“It seems that whatever goes into my mouth makes me fat, just as whatever comes out of it embarrasses me.”
GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
“She had on a red bikini bottom, I remember, and no top, and she stood off to one side, watching us. She had these deep lines under her eyes, not ugly I thought, but striking and sad. She refused to speak to anyone all day.”
A FRIEND DESCRIBING THE LATE CHRISTINA ONASSIS AT NINE
I never questioned the wrongness of my body image until I was in my thirties and saw myself on television. There was this thin, pretty, blondish woman of medium height who spoke in a boring monotone and, through lack of animation, seemed calm, even blasé in a New York way. This was a shock. What I felt like inside was a plump brunette from Toledo, too tall and much too pudding-faced, with looks that might be pretty-on-a-good-day but were mostly very ordinary, and a voice that felt constantly on the verge of revealing some unacceptable emotion. I was amazed: Where had this woman on television come from? She was so different from the way I felt that I almost resented her—though she did give me some valuable insights into what other people were responding to.
It’s taken me the last twenty years to realize that I might better have asked: Where did that woman in my mind come from? For each of us, the answer to that question is different, but it’s astonishing how universal the experience of such distortions is—and how hard it is to bring image and reality closer together, especially for women. The first step is to realize that our body image isn’t reality—in fact, that it often departs from anything that might be considered objective reality.
When fifty women staff members at a London hospital were asked to estimate the width of a box by duplicating it on a bar with movable margins, for instance, they were right on target. But when they were asked to estimate the width of their own bodies at bust, waist, and hip level, they overestimated by about 25 percent. Even those who were at their ideal weight or under by medical standards felt they needed to lose. When these results were compared with a parallel study of women who were bulimics—who binge on food and then purge by vomiting—the “abnormal” women were no more likely to overestimate their body size than were the “normal” ones.30 In this and many ways, women with body-image or eating disorders are not a special category, just more extreme in their response to a culture that emphasizes thinness and impossible standards of appearance for women instead of individuality and health.*
In Bodylove, a book whose title reflects the goal of its author, Rita Freedman, a professor of psychology and women’s studies, there is a roundup of studies that show just how negative—and remote from reality—females’ body images often are. For instance: a majority of ten-year-olds rated themselves as the single least attractive girl in their school class; half of a group of teenage girls said they frequently felt ugly; fewer than half of college-age women felt good about their appearance; a majority of adult women considered themselves heavier than they really were, as well as heavier than the ideal they thought men preferred; and women considered “pretty” by others were just as likely to be dissatisfied with their looks as were women considered “plain.” As Dr. Freedman summarized, “There’s hardly any connection between a woman’s actual physical attractiveness (as rated by others) and her satisfaction with body image … and feelings of self-worth. … There is a strong relationship, however, between body image and self-esteem.”31
Men also tend to have an inaccurate body image—but in the opposite direction. Every study I found showed that males in general are more satisfied with their overall looks than women are with theirs (for instance, 75 percent of the men in the college study cited above expressed such satisfaction, versus only 45 percent of the women), and that they consider themselves closer to the ideal than their vital statistics reflect. Men also feel they weigh less or are closer to normal than they actually are, and they generally rate themselves as being at least as attractive as others, male and female, rate them. In The Beauty Myth, for instance, Naomi Wolf reports that only one man in ten is “strongly dissatisfied” with his body as compared to one in three women; and also that about a third of men are overweight by medical standards, yet 95 percent of people enrolled in weight-loss programs are women. As Wolf summarizes: “Studies show that while women unrealistically distort their bodies negatively, men distort theirs positively.”32 It’s also a fact that punishes men, too, by perpetuating overweight and contributing to men’s lower life expectancy.
Gender differences in this respect are so pronounced, Wolf concludes by comparing studies, that many able-bodied women have a more negative body image (and thus lower self-esteem) than do many disabled people—the results would have been more striking if able-bodied women were compared only to disabled men. In a male-superior culture, it seems that men are almost always okay no matter how they look, while women are rarely okay no matter how they look, and thus feel constantly in need of “fixing.” This sense that women’s bodies are less valuable is reinforced by everything from getting paid lower wages than men (and realizing that our work raising families is unpaid and invisible) to, as Wolf writes, a “Western legacy of religion based on men resembling God” and women having sinful or unclean bodies.33
As Linda Sanford and Mary Ellen Donovan conclude in Women and Self-Esteem, a practical and helpful book that resulted from their years spent leading self-esteem-enhancement seminars: “It is difficult to dislike your body or a specific part of your body and still like yourself.”34 Conversely, if you do like yourself, you are likely to feel good about your physical appearance, and often to cause others to do so as well. The French have a term for this phenomenon: jolie-laide, beautiful-ugly, as in a woman who is not conventionally beautiful but who becomes beautiful by the way she presents herself.
