Ageing is not the enemy - beauty bullshit is

Quite why anyone remotely intelligent or considering themselves feminist would ask a plastic surgeon for advice on preventing ageing and expect to get anything other than biased, anti-woman advice is beyond me. However, that's pretty much precisely what Rachel Krantz did in her article for Bustle, "Can You Prevent Aging in Your 20s? I Asked a Plastic Surgeon & Here's What He Told Me." I still clicked on the article, partly out of morbid curiosity, partly because I fully admit to not being immune to beauty culture and like most women I know, fear ageing not because of what it might do to our faces and bodies, but because of what it might do to the way people will treat us. Bustle has made something of a trademark out its "I did X so you don't have to," articles (e.g. going without deodorant for 7 days, actually drinking the recommended amount of water per day, shaving your face for some reason that I so strongly don't wish to know that I've never actually clicked on that article) but I'm not sure there was a hell of a lot of a reveal with this one.

The plastic surgeon - someone who makes their living from people's insecurities about their looks, remember - recommends regular Botox. This is your first sign that someone is not to be trusted. Botox is a poison - the clue is in the full name, Botulinum toxin - yet for some reason we don't regard it as bizarre, harmful and grotesque as when Queen Elizabeth used to whiten her face using lead-based make-up. It can cause symptoms similar to the fatal condition botulism. It works by paralysing your muscles. Under what other circumstances would we ever encourage someone to voluntarily paralyse healthy muscles, except in a society so warped by the fear of natural ageing that we view it as a disease that must be cured?

"It is very typical for everyone when they’re young to believe they are immortal," Dr. Wells told me."But the smart people realize they need to be proactive ... For example, if you never clean your house, it will continue to get dirtier and messier and more unkempt — and that is the aging process. So this is housekeeping for your body."

Um, no it's not. Sorry. Nope. Putting poison into a healthy body is not "housekeeping." It's harm, plain and simple. It does absolutely nothing to increase anyone's physical health or longevity, or decrease their risk of serious diseases. For someone who calls themselves 'Dr', this individual seems to be seriously confused about the distinction between keeping yourself healthy - which is an admirable goal at any age - and keeping yourself looking a certain, socially-dictated way. Comparing the physical ageing process to an unkempt house isn't just lazy and offensive, it's untrue. Ageing is not "untidy," "dirty" or "messy." It's natural. It means - SHOCKER - that you'll look different at 50 than you did at 20. And different at 80 than you did at 50. So fucking what? Only in a society where we're taught to loathe all markers of nature on our bodies, especially as women - hair, wrinkles, rolls, cellulite - could the simply flipping obvious trajectory of the human body over time be compared to letting your home go to shit. If that's really the case, then I compare the use of Botox to applying a substance to the walls of your house which does nothing to improve their structure or resilience and actually destroys their natural function.

Maybe I was just being stubborn by refusing to "protect" my skin, the same way I'd delayed setting up an IRA until this year, or still hadn't figured out what to do about my newly-aching knees after a run.

 Although I empathise with Krantz's fears of ageing - I don't think any woman, save for one who lives in an isolated cabin far from all civilisation with no mirrors in it, would say she has no fears about getting older - I dislike the fact she even entertains the idea that it's somehow obnoxious to refuse to buy into misogynistic anti-ageing culture. Saving for your old age? Smart move, unless you want to work until you're dead. Looking after those achey joints? Ditto, because this body has got to last you a lifetime. But INJECTING POISON INTO YOUR FACE? No, refusing to do this is not STUBBORN, it's FUCKING COMMON SENSE!! If you want to "protect" your skin then sure, wear sunscreen all year round, or a healthy layer of Vaseline, or both. Wear an ice hockey helmet with a visor on it, if you really want to be completely "protected" from all the possible ravages of daily life. But fuck OFF with this rewriting of language, this abandoning of sense, this demonisation of perfectly normal  human processes to the point that you're unreasonable if you don't invite a surgeon to sink a scalpel into completely healthy flesh. You cannot turn back the clock. You cannot stop age from having effects on your body and face, because that's the physical law of this world. Undergoing pointless and damaging procedures that will simply pretend your skin hasn't gone through what it's gone through is not the same thing as getting in a DeLorean and being 18 again.

And why should we want to do the latter, anyway? Why is youth - a time of disempowerment and ignorance - so fetishised? Why, conversely, is ageing considered so criminal? My grandmother recently died at the age of 94, and her life's rich experiences were etched into her 94 year-old-looking face. And that's exactly how it should be. How damn creepy would it have looked if half of those years were missing from her face?

