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Tonya
AALBC .com Platinum Poster
Username: Tonya
Post Number: 3919
Registered: 07-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, January 08, 2007 - 08:05 pm: | 
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Domestic Disturbances
by Judith Warner
Last week, I took a few delicious days off from work and read Nora Ephron’s latest book, “I Feel Bad About My Neck.”
This is a book I’ve been wanting to read for some time, but prior to Christmas, I couldn’t get myself to buy it. The cover, after all, is designed so that the title reads like the label on a jar of expensive skin cream. From reading about the book I knew that it was, in large part, about aging and beauty regimens – the rounds of Botox and Restylane, hair dressing and removal, and skin buffing and shaping and abrasion that Ephron, with clever simplicity, calls “maintenance.”
I am not supposed to be interested in such things as aging and “maintenance.” I am only 41, after all, and I’m supposed to be a serious sort of a person, concerned with more serious things – literature! politics! the history of feminism! psychopharmacology! – and not eternally scribbling down tiny tabulations to figure out how many books I’d have to sell to afford a boob lift.
So I gave Ephron’s book to my mother. How nice this was, I’m not sure. But it was a good strategy. I figured she’d read it fast, hiding out in the guest room, perhaps, while the rest of the family enjoyed our annual slugfest by the light of the Christmas tree, and then pass it on to me. Which she did – on the 26th, just before beating a fast path out of town, leaving my mother-in-law, husband, kids and hysterical dog behind for five more long days of vacation, and leaving me with the book to read on my new cross-trainer machine, guilt-free.
It’s a strange thing: like Ephron, throughout most of my life, I was always a “low maintenance” kind of a woman, as my very blond college classmate Cate once kindly put it. It wasn’t that, as a less diplomatic friend in Paris once said, I didn’t care about my appearance; I did care – but not enough to put any real time or money into it. “Done” nails, “done” hair – they really weren’t my aesthetic. I had no problem with them. I had no patience for the many very Serious women who looked down upon other women who had them. I was a great fan of makeup. I just couldn’t remember, most days, to put it on.
But then, something happened right around the time I turned 41. I was the maid of honor at Cate’s wedding. And when the wedding photos arrived, I saw for the first time that my face was full of lines. Vertical lines, creases running down from both sides of my mouth and into my neck. A full face of professional wedding makeup hadn’t hidden them.
I realized, all of a sudden, that I looked old.
Worse, like Ephron, I’d crossed over into the country of women who Have to Do Something About Their Appearance. The question was what, followed soon after by musings as to why.
The first part of the answer was easy: I grew my hair longer and got highlights. Now, if you’ve ever read even a single article in a beauty magazine you’ll know that this is purely irrational. Long hair pulls down facial lines. And highlights? Well, I don’t know why I got them: I wanted to look “fun.” I wanted my hair to look more like my daughter Emilie’s. I wanted light brown for the streaks, but ended up with an auburn-y red, and walked around for a few weeks looking like a tiger.
I was proud of my stripes. I felt like they made me look like someone was spending some time and money on maintaining me.
And as I tried to convince my friends that my highlights were life-changing or even visible, I discovered an interesting thing: All the women of my close acquaintance – serious sorts – were, like Ephron and me, becoming obsessed with cosmetic procedures. Two had secretly had Botox. One was visiting her dermatologist on a near-monthly basis. I met a college friend after a long period apart, and we spent our first few minutes scouring each others’ faces. “You look so good,” we both said, suspiciously. A childhood friend, thrilled by my surprising new concern, offered to go halves with me on a breast lift. (“We’ll each get one side done and then, when we can afford it, we’ll do the other.”)
It was funny, but then again, it really wasn’t. This wasn’t who we were supposed to be.
It comes down to this: having lines on my face makes me feel vulnerable. And vulnerable, in the face of impending age, is the last thing that I want to be.
These days, I find I spend a fair amount of time thinking about who I am going to be as I get older. The big picture is kind of scary. Saving for my children’s college! Saving for retirement! Sometimes, when I forget to take my preventive migraine meds (low-dose Elavil; I highly recommend it), I wake up at 3 in the morning, convinced that I am going to become a bag lady.
Other friends, I know, share the same fear. The terror of falling off the rails, of failing utterly, of being unable to care for yourself, not to mention your family is, I suspect, relatively widespread. It’s certainly present for Ephron.
“I am only about eight hours a week away from looking exactly like that woman,” she wrote of her maintenance regime, contemplating the sight of a local homeless woman, “with frizzled flyaway gray hair I would probably have if I stopped dyeing mine; with a potbelly I would definitely develop if I ate just half of what I think about eating every day; with the dirty nails and chapped lips and mustache and bushy eyebrows that would be my destiny if I ever spent two weeks on a desert island.” I believe her concern is not just skin-deep. I think she’s afraid of losing control and of becoming a throw-away person.
Our society is full of throwaway people of various sorts; all those people we don’t deem worthy of decent health care or education or housing or political representation. When you hear stories about middle-class people who fall into bankruptcy because of, say, medical bills or the costs of caring for an elderly relative or, often enough, divorce, you realize that, unless you’re very, very wealthy or very, very lucky, you are really only one or two bad strokes of luck away from falling off the rails yourself. I feel this quite acutely.
Which is why, I think, many of us – even women like Ephron, who on the surface of things has no right to such worries as she strides past the homeless on her way to her biweekly blow-dry – have our own inner bag ladies. They surface in the dead of night, when the dog barks and there’s no Ambien.
The bag lady threatens. She’s a menace. And we need whatever armor money can buy.
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Judith Warner's book, "Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety" (excerpt, NPR interview), a New York Times best-seller, was published in February 2005. She is currently the host of "The Judith Warner Show" on XM Satellite Radio. |
Cynique
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Cynique
Post Number: 6570
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, January 09, 2007 - 12:01 am: |
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LOL. Now will we have a chorus of posters accusing middle-aged white women of self-hate and of being brain-washed by the media because they want to change their appearance by getting botox treatments and having their hair dyed and streaked and their faces lifted, all so they can emulate false standards of beauty?? tsk-tsk
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Tonya
AALBC .com Platinum Poster
Username: Tonya
Post Number: 3920
Registered: 07-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, January 09, 2007 - 07:23 am: |
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What I found interesting was she spends all of this time, money and worry on her appearance because she's TERRIFIED of looking like a "throwaway" ...those "people of various sorts; all those people we don’t deem worthy of decent health care or education or housing or political representation." She equates looking older with losing control of her money, her mind, but most of all her white, middle class status. ..and that lost scares the hell out of her. |
Tonya
AALBC .com Platinum Poster
Username: Tonya
Post Number: 3924
Registered: 07-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, January 09, 2007 - 07:51 am: |
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As for self-hate, no, she does not hate herself, maybe.... She hates and fears what/who we ALL were taught to hate and fear.
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Cynique
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Cynique
Post Number: 6577
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, January 09, 2007 - 01:25 pm: |
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Who/what is that? I think you give these women too much credit. Like everybody else, they want to look good so they can feel good about themselves and they'll feel good about themselves if others appreciate the way they look. |
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