Post 14-Dani Reed

After watching my peers’ speeches this week, I found the topic on plastic surgery the most interesting and compelling. She started off the speech asking what kind of judgment would you make if you saw a person sitting on a park bench that clearly got a botox, breast implants, or some sort of plastic surgery. My immediate reaction was something like, “Ew, come on. You are going to waste money on that. How pathetic.” Throughout the speech, I found myself being the pathetic one. I judged so hard and so quickly without taking a minute to stop and put myself in the other persons shoes. This is the aspect of the controversy I had never considered before. She talked about how a person may just feel awful when they look at themselves in a mirror everyday and that they feel they must change. She used pathos here as she explained someone going through the routine of staring at their reflection in a mirror in disgust and it attracted my emotional side. I guess if someone felt that way about himself or herself for a very long time then why should I care if they spend the money to go about changing themselves? Yes, I believe that everyone is beautiful in his or her own way and they should try to love the way they were made, but if they really want to change, should I be judging them for it? This part of the speech was rhetorically powerful for me because it got me to second-guess my opinion to the first question about that girl on the bench. After this speech, I feel differently about the way I will look at a person with plastic surgery. Like she said in her speech, maybe they did get it for superficial reasons, but maybe they didn’t. The overall message I took from this speech was more than just about plastic surgery; it was about not being so quick to judge.