The depressing thing about the piece is how, for someone who claims she's a feminist regularly
throughout the piece, Krantz seems to have no scepticism towards the idea that by getting Botox or cosmetic treatments, she'll automatically "stay relevant in my field and desirable to my partner for even longer." She gives barely any time over to considering whether it's really true that age will have any effect on those areas of her life, or whether it's more likely that women are just constantly intimidated in to having procedures they don't need with the threat of it? Is it really our partners and employers who imbue us with the belief that as soon as we show a grey hair or wrinkle, they'll leave us, or is it magazines, TV shows, beauty advertisements and oh yes, wait for it, PLASTIC SURGEONS, perchance?! Perhaps I'm an idealist, but I like to think that in Krantz's particular field, the same one that I inhabit, what you write still matters more than what you look like. Don't get me wrong, I'm aware that there's been an insidious push for writers to have a public face, and yes I do kind of hate the fact that more and more articles, online and in print, have to be accompanied with a headshot of the author, but that in itself is hardly reason to rush out and get our the skin on our jawlines stapled behind our ears. I just can't understand why - apart from in order to spin out enough material for a whole piece - Krantz would entertain the idea that a (male, incidentally) plastic surgeon is an unbiased source on whether she should be "preventing ageing."

Well, I can tell you how to avoid getting that little crinkle between your eyebrows. Don't ask people who make their living off hating women's bodies and faces for advice.

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.

Gender-blindness Is A Dangerous Condition

...especially when it comes to documentaries such as last night's The Ugly Face of Beauty on Channel 4. There seemed to be some good intention mixed in with all the mixed messages, but really it was a gigantic wasted opportunity to point out just why the promotion of cosmetic surgery is so hateful towards women. Instead, the programme focused on 'when surgery goes wrong', therefore neatly implying that having your breasts, stomach or face hoicked all over the shop by a surgeon is fine, as long as it's done right. Arrrghh.

While it's certainly criminal that there's so little regulation in the plastic surgery industry, and that cowboy surgeons are getting away with ruining people's bodies and lives, that seems to me to be an issue for Watchdog or Panorama - not an opportunity for a cosy pseudo-documentary on Channel 4 where on the one hand we can giggle at the maimed bodies of naive idiots who just wanted to look beautiful, and on the other still somehow fail to condemn the cosmetic surgery industry altogether. And why should it be condemned? Because, and I don't think this is too strong a statement, it is a form of insidious violence against women. Yes, women. Not a single case named on last night's programme was male. When the makers set up a 'fake clinic' in Essex city centre, luring customers in to sign up for surgical procedures with no advice, qualifications or regulation, everyone who entered the 'clinic' was female. Men were entirely absent from the documentary (apart from their presence as surgeons, of course), yet the makers seemed entirely blind to this fact and keep referring to 'people', 'patients' and 'the public' as being sucked in by the dubious tactics of the cosmetic surgery industry.

My mind boggles at this attitude, especially as it was screamingly obvious to me that the programme could and should have been titled "The Ugly Face of Beauty And How Women Are Affected By It". Without even needing to try, the programme showed in painful detail just how pressured, coerced and brainwashed so many women are into thinking that their breasts must resemble watermelons, their stomachs should be flat if not concave, and that wrinkled faces are a sign of evil which must be wiped out. It showed how the industry teaches women to hate and mistrust their bodies and believe that the answer lies in a surgeon's scalpel, and how ultimately proponents of CS wish to homogenise the ideal of beauty to the terrifying drag-queen-gone-wrong archetype described above. I can understand that gory scars and grossly misshaped breasts are more of a viewing pull than feminist analysis, but having lured the public in with the sensationalist maiming, couldn't the makers have at least made some kind of point about how the hatred the beauty industry perpetuates is clearly gendered? They clearly weren't afraid to criticise the cosmetic surgery profession up to a point, but chickened out short of proposing that perhaps one of the reasons surgeons don't seem to care if they botch a procedure on a woman's body, is that they have nothing but contempt for the female form.

It was particularly disappointing to see the presenter of the programme, Dr Christian Jessen, tell a lady who had been duped by the 'fake clinic' that 'there's nothing wrong with you wanting cosmetic surgery', but scolding her to make sure a doctor is legitimate and trustworthy first. To me, this is about as morally acceptable as telling a black person that it's fine to bleach their skin, just make sure you read the ingredients on the packet first. The point is not about information, regulation or any of that. It's about just how twisted and brimming with hate for women cosmetic surgery procedures are in the first place. But the makers of the programme seemed to be too worn down by the modern acceptance of contempt for the female body, to even consider that.