Aging only adds more proof that the body in our minds is often quite different from the one we’re walking around in. For both men and women, body image remains fairly constant, in spite of the drastic changes that occur as we grow older,35 just as so-called core or global self-esteem tends to remain constant. Studies show that age plays little role in whether or not women report satisfaction with their bodies. For example, women under twenty-four are more likely to want to change parts of their bodies than older women are.36 As The Lancet, a British medical journal, reported: “We may indeed have opinions of our capacity at cricket, and at maths, and at doing the cha-cha, but we also have a global opinion of our general worth.”37 And it’s this global or core opinion that correlates with body image.
Perhaps most surprising, this positive image can persist in spite of many external biases that favor those judged to be more attractive. One’s body image can be positive enough, and rooted deeply enough in childhood, to remain positive even in the face of society’s quite different evaluation. For instance, physically appealing children tend to be given more attention by teachers, nice-looking people are often perceived as intrinsically “good,” fat people are stereotyped as lazy, inefficient, or self-indulgent,38 and dark skin or kinky hair may be so looked down upon in a racist culture that those words become epithets. Nonetheless, even a recent issue of Vogue reported: “When researchers surveyed several hundred women of all ages, they found no connection between fatness, thinness, and psychological well-being, even in overweight young women whom we might expect to be the most vulnerable.”39
This is not to say that either our body image or our core sense of self-worth to which it is linked remains rocklike and constant.
Our physical self is a living part of each of us. Illness, aging, injury, or anything that shakes some pillar of our identity can unsettle it for a time. Even such subtle things as someone telling us we “look rested” or “look tired” can shift our body image for that moment. But the big difference is that, if we have a basically positive feeling about our bodies and ourselves, we don’t “catastrophize”; that is, we don’t extrapolate from a negative event or comment, from the effects of illness or aging, to a devastating feeling of despair about the whole self. With a basically poor image, on the other hand, each blow becomes proof that our bodies (hence ourselves) are defective or worthless, each compliment is interpreted as a friend’s kindness or insincerity, and each day becomes a challenge to conceal our real selves (that is, what we think we look like) behind a facade. If they saw us as we “really” are, we believe, others would reject us.
So if we didn’t internalize a positive body image in childhood, how can we begin to acquire it now? To start with the “don’ts” first: dieting and cosmetic surgery don’t seem to work very well, at least not without serious inner work at the same time. It isn’t that there is anything intrinsically wrong with them—each may be dangerous or helpful, depending on its content and our motive—but ultimately, they don’t reach the image in our mind’s eye. At best, they become to body image what money and possessions are to self-esteem: they may help us gain approval from others, but they rarely contribute to a feeling of being valuable as we are. At worst, they become addictive in the same way that money and possessions can be addictive when combined with low self-esteem. There seems to be a Law of Intentionality: changes undertaken to please others do that but no more; changes undertaken to please ourselves do that and no less.
If this sounds too contrary to the popular wisdom about the self-image improvements that come with diets and cosmetic surgery, consider that, if dieting could slenderize the image of the body that lives in the mind, 95 percent of adult women wouldn’t be overestimating their body size, and 45 percent of underweight women wouldn’t consider themselves overweight.40 And if cosmetic surgeons could operate on self-esteem, it wouldn’t happen so often that the result of such surgery doesn’t even confer enough confidence to allow people to tell the truth about having had it. In fact, many people have done such drastic things as dieting away fifty pounds, surgically altering a racial characteristic, acquiring silicone breasts or transplanted hair, and still found themselves with exactly the same self-esteem problem. On the other hand, others have done such seemingly minor things as talking to people who share the same life experiences, exercising every morning, joining a big-and-beautiful group for large-size women, or honoring their own racial and ethnic heritage with people who share it—and learned to feel much more positive about themselves, inside and out.
