The 2011 awards season is a rash of celebrity interviews, penetrating questions and actor-endorsed guides to looking younger. Surgical procedures and cosmetic enhancements have become more commonplace on and off the red carpet. How does this affect the way we see ourselves? Do our choices to disguise our ageing bodies affect other people? Lie back on the couch and listen closely to what NM’s News Therapist makes of it all.
A couple of months ago I was watching Truly, Madly, Deeply with my daughter. We both love Alan Rickman and we both like to cry. The movie was as tender and weepy as I remember, but I was struck dumb by how extraordinarily yellow peoples’ teeth looked to me. I couldn’t believe how much my own vision had changed. What really hit home about this was that I felt as if I had lost part of my choice about how I see the world. I couldn’t go back to my old way of seeing teeth. I don’t have to whiten my own teeth, but I can’t choose not to see them as yellowed ever again.
From my early teens until my late 20s I never shaved. Anything. Looking back I think that this was in part possible because I was not alone. I had my friend Karen, and we were pretty proud of our hairy legs. There were plenty of other women who didn’t shave, and a hairy armpit was not a national decency emergency. It’s hard to make this kind of hairy stand alone. There is so much ridicule and outright discrimination based on appearance, that most of us need visible buddies if we are to resist aesthetic conformity. Eventually both of us, like many other women in this age of hairlessness, took up the razor and the wax pot, tired of carrying the flag on our own.
If you think hair arrangement is a simple choice, I challenge you to a reading or a re-reading of The Joy of Sex. It’s been so long since such an abundance of natural pubic hair has been on display, that it looks more like The Jungle Book than a sex manual. Again, of course I have a choice here about surrendering to topiary, but I’m quickly losing the battle over the choice of what I see.
zoekrupka.com 
Leave a Reply