Getting lippy

An interesting article on BBC News questions both the safety and ethics of 'designer vaginas', i.e. the rising trend of labiaplasty amongst western women. The gist is that senior gynaecologists and psychologists have started questioning the reasoning behind blowing £3,000 to cut perfectly normal, healthty tissue out of one's genitals in order to achieve a 'homogenised, pre-pubescent' appearance. Thank god someone is finally speaking out.

Naturally, plastic surgeons are staunchly defending the procedure, citing women's right to mutilate themselves, the influence of lads' mags, and the syndrome (?) of 'hypertrophy' where 'the tissue is dark and hangs down'. Hmm, we wouldn't be pathologising perfectly normal genitalia in order to line our pockets a bit more, now would we? It's a bit like asking a turkey farmer if they're in favour of Christmas - you're not exactly gonna get an answer that doesn't betray a vested interest, now are you? Why the BBC even bothered giving these people a voice I'm not sure - they don't interview drug dealers for 'their side of the story' when reporting on heroin problems, after all.

I've wondered for a while why no one has identified the irony in the fact we fight against and fiercely condemn women having their genitals mutilated in 3rd world countries, yet here we're happy to pay £3,000 for the privilege. The only real difference is the setting in which the mutilations take place - in Somalia you may have your labia chopped off with a piece of broken glass in the middle of a forest courtesy of a village elder, in Britain you'll have it done under sterile surgical conditions in a nice clean hospital. But the motivation is the same - namely the notion that women's genitals are wrong/grotesque, and must be changed.

The medical profession definitely need to do more to identify the madness in undertaking such procedures, as the media isn't interested in doing so. Instead, TV programme-makers sanction and compound public interest in women surgically altering their genitals, in programmes such as Designer Vaginas and Embarrassing Bodies. The latter programme (which has, tellingly, altered its title from Embarrassing Illnesses, probably because it shows a lot of conditions where there is nothing medically wrong with the person) has shown two women coming in on separate occasions, bemoaning the length of their labia. I'll step up to the plate right now and say that my labia are probably longer/more protruding than either of them, and their vaginas looked completely normal to me. Instead of reassuring the women and suggesting perhaps some counselling or confidence-building therapy about their bodies, the doctors on the show sent them both for operations to get their labia trimmed. Nice message to send out. Don't have a tuppence like a porn star? Get thee to Harley Street and spend a whack of money that'd get you a new car, part of a house or at the least a holiday on a nude beach to see what real vaginas look like, on trimming a few millimetres off your lady lips.

Sigh.

A poster on Feministing made me smile by defending her 'big sexy labia' before cheekily adding 'still hurts to ride a bike though!'. True, having big labia can be a bit of a pain - they get in the way during sex, rub during biking/horse-riding, and require an extra-attentive sense of personal hygiene. But, um, so frigging what? Bodies in all their glory can be a pain in 1000 different ways, and we don't rush all down to the nearest body-butcher to get bits chopped off in order to remedy that, even though that's what cosmetic surgeons would have us do in the name of 'returning our confidence to us'.

The trend towards unquestioningly encouraging people to undergo serious surgery under the flimsiest of pretexts is worrying, and it's good to see some medical professionals speaking up against it. I'd be lying if I said I hadn't worried and wondered about my labia over the years - whether they're freakish, unattractive and in need of a trim. But when I observe this sickening trend of portraying normal female flesh as requiring medical intervention, I become fiercely proud of them; and yes, it does help that my partner is very enamoured with them. No, I don't derive my self-esteem solely from male approval, but it's just nice to have the viral myths of porn and lads' mags debunked by a real live man. After all, we hear very little from the actual men in aid of whom these procedures are presumably, or at least in part, performed. As Jo Brand pointed out, labiaplasty is an operation undertaken 'for your doctor, and your partner' and no one else (because who else knows or cares, was her point). And who says that men demand a certain kind of vagina, apart from the magazines and films that purport to speak for them? I think if we asked real men, who are having sex with real, unaltered women, their answers would range from 'couldn't care less' to actually positively liking more visible genitalia on their women. But instead we let the media and cash-happy scalpel jocks tell us what's hot and what's not below the waist. We've really got to wise up and start thinking for ourselves again. When did we stop?