The only practical, permanent solution to poor body image seems to be turning inward to ask: Where did it come from? What subtle or blatant events gave birth to it? What peer pressure nurtured it? What popular images make our real selves seem different or wrong?
It was only when I looked for the why of that big, plump, vulnerable girl in my own head—who had made me do everything from becoming stoop-shouldered in an effort to be shorter to hiding behind any available screen of hair and huge glasses—that she began to change at all, and she’s not completely there yet. I had left her for too many years sealed up and alone, a chubby girl growing up in an isolated family whose food addictions and body image she absorbed.
I think of my father, who weighed over 300 pounds most of his life, got in the car even to mail a letter, and organized his days around food. He knew every restaurant with an unlimited buffet on his peripatetic sales route from the Midwest to the West Coast, and when we saw each other, our emotional connections always took place over double-thick malteds or apple pie à la mode. I loved him for his sense of adventure, for looking after me when I was very little and my mother could not, and for so much more; yet I was often ashamed of his huge size, his inability to fit into movie seats, his suits and shirts that often bore clear traces of the last meal, and his habit of falling asleep in any company after the soporific of food. At the time and for years after his death, I thought I was separate from him—but of course, I was not. I am his daughter. Like a recovering alcoholic, I’m a foodaholic who can’t keep food in the house. I’m still trying to stay healthy, one day at a time. As Gabriel García Márquez says through one of his characters in Love in the Time of Cholera: “I am not rich. I am a poor man with money, which is not the same thing.” Well, I am not a thin woman, I’m a fat woman who’s not fat at the moment.41
I also think of my mother, whose problem was her sad heart and undervalued head, not the rest of her body, yet her soft maternal hips and breasts seemed connected in my child’s mind to her fate of sadness. I realize that I’ve continued to worry about and feel protective of women who are big-breasted and vulnerable, at the same time that I’ve longed for a more slender, boyish body to distance me from my mother’s fate. But when I did begin to lose some plumpness after childhood, it was because I shot up to my full height of five feet seven by the time I was ten or eleven, which made me tower over my girlfriends and internalize a sense of being huge and galumphing. Still, this new height did reward me by enabling me to look older, and thus make money dancing at local clubs, a small-time version of the show-business career that seemed the only way out of our neighborhood. In retrospect, however, this was also a case of growing up too soon that probably added to my feelings of loss as my mother’s caretaker. By fifteen, I was pretending to be eighteen in order to enter a local talent/beauty contest and feeling inordinately depressed when I failed to win a chance to compete in Florida for a title I recall as “Miss Capehart TV.” When I belatedly began ballet lessons to add to the tap dancing I’d been learning, my ballet teacher also dimmed my dreams of dancing my way out of Toledo by saying I was too tall en pointe for most male partners. Since I never questioned the need to be shorter than dates and an eventual husband, a lifetime of creative slumping stretched before me.
Later, when college had got me out of Toledo, I gave up dancing—my only exercise. All other forms seemed beyond me. I thought tennis was for rich kids, field hockey was for prep-school girls, and besides, I’d never learned a sport. In high school, the only desirable sport for girls was being a drum majorette or cheerleader, both of which I envied but didn’t attempt. Each time I tried one in college, the instructors—perhaps unaccustomed to having to start from scratch—suggested I try something else. Furthermore, I was downright shocked the first time I heard someone say “I’m going for a walk” when she didn’t have to. In my neighborhood in those prefitness times, having a car signaled prosperity and walking meant poverty. College only confirmed my habit of living in my head: I just studied, ate, and gained my part of what was known as “the freshman ton.” If there had been a sport called sitting-and-reading, I would have been an all-time champion.
By the time I was out of college, back from a two-year fellowship in India, and trying to make a living as a freelance writer in New York, there were media images that gave me other ways to distance myself from my background and my family. I remember crying over Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s because I identified with the poor and prematurely responsible childhood she had escaped by walking down a dirt road a little farther every day—until finally, she just kept going. I laced my dark hair with obvious blond streaks, just as she had done. The kerchiefs she wore turned out to be perfect for hiding my fat cheeks. I also copied her huge sunglasses in order to hide the fleshiness left over from a chubby childhood that overhung my eyelids and displaced my contact lenses so often that I gave up wearing them. Short skirts like hers were also satisfyingly unladylike and showed the one part of me still fit from dancing: legs. I realized that, if I patched myself together with just the right combination of flaunting and hiding, I could be counted as pretty, even though I was far from that in my mind. A friend from that era described me as a mousy girl with harlequin glasses and a ponytail who had turned herself into a mysterious Holly Golightly overnight.
