Girl on the Net

When I was in my late twenties I used to write blog posts about bullshit societal expectations of women at that age. How we were expected to be slim, ‘feminine‘, hairless, petite and sweet-smelling (especially in the ‘cunt‘ region). Then, for a brief period in my thirties I was nagged to be one thing above all others (PREGNANT!). Now that I’ve sailed past childbearing age without even a cursory click on a ClearBlue ad or video about IVF, the sales messages have settled into a comfortable, familiar horrorshow of content for the ‘older’ lady. And they seem pretty united in bad news: I’ve got far too much skin everywhere, and my face is falling off.

Note: this piece discusses societal messaging around weight/beauty/looks in general. It is not an endorsement of those views – I hope obviously. 

I have never had a comfortable relationship with my body. That’s par for the course for most of us, right? I don’t know many people who would stand naked in front of a mirror and happily declare that they’re content with what they see. I’ve had fleeting glimpses of happiness, over my life, when I feel at peace with the way that I look, but those moments have been few and far between. Whether it’s partners declaring unkindly that ‘we’ need to lose a bit of weight, or shrieking adverts which offer me gym memberships or shapewear, there’s always something round the corner to remind me that my body isn’t as good as it could be. I’ve probably spent more time exercising my mental energy to make peace with my imperfect body than I have ever spent in a gym.

And sure, I could just go to the gym, but I hate the gym – it’s full of Other People. If someone had targeted me with ads, early in life, that reminded me how fun cycling could be and threw interesting and fun low-traffic ride routes at me, I suspect I’d be in infinitely healthier shape than I am today. But the point of these ads is not actually to help you become a happier and more contented person in the body that you own, the point is to make you spend money. Feel bad about some aspect of yourself, then feel worse, then eventually look in the mirror and see your arse/face/arms/torso as a problem to be solved rather than a home to live in. Next step, you fork out fifty quid on a magic solution that will give you just enough hope that when it inevitably doesn’t work you’ll see it as your own failing, rather than that of the avaricious cunts who sold it to you. Blergh.

Here are some of the things I am offered on Facebook to solve the problem of my current body:

Collagen

As discussed, my face is falling off. As a human who has lived in The World for a number of decades, my skin is doing the thing that all human skin does eventually, and beginning to wrinkle and sag. I have a vague understanding of human skin, so I know that ‘collagen’ is one of the things that keeps it flex and springy. Despite most scientific studies being – at best – ambivalent about whether there are any tangible skin-related benefits to ingesting collagen, Facebook ads are determined to make me chug it down the way I imagine men in their twenties are urged to chug protein shakes.

One of my favourite things about the collagen ads is they nearly always start by telling you exactly what’s wrong with all the OTHER collagen.

• “Most companies offer collagen that’s derived from FISH, the absolute MORONS! Our collagen is bovine, which is the only one you can truly absorb in your puny human body.”
• “Are you taking collagen that hasn’t been HYDROLISED?! You fool! You rube! You ignorant baby! OUR collagen has been hydrolised which means something something better absorbtion – look at this lady! She’s even older than YOU and she looks FINE!”
• “Are you drinking collagen POWDER?! No WONDER you still look so SHIT! You need our collagen which comes in this silky-looking drink. Here’s Alyson Hannigan off of Buffy – remember her? Remember how she did an FHM shoot when you were a teenager and all the boys wanted her? Well boys your age STILL DO, and it’s because she drinks this. Can YOU afford NOT to pay us £60 quid a month for it?”

Shapewear

This kind of ad has been a constant throughout my life, more or less. Bodysuits and tops that you squeeze your torso into, which then magically shape that torso into whatever the ideal is at the time. Body shape and size comes in and out of fashion, after all: when I was young, in the early noughties, big tits were in. Later, in the 2010s, I think small tits and tiny, childlike bodies were more ‘fashionable’ for women. Nowadays, judging by the ads I get served on Facebook, curves are back again. You want shapewear that gives you a ‘snatched’ waist but shovels everything else out the top and the bottom.

Annoyingly, my own natural body shape has never been especially fashionable. But fingers crossed that the 2030s will usher in a new era for those of us who are neither ‘apple’ nor ‘pear’ but more ‘vending machine’.

Bizarre devices that stop you having jowls

The thing which prompted me to write this post was an ad I saw last night for a device that uses infrared light, or some other kind of light, to [blah blah sciencey-sounding bollocks] which plumps up your skin, reducing sag around the jowls. Apparently jowls are the thing that causes most women of my age to look woefully, embarrassingly old, and therefore that’s the key problem with our faces that we need to fix. This device is suspiciously cheap, but other similar ones cost hundreds of pounds, and I’ll be honest – once we’re getting into ‘hundreds of pounds’ territory, if I had that kind of money going spare I’d be more likely to spend it on therapy so I could have someone to moan to about all the ways the internet makes me feel shit.

Alternatively…

Injectables

This is what we’re calling botox and fillers these days. You pay someone to inject stuff in your face, and if it’s botox then that forces the muscles of your face to relax. So instead of constantly screwing up in an expression that can best be described (if you’re me) as ‘angry and anxious’, the lines that have appeared on your forehead over the last few years of anger and anxiety smooth out and give you a more relaxed appearance. Fillers plump up the flesh under the skin so the skin itself is more taut.

I’m gonna be super honest with you all: I got the botox. I look great. Fucking sue me.

