to the cinema). Social media encouraged this trend, which got a further boost from the pandemic: Zoom meetings forced people to stare at their own faces for hours daily, and requests for skin-tightening procedures – “Zoom neck” became a clinical term – surged accordingly. People have always cared about their appearance, but how have we arrived at a moment where surgical “enhancement” of a healthy face has become a consumer option, promoted as a route to a better life? The history is instructive. Cosmetic surgery as a purely aesthetic practice is a 20th-century invention. The technical foundations were laid in the First World War, when surgeons developed reconstructive techniques to repair the faces of wounded soldiers. After the Second World War, those skills needed a new market, which was found in post-war consumer culture, among women who had been trained by cinema and advertising to measure themselves against the faces of screen goddesses. The profession pivoted from repair to enhancement – and then, critically, recruited psychology to legitimise the move. In the 1960s, small-breastedness was newly classified as a source of psychological distress, linking appearance directly to mental health outcomes. If low self-esteem was a genuine clinical concern, the argument ran, cosmetic surgery was not merely desirable, but a legitimate treatment. The first silicone breast enlargement followed in 1962. Consumer desire has been repackaged as medical need ever since. Social media has given that logic an unprecedented reach. Cosmetic surgeons colonise Instagram and TikTok because those platforms are visual and map perfectly onto the before-and-after structure that is wired deep into consumer culture: the Cinderella transformation, the home makeover, the weight-loss reveal. But people aren’t happier. Body dysmorphic disorder, once considered rare, has risen sharply. Research from City St George’s, University of London found that 90 per cent of girls aged 11 to 21 use filters to alter their appearance in photographs, with negative effects on self-image. The American Society of Plastic Surgeons has linked childhood bullying to later interest in cosmetic surgery, starting from adolescence. Young people with visible difference are three times more likely to be bullied, and three times more likely to have their image shared without consent. The regulatory environment has not kept pace. Non-surgical interventions – Botox, fillers, fat-dissolving injections – have operated in the UK with minimal professional gatekeeping. New legislation announced in August 2025 aims to restrict the most invasive treatments to qualified healthcare professionals, but there is no clarity yet on enforcement. In the meantime, medical tourism fills the gaps. The power dynamics within the industry are worth stating. Over 90 per cent of cosmetic surgery patients in the UK and US are women, but around 80 per cent of surgeons are men. Patriarchal ideas about “beauty” are being repackaged as fact, while the “patient” has been rebranded as “the consumer” or “client” – with less protection than patients, but carrying the same risks. None of this forecloses the question of individual agency. But it does complicate it. The industry’s standard defence – that people should be free to modify their appearance if it makes them happier – depends on a notion of autonomous choice that is difficult to sustain when desire itself is carefully constructed. The face is the site of our emotional expression and communication, our heredity and experience. Before speech, the face is language, with infants turning towards their mother’s faces within moments of birth. Surgery and social media alike sell the face as a surface to be enhanced, or a visual output to be improved. And yet it is not a static image; it moves, flushes, tightens, trembles. It’s where we taste and breathe and talk and kiss and smile and feel the sun. To treat it as a product is to misunderstand what it is for. The face was designed for connection, not as a commodity. ![](https://newhumanist.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/05/Swami-jpg.webp) **Heal our toxic dating culture** By Viren Swami Professor of Social Psychology Dating apps were meant to have solved the problem of finding love. And perhaps, for a time, they did. In the UK, almost a third of those aged between 18 and 34 years were dating through apps in 2023 and just over a tenth of the entire population said they met their partners online. This represents a remarkable shift in where we find love, with workplaces, universities and bars increasingly being displaced as the locations for romantic encounters by the likes of Hinge, Bumble and Grindr. Yet visits to dating apps have started to decline dramatically, with Ofcom data showing a 16 per cent reduction in usage since 2024. It’s not difficult to understand why. Profiles are rated on shallow criteria, primarily appearance, and toxicity is thriving – from poor treatment of others to explicit sexism, misogyny and racism. Young people in particular are complaining of dating fatigue – a sense of apathy and even nihilism driven by endless cycles of swiping and tapping, followed by superficial conversations and failed connections. What, then, is to be done? You could switch to a competitor – new apps are being released every year. Some promise an end to swiping or, for a price, guarantee specially curated profiles and matches. Others promise AI-powered matchmaking, coaching through initial interactions, and even AI-scheduled dates. Or you could turn to hobby apps: online fitness communities, for example, are becoming increasingly popular as places to find love. But these individualistic solutions don’t get around the toxicity of dating apps specifically and dating culture more broadly. A big part of the problem