Thus, I inched along that narrow you-can’t-win continuum of female images, escaping from 1950s “collegiate” into 1960s “rebellious” without once thinking who I was.
Fortunately, feminist ideas began to explode at the end of the 1960s and helped us all to realize that we shared an overarching problem: being judged on how we looked instead of what was in our heads and hearts. Thanks to this unifying and liberating revelation, we began to rebel against the more obvious forms of imprisonment, like feeling we couldn’t go to the grocery without lipstick, or giving more thought to what we wore than what we read. I abandoned clothes anxiety with relief and evolved a simple, comfortable, jeans-sweater-and-boots uniform that I wore for one entire decade. Somehow, it took me that long to burn the cheap dressing-up of Toledo plus the expensive dressing-down of the Ivy League out of my brain.
Only in the last decade have I been able to achieve what I really enjoy; what Marge Piercy described so well in her futurist novel, Woman on the Edge of Time: soft, comfortable, semiandrogynous clothes for everyday, and a pool of fanciful clothes shared with friends so we can all decorate ourselves for an occasional party or dancing at night. Perhaps the one attitude that has persisted from Toledo days is my fear of looking ladylike: then, because the wives of the factory owners looked that way (and unfortunately, I thought of them as the enemy); now, because those fussy clothes seem like a prison. I noticed several studies remarking on the frequency with which women’s dreams involve feeling imprisoned by their clothes—and I believe it. I’d like to print cards for little girls in button-in-the-back frilly dresses (as well as for their grown-up sisters suffering in their own versions of those dresses): Help! I am a prisoner in my clothes.
But though I was rescued by feminism, it had one result for which I was ill prepared: finding myself referred to as “the pretty one”—jeans and all. Rationally, I knew it was a response of surprise, based on what the media thought feminists looked like (if a woman could get a man, why would she need equal pay?), and this was especially clear to me because I was judged much prettier after I was identified as a feminist than I ever had been before. Identifying women by appearance again, flattering some and insulting others, was a way of reducing feminism to form without content—and dividing us. Since I didn’t feel prettier (or even pretty), I didn’t trust the press’s image of me, and I just kept hiding out in my uniform of jeans, hair, and sunglasses, hoping that other women wouldn’t be alienated by what the media said.
Because the internal image was so much realer than reality, it never occurred to me to question the childhood roots of that self-image—to ask myself why I hid my face, stood round-shouldered, always felt enormous, and when someone complimented me, gave them reasons why they were wrong—instead of just saying thank you.
It was in that stage that I saw my real physical self on television. (This is a self-revelation now available to anyone with a video camera, and one that I highly recommend; somehow, it’s much more powerful than looking in a mirror, perhaps because our media craziness makes us think what we see on a screen is almost more real than reality.) Once I got past the shock of wondering who that was, I had to admit there was something called body image. Seeing myself looking so calm on the screen, and knowing that I had been petrified inside—paradoxically, it takes a little confidence to reveal one’s lack of confidence—also gave me more sympathy for other people. I began to do less envying, judging, or worrying about women based on their appearance, since it now dawned on me that one can never know how others see themselves.
But once I realized that image was different from reality, I also began to wonder how my own mother had seen herself. One of my earliest memories was of brushing her hair or dabbing powder on her pale cheeks while she sat docile as a child, depending on me to “fix her up” for a rare outing. By the time I knew her, she was a woman who paid almost no attention to her physical self. Before those long years of depression, how had she seen herself when she was a young girl?
