Appearance Policing: Learning to stop snarking about the way other women look

When I was growing up, I saw that, if you were female, criticising other women's appearances was a big part of your daily life. My mum would regularly change TV channels just to see what the female TV presenter or weather forecaster was wearing on a particular programme, ITV's This Morning would be watched with a commentary on how Judy Finnegan needed to get her eyes/face done and lose some weight, and Wimbledon season every year entailed a critique of Sue Barker's face/hair/outfit. I'd sit there thinking "Maybe she does look a bit crap, but who cares?" and wondering why the men presenting opposite these women were never singled out for a scathing attack on their appearances. Why was it OK for the men who were visible in the media to be wrinkled, grey-haired, fat, scruffy and never wearing anything more imaginative than a grey suit, yet the women were subject so such scrutiny?

Still, it's hard to shake off such conditioning, especially in a society that pits women against each other so viciously. We are allowed to compliment each other's appearances, but only if we criticise our own. "Oh, your hair looks lovely - I wish mine was like that," is the template for how we, as women, are supposed to address aspects of our appearance. We can't accept a compliment - if someone tells us we look great, we're supposed to reject it and disagree - "What, this old thing? God no..." and highlight something else about our bodies we don't like. And because we're taught to view all other women as competition, we must snark and bitch about and criticise the appearance of any woman we find threatening. Those are the rules of Girl World that Cady discovers in the fantastic film Mean Girls, where she watches Regina George tell a girl her skirt is "adorable" to her face and then turn around and say "That is the ugliest effing skirt I have ever seen" behind her back.

I thought I'd largely got past the compulsion to criticise other women's appearances and outfit choices. I know I'm not entirely there yet - there are still parts of me that apply an appearance hierarchy in my head whenever I feel threatened by another woman (usually, sadly, because I assume someone I want to be attracted to me is more attracted to her) frantically conducting mental maths to see who 'wins' - "Well, she's got bigger boobs, so I lose on that score, but she's bigger all over than me, so I win on that score, and I have a nicer bum, so I win on that one, but she has nicer hair, so I lose on that one..." It's sad and shitty and petty and one feels like an utterly foul human being for even admitting it, but there are no Feminist Awards and even if there were, I wouldn't want to win one by lying about my tendency to still instinctively compete with other women. I recognise it, I know it's not a good thing, and I'm trying to change it, but I have to be honest and admit I still do it.

Still, it pulled me up sharp the other day when I started snarking about what another woman was wearing, and the person I snarked to refused to join in. The item in question was an extremely high pair of spiked platform heels, and were being worn to perform a role that involved a lot of moving around. They struck me as deeply impractical, they hurt my feet to even look at them, and I wondered why the woman didn't just go for comfort and wear flats. When I voiced this to a friend, she didn't join in the snarking. She said she didn't have a problem with heels, and tactfully guided the conversation in another direction. In the nicest way possible, it made me realise exactly how unnecessary my comments and thoughts were. Was I focusing on any of the men in the room, and criticising their outfit choices? Nope. I was honing in on this woman, solely because she was a woman and because we see women's appearances as public property and up for scrutiny. I was tying her up in the impossible double bind of being expected to dress for other people's approval, and then condemned for doing so. Heels are sexy when society wants them to be, but when society wants to have a pop at women, then they're just stupid and impractical and vain and ha ha look at those dumb bitches tottering along how airheaded must you have to be to want to squeeze your feet into those ridiculous contraptions.

Perhaps karma came around quickly, because later that same day I found myself changing from a pair of hotpants into a pair of knee-length shorts, precisely because a group of us were going to a pub known for having sleazy old men hanging around who like to bother groups of young women. I'd seen such men approaching my friends on other occasions, seeming to believe that any group of young women could only be attending the pub for their entertainment, and I just didn't feel like having my mellow harshed by having to have an unpleasant confrontation with a drunk man who saw me as fair game simply because I was wearing short shorts. It made me incredibly angry that I had  to resort to changing my outfit just to avoid this, but I  just didn't have the mental energy to deal with it. To any man who wonders why women "don't just tell them to fuck off" whenever we're harassed, the answer is pretty simple - if we did this every time we're bothered by a man who thinks we owe him our time/conversation/smiles/body, we'd never get anything else done. And amazingly, we don't all relish the prospect of being forever involved in arguments with hostile sexists who are only going to call you an uptight bitch for confronting them in the first place. It's exhausting, and we'd like to have lives that involved some fun and relaxation, please, if that's not too damn much to ask.

But me changing my shorts and snarking over the woman in heels are linked. They're both a result of a society that makes everything women do about their appearances, and then punishes them for it. Get harassed? Your fault for showing your thighs. Get bitched about by other women? Your fault for wearing those heels. Dare to look casual, even scruffy? You'll be condemned for not making enough effort.

We all should know by now that we can't win, and therefore we need to stop playing the game altogether. Not the one of looking however we wish, because that's a right we should certainly never stop fighting for. But we need to stop thinking that hissing OMG what is she wearing is somehow a chummy act of female bonding, and instead recognise it as collusion with sexism. It's hard to break that conditioning - only last night my mum was criticising the hair of a woman on a property show on TV, and asking me if I agreed. So I can certainly see where I've picked up the habit, but I know that's no excuse. If I want to be free to look however the fuck I want - and I certainly do - then I have to respect other women's choices about their appearances as much as I respect my own. Otherwise I really am no better than a Mean Girl. 

Disappointment with The Independent...