is that we still tend to see dating apps as neutral providers of an unbiased service. The companies that run them operate in a legal grey area, with responsibility for policing abusive and discriminatory behaviour passed on to individual consumers – set your own boundaries, identify red flags, report the worst offenders, and be responsible for your own dating failures and your hopeless mindset. Of course, these apps are not neutral. Toxic behaviour on dating apps is inherently connected to the social and political structures that dehumanise particular communities outside of the apps, and that not only allow for but actively encourage entitlement, domination and callousness in human relationships. So at this point, we should ask a broader question: why do so many people today find it difficult to find love? This question requires us to understand how the conditions of capitalism have entrenched us all as atomised individuals. We seek solace in the arms of idealised romantic love – imagined, in most cases, as a stable, monogamous relationship. Love now provides what capitalism has taken away: a feeling of belonging, significance and meaning in life. But capitalism also finds ways of expanding into every dimension of our lives, with even our search for deep connection now monetised and sold back to us. Despite what they may claim, dating apps have a financial interest in keeping us single and engaged as consumers. It’s in their interest to prolong the process of finding love, and ensure that as many of us as possible become addicted to the gamification of sex, desire and romance. Think of it this way: if the apps were truly effective, their profits would suffer. So switching apps or putting your faith in AI-led dating is not going to break the endless cycle of hope and disappointment. The solution, instead, may lie in collectively envisioning a future in which love is uncoupled from the constraints of capitalism. One positive step would be to democratise and liberate online platforms from the profit motive. Nationalised dating apps or platforms run as cooperatives might sound idealistic, but they needn’t be – several countries already run their own dating services. But unfettering love from profit will require more than just cooperatives. It must begin with us forging societies that support empathy and compassion, and that challenge oppression and injustice – whether it occurs in wider society or on a dating app. ![](https://newhumanist.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/05/Walter-jpg.webp) **It’s time to resist the cult of youth** By Natasha Walter Writer, campaigner and author of *Feminism for a World on Fire* I was 24 years old when Germaine Greer published her insightful and furious book *The Change: Women, Ageing and Menopause*. I remember reading it with sympathetic anger, raging alongside Greer at the reality that however brilliant and experienced they are, women are downgraded and overlooked as soon as they lose the gleam of youth. But I believed that the world was improving year on year, and that when I reached Greer’s age, old women would no longer be so devalued. Here I am now, 35 years later, and something has become horribly clear to me. Despite all the passionate and convincing arguments put forward not only by Greer but by so many other feminists, the connection between the value of women and their youth has not been broken. In many ways it is stronger than ever. Yes, I see silver-haired women on Instagram jumping up and down on beaches or sharing their personal best in the gym, and here and there I see older women in positions of power and influence. But I also see how older women’s voices and experiences are still marginalised everywhere, from politics to cinema, from newsrooms to medicine. One recent survey showed that at the content division of the BBC there are four times as many male presenters over 60 as there are female. And I see how women are still pressured to chase the appearance of youth by an anti-ageing industry whose seductive power is only growing. I see how the faces of women who still command attention are so often stretched and waxy, plumped and frozen. These are not the faces of women who are confident that they will be respected for their experience and wisdom. These are faces shaped by fear rather than freedom. This is not an issue that can be fixed through discussion or confidence-building among women. It goes to the heart of how patriarchal culture values – or devalues – women. And there is something very dark in that heart. The recent release of the Epstein files reminded us that the scale on which women’s value is measured is still not only a man’s scale, it too often has a paedophile’s thumb on the weights. Paedophilia itself is criminalised and loathed, but the fact that Epstein was able to operate for so long with the complicity of so many reminds us that while he himself was an outlier, he benefited from a mainstream culture in which it is accepted that young women will be valued only as sexual objects and older women will not be valued at all, or valued only in how they facilitate this culture. Nobody in Epstein’s circles found it odd – indeed, they often seem to have found it funny or glamorous – that he was surrounded by young girls who were obviously being exploited. The eroticisation of very young women and girls has always been normalised in our patriarchal culture. Men who sexualise very young women and girls are positioning them as the object, not the subject of desire, which leads easily to exploitation and abuse. Sadly this dark truth is only one aspect of our overwhelmingly patriarchal culture, which still denies women full humanity, seeing them so often not as individuals in their own right, but as reflections or adjuncts to male power. Men explain things to me, says