An Inside (and outside) Job
5 minute read
“A world obsessed with women’s hyper-visibility can dispatch them so swiftly to invisibility.” So said The New York Times this week in an article about supermodel Linda Evangelista, who experienced an allegedly botched cosmetic procedure that has left her suffering from depression and self-loathing, and forced her into self-imposed hiding. Apparently instead of shrinking away fat cells around her thighs, abdomen, ‘love handles’ and chin, the CoolSculpting process she underwent left them looking heavier than before.
The New York Times article described the nineties icon as a “recluse”. Her intense desire to maintain the body of her 26-year-old self at 56 has led her to withdraw from society because, to put it bluntly, she feels fat. I know how that feels. I spent my 20s prioritising being thin over almost everything else. I remember refusing to go out one particular night because I thought I’d eaten too much that day and I couldn’t possibly consume the extra calories alcohol would involve. I stayed home and cried, not because I was missing a night out but because I was terrified of having put on a couple of pounds. Just like Evangelista, I hid away.
While we all know that midlife and menopause change a woman’s body regardless of who she is, I had somehow subconsciously accepted the idea that Evangelista and her glamazon peers from the nineties supermodel era were different; born of some sanctified gene pool maybe, or baptised with the Grail of eternal youth perhaps. But no. A 56-year-old woman most likely needs help by way of freezing, sucking or starving away her fat cells if she is to have a body equal to a woman 30 years her junior. The same applies if her face looks as fresh as a Millenials. I talked about the Imagery of Ageing in a recent piece for Heyday and I wonder if anybody else was disappointed with the photograph of Joan Collins which graced the cover of The Sunday Times Magazine last weekend? She’s 88 years old, but her face looked as polished as her old-fashioned English manners. No hint of the laughs, tears, worries and woes a woman with a Hollywood film career, five husbands, three children and three grandchildren would most certainly have weathered. To me, the photograph didn’t do this wonderfully strong woman any justice. There was a blandness to it, a generic feel almost, and generic is something Joan Collins is definitely not.
In her 1990 feminist work, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women, Naomi Wolf made the insightful statement that: “A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience. Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history.” Whether it’s a perfect body or flawless complexion in question, Wolf’s message is true isn’t it? The pressure of the forever-thin and anti-ageing culture we’ve grown up with has left many of us diminished; not physically – I’ve no doubt Evangelista is as stunning now as she ever was – but emotionally and mentally. The invisibility of women in midlife and beyond begins as a physical one – we withdraw from society, or at least loiter on the periphery of it, out of fear that we don't measure up – but very quickly it becomes a political one too. Our voices, passions and beliefs are weakened and devalued along with our bodies as we under-eat, over-exercise and over-expend our energies on researching new ways to look younger, thinner, better.
Most women are trying to tread that tightrope between self-love and self-improvement. We’re each like the Man on a Wire, but instead of having a pole with which to balance ourselves, we’re walking hands-free through a high wind of distracting and conflicting images and messages. Nobody’s going to reach that finish line without a whole lot of bumps and bruises, not even Linda Evangelista. I feel awful for her. Can you imagine being defined by your beauty your entire life, and then suddenly feeling so appalled by what you see in the mirror that you can’t bear to leave the house? It’s similar to women in perimenopause suffering from anxiety for the first time. If you’re not used to that sudden groundswell of negative emotions, how dreadful and frightening must it be to deal with them for the first time in your 40s and 50s?
If I was being flippant about Evangelista’s plight, I’d say welcome to how the other half lives. Like a lot of women, I’ve had many days during my life when I’ve wanted to stay home or get home fast because I felt bad about how I looked. I don’t any more because I work hard every day at finding the value in myself outside of my appearance.
Today, I’m okay with only looking okay – or bloody awful. I’ve realised that the only person putting me under pressure to look my best self all of the time is me. I’ll admit though that I haven’t been able to apply this philosophy to my Instagram account yet, where like almost everyone, I only post the most palatable version of myself. Baby steps I suppose.
If you follow The Female Lead on Instagram (@the_female_lead), you may have seen a post this week in which a woman in midlife frustratingly recounts the neverending list of beauty ‘trends’ women have been fed – and standards we’ve been held to – over the decades, before explaining that when 20-year-olds look at a woman of 40, 50 or 60 and scoff, “Lady, it looks like you gave up!”, the answer is “You’re damn right I did.”
Women don’t give up on looking good in midlife and beyond, they give up on anybody else’s definition of ‘good’. Part of the midlife journey is learning that we’re enough just as we are and that every lump, bump and line should be loved not loathed.
British radio DJ Lisa Snowden posted a breathtaking quote from Scottish author Donna Ashworth on Instagram this week. It read in part, “The female body was never supposed to be smooth, firm and flawless. It was designed to create life, to host life, to feed life. If you are losing a battle for slimness, do not for a moment think this is your fault. You are trying to blow away the wind…Peace, laughter and acceptance are the best medicines around.”
The irony of my own personal renaissance, as you might call it, is that it’s involved looking outside of myself as much as inside. I came across another interesting article this week in The Guardian about women who are involuntarily celibate. One of the individuals interviewed said she was dealing with the absence of a sexual relationship in her life by throwing herself into “work, life and healthy communities where single life is celebrated”. While working on our own self-esteem by looking inwards is necessary and healthy, I think we should spend just as much time seeking out those “healthy communities” which give us perspective on our own demons as well as an opportunity to simply forget about them. For me, this is where I find “peace, laughter and acceptance”.
I have some amazing women in my life who reinforce how important it is simply to find the joy in every day. There’s a couple in particular who have become role models for me, and they make me a kinder person – to myself and to others. I’ve started to look further afield too, for women who are older, wiser and braver than me, who I can learn more from than simply how to look good by today’s standards. Besides Joan Collins, another octogenarian appeared in the newspapers this week. The Guardian ran an interview with environmentalist Jane Goodall and included a portrait shot of her softly smiling face with its wonderful road map of lines reflecting a life well lived. Like Collins, she is still so incredibly active and engaged in life and work and it was so refreshing to read an article with an older woman that didn’t mention beauty, fashion, family, men or children. The last thing I was thinking about as I read this fascinating piece was whether or not my bum looked big.
Marie Kelly, October 2021
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