Why was Michael Jackson stigmatised so harshly?

[Aractus]

So let's look at the stigmas that society attached to MJ. For brevity I won't bother discussing the child sexual assault allegations in the OP, but feel free to discuss them in the thread.

I'll start with what he wasn't stigmatised for. MJ was balding and had cosmetic work done to darken his scalp at the hairline as well as wore a wig woven into his hair (as revealed in his autopsy report).

So why was he stigmatised at all? There are two primary factors at play here. Americans have a culture of obsessing over the health of people in the public eye, and secondly there are huge stigmas attached to disease as it is anyway.

1. Rhinoplasty. So this is probably the most surprising thing that he was stigmatised for. He had his first nose job after breaking it. Rumours say he wasn't happy with his nose anyway, but let's stick to the fact here. Following an initial rhinoplasty it is not unusual to require follow-up corrective surgery, apparently it's now less common than it was, but whatever that was the surgeon's fault if you're going to play the blame-game. It's also the surgeon's fault that it ended up looking the way it did. It's pretty unlikely MJ wanted it to look the way it ultimately did.

2. Vitiligo. Right a skin condition that the public did not know much about. People would speculate right up to the day he died that he never had Vitiligo and simply bleached his skin, even though there were photos of him with clear blotches on his skin from the 80's and 90's. Here's a black girl with Vitiligo:

https://youtu.be/za6nv-CK4xQ

Now this is less surprising because of the culture in the USA mentioned in the opening paragraphs. You have a little known chronic skin disease, and a fascination with speculating about celebrity's health - a clear recipe for stigma. The autopsy reported noted that his skin still had blotches on it - had he treated it aggressively with skin bleach, as many believed, it would only have taken him about one year to remove all remaining dark patches. He never did this (he may have used the products but not to completely whiten his skin), evidenced by the fact he continued wearing long sleeves and long pants in his performances in the 90's, and the fact that dark blotches were present at the time of his death.

3. Weight. MJ was underweight at some point, but when he died he was within the healthy weight range.

4. 100 Facial Surgeries? Highly unlikely. He had some unusual surgeries, that's for sure, but 100? Come on his facial structure remained the same. MJ received multiple stigmas for his face.

Black people age slower in their faces than whites as it is, so he should only have looked about 40ish when he died if he didn't do anything at all. People stigmatised him for his "feminine look", something we now call "meterosexual".

We'll break down what we know about: MJ said that he had a rhinoplasty with follow-up work done. He also said he had the cleft chin put in. We also know that his face looked gaunt when he became underweight, and it never really filled back out when he put some weight back on. He also had cosmetic tattoos that no one seemed to know about on his lips, his eyelids, his eyebrows, and as already mentioned at his thinning hairline. Also, blacks have a different facial structure to whites so of course it looks odd if they lose their skin pigment as this photo-shopped image of MJ shows:



It's certainly possible that he's had some more work done beyond what we know about, but even if all he had was the nose job and the cleft chin you can see it looks normal when he was black, but he looks, well, odd when his skin is whitened. He wasn't hideously disfigured though as this 2005 trial photo shows:



I think it's a shame that people are stigmatised for things that are outside of their control. MJ got the raw end of the stick when it came to his nose - something that attracted huge stigma his way instead of the way of plastic surgeons responsible for the outcome. Not to mention his appearance overall, unfortunately due to his Vitiligo his facial structure was always going to look strange with pale skin. Perhaps he exacerbated the problems in some ways, but as I've shown above he would have been stigmatised for his face had he had no work done on it at all. And bad surgery on his nose is not his fault, nor is his medical condition.