Rebecca Solnit. There is an authority gap, says Mary-Ann Sieghart. Women are invisible in data, says Caroline Criado-Perez. All of these insights speak to the same reality: that women are still seen as less than fully human. Writing about these issues at this time, with patriarchy on the rise across the globe, and the new threats of online misogyny and authoritarianism threatening women’s rights and freedoms, often brings me close to despair. But recognising this relationship between the devaluation of older women and the patriarchal culture we live in also helps energise me and other women to fight back. It reminds us that decisions around how we age are personal, but also always political. It reminds us why it is so vital that we resist on a personal level – by celebrating older women, listening to older women and being older women, visibly and unapologetically. And it reminds us that this is a political struggle, in which women of all ages need to fight back against the systems that devalue us. ![](https://newhumanist.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/05/Jacques-jpg.webp) **Celebrate the freedom to change our bodies** By Juliet Jacques Journalist, filmmaker and author of *Trans: A Memoir* “Can Sex in Humans be Changed?” asked *Physical Culture* magazine in January 1937. Their article declared that science had “succeeded in changing the gender of two female athletes” now living as men, with the “miracle accomplished by surgery and duly acknowledged by law”. Calmly, Donald Furthman Wickets laid out for his American readership how “each sex carries within itself the potentialities of the other” with “no man \[being\] 100 per cent male”, “no woman 100 per cent female”. He made no moral judgement on the hormonal or surgical research carried out by Eugen Steinach, Lennox Broster and others – writing just four years before the Nazis ransacked the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin, burning its library, forcing its founder Magnus Hirschfeld into exile and displacing or killing the transsexual women in its orbit. Ninety years later, the terms of discussion about hormone therapy and elective surgery are largely focused on trans people and set by a resurgent international far-right who have used transphobia as a recruiting tool and binding agent. US President Donald Trump has passed a slew of executive orders targeting the trans community; the UK Supreme Court has made it possible to exclude trans people from public bathrooms, amidst a decades-long media hate campaign; Hungary, Slovakia and others have rescinded gender recognition, while Russia has banned medical transition. These reactions have come alongside anti-abortion laws, and anti-gay and lesbian legislation, and efforts to crush the #MeToo movement and secure impunity for sex offenders – in other words, a full restoration of straight white men as rulers of a society in which gender roles are fixed in their favour. This, then, is consistent with the increased social and market pressure for cisgender men and women to undergo surgeries to make them conform further to traditional ideals of masculinity or femininity, even if it seems hypocritical next to some of the arguments made against trans people. The “gender defenders” (as trans writer Kate Bornstein called them) will often invoke “nature” in their arguments against trans people – although they seem reluctant to give up cars or electric light, let alone engage with the chromosomal and hormonal variations that Furthman Wickets documented. Some writers have gone so far as to theorise a “transsexual empire” of surgeons turning men into women to destroy the feminist movement, casting transsexual women as immediately readable and yet experts in infiltration – and obscuring the reality that the reason gender affirmation treatments exist is because people wanted them. By framing “the transgender issue” not as one of authenticity, nor of “acceptance”, but of bodily autonomy, we can fight the use of transphobia as a far-right cudgel against feminism and gay rights. We can also think of the possibilities of personal alteration – be they surgical, digital or aesthetic – as good and interesting in themselves. Artists from Orlan to Lynn Hershman Leeson have explored the creative potential of fashioning new identities. Orlan turned herself into “carnal art”, broadcasting surgeries that put facial elements of famous paintings of women, including the *Mona Lisa* and Botticelli’s *Venus*, onto her face. Hershman Leeson produced an alter ego, “Roberta Breitmore”, creating not just a different appearance (which she documented in *Roberta Construction Chart #1* in 1975) but also getting her own credit card and driver’s license and even seeing a therapist. It is often the case that artists do these extreme-sounding things in part to make space for others to feel more freedom in how they live their lives. Most people have no desire to go to such lengths in order to express themselves, but piercings and dyes, for example, are relatively commonplace now – even if the figure of the blue-haired student, usually cast as gender-nonconformist, is currently a bogeyman for bloviating reactionaries. The freedom to reimagine ourselves using whatever is available represents a way to claim back technological advances from those who use them to surveil or suppress us. Just as importantly, it can help us reassert the basic principle that as long as one is not hurting anyone else, people should have as much liberty as possible – although this relies on liberals standing up to the bad faith argument that trans people, for example, harm others through our mere existence. Now, as in the 1930s, protecting our own choice and agency over our bodies is a frontline in the fight against fascism: refuse this battle, and the war will only escalate.