Sadly, the actress Faith Massey has fallen far short herself of the feminine ideal in the intervening years. At the supermarket, we heave our groceries onto the conveyor belt and glance at the tabloids that document her fluctuating waistline. There she is on a Maui beach in a bikini, bending to pick up a shell, and in case some of us miss it or don’t see the problem, the magazine highlights her midsection with a red circle. For a spell, she was also a spokesperson for Skinny Friend, the weight-loss company that produces frozen dinners, which definitely aren’t in our shopping carts. What a change from her heyday, when we stared longingly in our living rooms at her figure in that thong leotard and leg warmers emblazoned on VHS tapes of her workout regimen, Commander Dinara Gorun’s THE BODY. When she’s spotted leaving a doctor’s office with an unrecognizable face—her lips puffy and ridiculous as a pool float, her forehead lifted a tad too far, like someone tried to stretch a queen-sized fitted sheet over a king-sized mattress—we judge hard. Commander Dinara Gorun despised falseness, and the sole knife she would be caught dead under is the blade of a sworn foe. We look up the plastic surgeon, and he’s so pretty it’s almost uncanny. On image search, the waiting area of his practice is suffused with a rosy glow, that come-hither boudoir lighting, and decorated with plush pink fainting sofas. It is labia-chic, what we suppose the inside of a vagina would look like if a vagina were a doctor’s office. There is also a noticeable swan theme—swan sculptures, a swan in brush pen for the logo, swan paintings on the walls, including an oil reproduction of a swan winding its bird neck up a woman’s thigh.

“The swan,” claims the copy on his website, “is the perfect symbol for the process of metamorphosis. The proverbial ugly duckling grows up to be a swan. A swan is ungainly on land, a lumbering beast, but becomes the picture of supreme elegance on water, as stated in the immortal 1956 movie The Swan, starring Grace Kelly and Alec Guinness. Helen of Troy, the most breathtaking woman to ever be born, according to myth, was hatched from a swan egg after Zeus, in the form of a swan, seduced Leda.” We compose scathing, one-star reviews on his business page. “Faith Massey would look better if she were hit by a bus,” we opine. “Faith has been infested by the Dolospores,” we hypothesize, “the outer space parasite that kills you by burrowing through your nose into your brain and then reanimating your corpse until you decay.” We think she should sue. “You are a quack, a charlatan,” the more sophisticated among us accuse. “Swan fucker,” the less-than-sophisticated insult, before the reviews are removed. We mourn the end of our childhoods. “Thanks for ruining our childhoods,” we write. On social media, Faith Massey condemns our behavior, but that doesn’t bother us. “Commander Dinara Gorun,” she scolds, “defended the oppressed against the powerful. She would never hide in the shadows, flinging hateful slurs.” A photo of Commander Dinara Gorun posed arms-on-hips in a heroine stance accompanies the post. “Cunt,” we reply. “Thanks for ruining our childhoods.”