I hate the way I look. As I get older, I hate it even more. I’ve never liked mirrors, always hated being at the barber, having to look at myself, but it’s so much worse today. If I could, I’d wear black out glasses in the barbers. Part of the reason is my lifelong sense of self-loathing, not just the way I look but who I am and how life panned out. That’s me, away from the public limelight, barely a household name in my own household. Imagine how I’d be if I was famous and worse still a famous woman? Or any kind of woman at all?
I’m a great believer in looking how you like, wearing what you like, but there is so much pressure to conform, often to some kind of norm. Society demands women look a certain way. You can only be attractive if you are wafer thin, are full of botox, with carefully rounded breasts and you look how the Daily Mail wants you to. It’s not just because of my self-loathing that I don’t expect and certainly don’t want women to look exactly the same.
As a man, I am allowed the lines of age, something that doesn’t apply to women. In this Guardian interview the brilliant and in my opinion beautiful actor Ruth Wilson confronts the expectations of others, but also fears that those lines of age will hand an advantage to her peers in getting acting roles. The New York Times reports that “people (which means mainly women) should get Botox in their 20s to stop wrinkles forming“. They must not appear to be getting older, even if they inevitably are. Men are weather-worn, wrinkly and have attractive lines of age. Women must have botox.
That said, I don’t have an issue if people choose to have botox and all other forms of cosmetic surgery. In general terms, if I don’t like the affects of botox on the human body, then that’s my problem, not theirs. Frankly, it’s none of my business. The problem I always have with it is if people are pressured, subconsciously, to change the way they look because someone decides what attractiveness means. But no one can decide that. Beauty, and this is still true, is in the eye of the beholder.
We are all to blame. Look at Debbie Harry, still lead singer of Blondie, in her 78th year. I’ve heard people saying, “She’s looking her age now!” Well, yes. She’s nearly 78. But Mick Jagger, who is nearly 80, looks amazing for his age. Who knows what kind of work they have had? Mick has an astonishingly lustrous barnet for a man of his age. He’s not even grey. But Debbie? Well, she’s had work done, dies her hair, doesn’t look like she did in the 1970s. Well, hello? Neither do I, regrettably.
Why can’t we just be allowed to look how we want or, if we don’t, why should we be shamed for it?
In the end, you can’t really fight advancing years. You can enjoy a lifestyle that may see you stay old for a while longer, but old father and mother time is going to get you some day. And how you look when you are plonked into your coffin doesn’t matter at all, botox or not.
