Summer has well and truly arrived. Baseball, fireworks, sweaty pits, and (drum roll please) skimpy clothes!! That kitten belly you’ve been ignoring all winter has become a bone of contention between you and your bikini. Inner thighs wedging those shorts up higher than the designer intended? Me too.

If you turn on the television at any hour of the day, especially if you have satellite or cable, you will be able to find some show about plastic surgery. Be it turning hillbillies with no teeth into hillbillies with fake teeth and modeling contracts or a tummy tuck on someone who’s lost a massive amount of weight (also through surgery, of course), plastic surgery is as big as it has ever been. Cosmetic surgery has become more acceptable, and in some cases even commonplace.

You may be, like me, someone who has never really considered plastic surgery as a figure fixer. This is not to say I’ve never bought into our culture’s obsession with appearance. I’ve spent hundreds on whitening toothpaste, cellulite cream, diet books, and exercise equipment. Plastic surgery is everywhere now! All I hear are commercials for it, TV shows about it, and people at my gym who have had it. I’m starting to wonder if maybe I need it. I’d like to lipo that belly from hanging over my jeans, wouldn’t you?