Heidi Montag continues to be a tabloid focal point, prompting ridicule, cruel jokes and derision. After she unveiled her new self to the horror of many (including her mother), I  was impelled to blog on her surgical transformation in a way that didn’t simply chalk her up to a freaky circus sideshow or Franken-barbie, a name commonly used in the tabloids and blogosphere.

Lets be honest, she is not the only woman (of any age) to pursue multiple procedures at once or over a period of time. Unlike most women who keep these “beauty secrets” precisely that, secrets, Heidi exposed herself and helped fuel the initial media feeding frenzy in the pursuit of exposure and publicity. Clearly, Heid’s revelation wasn’t necessarily an intentional revelation to critically examine the truth behind women’s insecurities, beauty pressure and the often horrifying consequences of elective cosmetic surgery (she is half of the fame mongering duo formely known as Speidi, afterall). But she did pull back the curtain on a beauty reality for many women. That reality is the incessant pursuit of unrealistic and crippling images of beauty. This candid and uncomfortable reality doesn’t sit well with most of us. It forces us to confront the emotional and physical fall-out that the beauty myth leaves in it’s wake, a wake made large and wide thanks to the proliferation of streams of images that fan the flames of the all-consuming beauty norm. And, lets face it, most of these images are perpetuated in the seemingly benign environment of pop culture, a cultural environment dominated by mindless “reality” shows that depict women as stupid, superficial pop-tarts consumed with the reflection in the mirror and their relationships with men (the former used to secure the latter).

Perez Hilton recently blogged on the “Franken-Heidi” in training, the 15-year-old UK girl regularly injecting Botox as preventative maintenance.  Perez acts surprised but “botox babies” are nothing new. The New York Times published an article on this phenomenon in 2005 and this is the cultural landscape Montag came of age in, an era in which young girls seek extreme measures to maintain their looks before they’ve even developed a line. As much as her new face and enormous, overly-round implants make me cringe, I recognize her as a pop culture casualty that is held up as some sort of freaky novelty because it is too uncomfortable to admit that she represents the insecurities so many of us face on a daily basis (and the measures many are silently willing to take).

This recent Gawker post, articulates the toxic terrain Montag rides on and the frightening and sad result.

When The Hills premiered, in May of 2006, Heidi Montag was 19 years old. Which could very well mean that she signed her first MTV contract at 18. The network snared this kid, this real genuine kid, into their glossy trap and then just let her hang herself, over and over again, claiming some sort of documentarian remove when asked if they’d intervene. They simply couldn’t do it, couldn’t even acknowledge the swirling Oort cloud of Us Weekly frenzy that surrounded the cast, because then it wouldn’t be real. Only of course they do intervene, all the time, when it is convenient for them. It’s pretty much common knowledge at this point that the show is staged to within an inch of its life — nearly every look, conversation, relationship is false. So the audience at home is never quite sure what to believe. “Oh look how awful Heidi acts on this show, let’s be cruel to her. It doesn’t matter, it’s just a made-up show!” Which, sure, may have seemed, or been, true at some point. But now, with all of these surgeries, this willful and terrifying mangling of her body, Heidi has emerged as a deeply troubled and emotionally damaged lost soul, one who childishly offered herself up to a reality camera crew and watched, feeling helpless to do anything but not fight the riptide, as they stripped her bare, took everything off her, mocked her for taking what they’d offered her, edited her however they wanted, threw her family into the mix and tore them apart too.

And then in a final act of desperation, the old innocent Heidi finally kicking out the chair, Montag got something like ten plastic surgeries at once, changing her entire face and body to something immovable and unrecognizable. She became some sort of version of Heidi as she imagined the show defined her — pretty, booby Heidi with her shallow, fake husband — and MTV saw it, they saw it, and said “OK, let’s roll cameras!” anyway. So we watched last night as she went home to Crested Butte (that name, that name) and her family tried to mask their horror, until it was finally too much. Until the presence of the cameras was so looming and demanding that her parents felt they had to try to sputter out words and just ended up hurting her feelings. Heidi tried to chew, she tried to cry, but she couldn’t. So she just sat there, her eyes wild with the recognition that she can never go back, and you realized that MTV ruined this kid’s life. They gave her a platform to indulge her greatest insecurities, to stoke her deepest unhealthy desires, and they encouraged it and filmed it and sent it out to world while saying Ha Ha.

Heidi isn’t any different than the girls watching at home, just worse off. She was watching the show, watching herself, and seeing something distant and faraway. And she wanted it, wanted desperately for it to be real. So she’s just chasing her tail forever, while MTV films and makes bundles in cellphone advertisements. They pried open that hole in Heidi’s heart, and they basically put that shit in her face. At least they certainly funded it [italics mine].