"The body for women – as also happens for men – is, in a cultural and biological, symbolic and natural sense, the place of one’s own identity."

"It is the subject, means, space of development and expression of the self, the place rationality, psychology, imagination, natural functionality and ideal tensions converge. The feminine body, then, is a filter of communication with others, in a continuous and inevitable exchange between individuals and contexts. So the feminine identity is the point of convergence of daily fragility, of vulnerability, mutability, and multiplicity between emotive interior life and exterior physicality. Plastic surgery can be counted as one of the many manipulations of the body that explore its limits with respect to the concept of identity. A specificity that is placed under so much stress in the contemporary world as to provoke pathologies (dysmorphophobia, eating disorders, depression...) or 'amputate' the expressive possibilities of the human face which are so connected to the empathic abilities. Plastic surgery that is not medico-therapeutic can be aggressive toward the feminine identity, showing a refusal of the body in as much as it is a refusal of the 'season' that is being lived out. If the body is the place of truth of the feminine self, in the indispensable mixture of culture and biology, it is also the place of the 'betrayal' of this truth. The indiscriminate and undifferentiated use that the media and communications industry has applied in all its forms, in advertising (sexual allusion and debasement of its role), is undeniable proof. No political or social battle has been able to do without a mechanism so profoundly rooted as that of the exploitation of the female body for commercial benefit."

From the "Outline document for the Plenary Assembly of the Pontifical Council for Culture, Rome 4-7 February 2015: WOMEN’S CULTURES: EQUALITY AND DIFFERENCE. (PDF.)

Via The Daily Mail "Vatican condemns plastic surgery saying it is 'like a burqa made of the flesh.'" That headline is deceptive: The phrase "like a burqa made of the flesh" is a quote from an unnamed woman and is characterized as "harsh and incisive," which is a weird way to approve of the observation without entirely adopting it. The quote appears on a bullet list of questions, and the questions it supposedly sets up are : "Having been given freedom of choice for all, are we not under a new cultural yoke of a singular feminine model? What do we think of women used in advertising and in the mass media?"

What is meant by the introductory clause "Having been given freedom of choice for all"? I'm not sure, because that is the only place in the document where the word "freedom" appears ("free" never appears) and the only place where "choice" appears. "Choose" appears in a discussion of the "egalitarian wave" in "all areas of social life and almost all human institutions and cultures." This egalitarian wave, we are told, "is so strong that, in the last years, in the West, some have even affirmed that... the subject is neuter and chooses and builds his/her identity; owns him/herself and answers primarily to him/herself."

So I think the "freedom of choice for all" is this ability (in the West) to design and invent your own individual form of gender expression, and the question relates to whether this freedom is squandered on efforts to conform to the culture's superficial and idiotic image of a beautiful, sexy woman.