It does mean I now have to tell everyone I know, though, including you. Just as I wouldn’t publish a photoshopped picture of my semi-naked body without disclosing the tweaks (don’t wanna contribute to unrealistic beauty standards!), now I want to slap a warning sticker on my own face that reads: THIS IS NOT NATURAL. Every time I hang out with a friend, I initiate a conversation about my brilliantly fresh face and when they go ‘oh yeah, you look great!’ I grab them by the lapels and go ‘THANKS, IT’S BOTOX’ so I can never be accused of deception, even by accident.

It’s me, I’m the problem

I bet some of you have been itching to comment below the line to point out what I already know: Facebook ads are not just targeted based on my demographic, they’re also hyper-tuned to the things that I spend time on. These collagen drinks, injectables, bits of shapewear, etc… they’re all things that I’m being shown because I scrolled past similar stuff before and fucking liked it.

I don’t mean ‘liked’ in the ‘clicked a Facebook like’ sense, nor do I even mean the traditional sense as in ‘enjoyed’. I just demonstrated a morbid fascination with it – staring with a kind of bleak urgency at this video of a sixty-year-old woman looking younger than her years, drinking a honey-coloured substance that promised me similar eternal youth. Ignoring, of course, the fact that this woman had probably spent her life doing all the things I have not: eating well, eschewing smoking, having a ‘skincare routine’ that consists of more than just ‘whatever the cheapest suncream is’. Maybe, too, the help of a plastic surgeon along the way. Ingesting collagen doesn’t really work, after all, but a professional with a scalpel can deal with that ‘excess’ skin in no time.

Besides… I got the fucking botox, didn’t I? I got it, I liked it, I enjoyed (and am still enjoying) looking in the mirror and seeing a less angry, anxious face staring back at me. I will probably do it again. It feels similar, to me, to the way that tattoos bring me joy in my own body. A needle here or there, a tweak, and suddenly this thing which I’d previously seen as a problem becomes something I have taken control of. I have modified, adjusted, adorned, adapted, and now when I see it in the mirror, I see something that – though still imperfect – is unarguably mine.

So we should all just give up?!

I’m not telling all of you to get botox, or buy shapewear, or do the things that the adverts tell you will make you feel better in yourself. That would be a hell of a depressing journey to have come on, in the last fourteen years of sex blogging. What I’m saying, though, is that I am personally trying to give less of a fuck about covering all the bases these days.

Back in the day, I hated my body for what it was and also hated myself for not being able to love it. Despised the fact that my shape wasn’t right or it had hair in the wrong places, then took that anger out on myself for not being able to slough off the messaging that my rational brain knew to be bullshit. Existing constantly in a state of failure: I had failed to be beautiful, and failed to love myself despite not being beautiful. Failed to properly practice the self-love that I preach to others.

• Instead of educating men I slept with about PCOS and how common body hair actually is, I got electrolysis and it was life-changing.
• Instead of coming to terms with the fact that my body would always be squishy and covered in stretchmarks, I waited till I’d done a whole bunch of cycle training and tightened things up before I ever took photos of myself in my pants.
• Instead of embracing the wrinkles and lines that are the natural byproduct of a life hedonistically lived, I got botox to smooth away the sadder ones.

None of these things hit the actual goal, which is to be comfortable and happy in my own skin, ‘excess’ or not. But I have spent so long being consumed by this vicious cycle: “I hate X, ah but I should EMBRACE X, ah but I don’t, and therefore I’ve failed, and so now I hate X and also the very essence of my own self for being weak enough to continue hating X even though I know I’m not supposed to.” that perhaps the time has come for a change in perspective.

These days I am trying very hard not to hate myself for wanting to change my body. I want to extend a level of kindness to the woman who lives inside it that was absent ten years ago. Yeah, I probably shouldn’t fall for the ads. I shouldn’t be so willing to accept my body as ‘bad’ that I just roll over and get zapped/ripped/injected to try and make myself look ‘better’. But equally I shouldn’t expect miracles of my tattered self worth and confidence after decades of hearing the relentless news that I’m ugly: this propaganda is powerful, after all, and I am not uniquely immune to it.

All my life I have been taught to despise myself for various things. I’m too fat, too saggy, too tall, too wrinkled, too stretchmarked, too hairy, whatever. I look back at photos from ten or twenty years ago and want to weep for the girl who was so convinced she was unattractive back then. Because oh my god, I wish she could see me NOW! I look AWFUL – my fucking FACE is falling off!

Joke. Obviously. One of the valuable messages that I genuinely have managed to internalise as I get older is the cast-iron truth that ageing is a precious gift. The more life you live, the more you realise how lucky you are to get to keep living it. You mourn the people who die far too soon, who never have the luxury of whining about their wrinkles because they didn’t get the opportunity to make any. As one of my sex blogging heroes Joan Price says: ageing is good. It means you’re still here.

So eh, I look fine. If you catch me on a good day, with a fair wind behind me, I’ll tell you I look broadly OK. The body and face that I’ve lived in for over forty years has never been one that anyone would consider ‘conventionally attractive’, but it’s fine. It gets me around well enough, and I’m extremely lucky that it’s never been significantly ill or broken. It does the jobs I need it to do, and I’ve modified it in ways that have brought me joy.

But the Facebook ads are still showing me collagen and shapewear. They do that not just because I’m a woman in my forties, but because I have a tendency to linger on those ads far longer than I dwell on all the others. No matter how desperately I want to be comfortable in my own skin, my behaviour still belies a deep and powerful yearning to have a better body.

Maybe it’s that yearning I need to come to terms with. Acknowledge it, accept it, forgive myself. Above all recognise that even though I’ll probably always have a lingering discomfort with my body, I can at least try not to be cruel to the woman inside it.