...for this Saturday's Essay by Susannah Frankel, "We fetishise the female form, and then condemn the wish to 'improve' it". Taking as its starting point the recent depressing news story of a British 20 year-old who died after an illegal cosmetic procedure, she basically goes on to defend the very culture which drove Claudia Aderotimi to her death. Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised that Frankel spends most of the article laying out the various bodily fashions that have been used to torment women over the years - from Rubens and Velasquez via Chanel and Twiggy, through to Kate Moss - as she is a fashion and beauty journalist. What I am dismayed about is her total failure to see these trends for what they all are - a way of tormenting the average women by holding up the most unattainable body types as the most desirable. The fleshy rolls and cellulite-dimpled thighs of Rubens' women were only considered beautiful because of their rarity value at a time when starvation and hard labour were a physical reality for the majority of any country's population. As the Depression and post-war austerity hampered the nation's diet, the well-nourished Mae West and Diana Dors were feted for their ample curves. Yet a few decades and a national conversion to cooking everything in lard later, and just as waistlines expanded, models contracted with the almost sinisterly boyish figures of the 60s fashion scene. I don't think I even need to follow the trend through to the modern day to demonstrate just how perverse and contemptuous of women fashion has always been.

What probably does sum that up nicely though, is the recent inversion of standards which then led this 20 year-old to get industrial silicone pumped into her buttocks. As Frankel points out, "After years of women over the world wondering "does my bum look big in this?", they [will] now be asking: "Does my bum look big enough?". The supposedly desirable female arse may have shifted away from being akin to that of a 12 year-old boy, and now at least be a bit bigger and more jiggly, but this should not be mistaken for progress or a female-friendly fashion world. The fact is, the standard remains as unrealistic and unattainable as ever. My backside probably isn't a million miles away from Beyonce's in terms of actual size, but it also happens to be white, dimpled, with a smattering of stretch marks, and unlike those pneumatic African-American butts, it generally points down rather than horizontally outwards. I'll never be able to fool myself that I'm anything like this woman, even if I can at least claim the meagre victory that at least she's not as emaciated as a grasshopper on Slimfast.

The woman-hating fashion industry will always set the bar just beyond women's grasp, even if it has got smart enough to start pretending that it is interested in promoting 'Real' body shapes. Anyway, I'm not sure Beyonce, a woman who admitted to living on lemon juice, maple syrup and cayenne pepper to lose weight for a film role, is someone to look up to - but that's another story. What galls me about Frankel's article is its total failure to acknowledge the misogynistic element to the very world which drove Claudia Aderotimi, and which drives thousands of women every year, to mutilate, distort and alter their bodies with an array of chemicals that'd put ICI to shame. Instead she simply narrates the tale of fashion's hateful treatment of women without any analysis of its implications. While she does admit that "it is not uncommon for designers...to use clothing to transform the female form into something closer to their personal ideal and further from anything nature intended", at no point does she consider or state how very fucked up that is. She even has the audacity to say that whether fashion's distortion of the female form is responsible for harm to women, "is the subject of much debate"; erm, when people are dying from injecting something you might use to seal bathroom tiles into their arses, I'm not sure exactly where the room for debate is.

Of course I'm not endorsing the ridiculously simplistic approach that dictates all eating disorders = the result of seeing thin models in magazines, because eating disorders are complex psychological conditions which are still not fully understood. But cosmetic procedures, be they an Elizabethan women putting lead on her face, or a 17 year-old girl wanting breast implants, have a much simpler, more obvious, and less debatable root. Namely, a society that tells women they are ugly and worthless, and that changing their bodies is the only way to fulfilment. And why does society do this? Well, even if Naomi Wolf has lost all credibility in recent times, her original argument still stands: when women start gaining more rights, it's in the interests of those who feel threatened by that phenomenon, to erode their confidence in any way possible. And the most effective method for that? Still, sadly, making people feel ugly. Frankel also makes the slightly bizarre point that "we are a basically Protestant nation, mistrustful of everything from expensive clothing to face, breast and now, bottom lifts", going on to say that this 'social disapproval' was what further endangered Aderotimi's life because her embarrassment about the procedure meant she didn't tell anyone what she was going to the US for.

Firstly, I have to take issue with this freakish logic that says pursuit of the latest Katherine Hammett outfit is somehow on a par with bodily mutilation - there just is no parallel, sorry. I also take issue with being labelled 'Protestant' for objecting to the promotion of a culture and its associated practices that are both physically and mentally poisonous to women. I don't disapprove because I'm 'not fun' or have some neo-Cromwellian objection to fun, frippery, glitz or gloss. I disapprove because the culture that promotes cosmetic surgery and the altering of the female form for the approval of others is a culture that HATES WOMEN and is now KILLING WOMEN (see also - Kanye West's mother for a famous example of a cosmetic surgery fatality). That's where my mind really boggles - at Frankel's apportioning the blame for Aderotimi's death to a prurient, purse-lipped society instead of the real culprit. For a start, saying that a country where Nuts magazine, Botox and Ann Summers flourish is a country opposed to indulgence, is simply bollocks. But even if it was the fear of disapproval that caused Aderotimi to sneak off to the States in silence, it was not disapproval that killed her. It was cosmetic surgery. Frankel is right to say that it's hypocritical to 'fetishise the female form, and then condemn the wish to 'improve' it'. What we should be condemning is the treatment of the female form as society's plaything, and I don't care how far back into the history of fashion and art Frankel can trace that practice, because historical persistence alone does not make something right.