As we sat in her basement apartment in my sister’s house—for my mother still could not live alone—she described how raw-boned and gawky she’d felt next to her littler, rounder, “prettier” sister, and how angry she had been at her mother for giving them both a message that women’s bodies were shameful. She had eloped with my father because he made her laugh, but also because she was grateful to be chosen. It was the first time in our lives we’d ever talked about anything as basic as our feelings about our bodies, and my mother, then in her seventies, surprised me by saying she wanted to do something about what she called “my dewlaps,” loose facial skin that was the result of a hard life that included several years in mental hospitals, and little self-care. For years, I’d noticed that she told new acquaintances she was much older than she really was, and I suddenly understood why: she’d been trying to match inner and outer reality. Now, there was a spark of hope that made her want to be that inner person. In spite of my skepticism (then a bias) about plastic surgery, I encouraged her and set about making the necessary arrangements; it was so clearly a sign of hope that she wanted it. But when we talked again, all her old anxieties and depression had returned. Nothing I said could convince her that her body was worth any attention at all. Our talk had come too late.
I look at the photograph she gave me that day, and when I see the tall, spare, “gawky” young woman that my mother was in her early twenties, I realize with irony that she was exactly the free, androgynous image I would later try to become. When I was in my mother’s body, had I absorbed this authentic self emanating from her bones? Are there generations of daughters, each one rebelling against the false image forced on the generation before, never knowing that we would have loved and admired our mothers all the more if they had been able to blossom as their true selves?
Over the years since my mother’s death, I’ve been trying to enjoy and appreciate my own authentic body, and to learn what it has to teach. “The body never forgets” is the motto of therapists who help people use somatic memories as bridges to the past, and I’ve come to believe that the body image never forgets either. I know a woman who saw herself with such shameful and distorted breasts that she wanted to have breast surgery. She remembered only a week before her scheduled operation that her grandmother had made her wear painful bindings as a developing girl, and that she had assumed this was necessary to keep her safe from boys at school. Suddenly, she saw that surgery was not the healing she needed. But I wonder: How many people try to change the part of the body that is only trying to help them remember?
As for myself, I’m still learning. I only recently understood, for instance, why nausea has always felt like the end of the world to me; so much so that I once endangered my health by resisting the need to throw up with food poisoning. By focusing on one current feeling of nausea, I rediscovered the day that I realized I was solely responsible for my mother. My father, long separated from her, had driven me home from Girl Scout camp, and after he had dropped me off, I was alone with my very depressed mother. As I felt the fear of understanding there was no one to turn to, I also felt in my stomach the malted and hamburger my father had bought me. They seemed to remain in the pit of my stomach for days.
But once I had followed this thread to the past, its fearfulness began to dim. The amazing thing is this: The moment we find the true reason for some feeling that has an irrationally powerful hold over us, whether it has to do with body image or anything else, the spell is broken. It may take a long time, but the negative grooves it has left in our minds can be filled in with conscious and positive affirmations. With our ideas about our bodies, as with all things human, saying yes works better than saying no. So I’ve been trying to recall positive parts of my family legacy and then expand on them.
While working on this book, for instance, I’ve been thinking how grateful I am to my parents for respecting my body as a child and never making me think it deserved spanking, hitting, or abuse of any kind. This has helped me not only to be rebellious on my own behalf, but to believe in and to fight against abuse experienced by others—for I have no personal stake in denying its reality. I’ve also tried to focus on parts of my body that I like, and to imagine expanding that empowering feeling to the rest of me. I recently realized that the one part of my body of which I am unequivocally proud is the hands I inherited from my father. They are long, tapering, graceful hands, something about him of which I was never ashamed. Just imagining how this self-esteem might feel if expanded to my whole body gives me a glimpse of how energizing true body-pride could be. I think of all the women I know who take pleasure in their bodies but are made to feel guilty about it, as if they were giving in to a culture that has used women’s bodies for fetishes and consumerism. I think of other women who give up body-pride and even jeopardize their health by ignoring their physical selves, retreating into their minds, and trying to defeat the culture by treating flesh and skin as unfortunate necessity. What wonders have they and all of us been missing? What might we become if we were body-proud from the beginning?
The whole answer remains for future generations to discover, but I’ve found my own small beginning. Sometimes when my hand rests on a surface, I see the middle finger tap involuntarily, exactly as my father’s used to do. For that one second, I feel his visceral presence. I hope he knows that I’m no longer ashamed—of either of us.
I don’t mean to suggest that changing our bodies can never make us feel better about ourselves; only that, to make sure it will, we do need to know our own motivation. Do we want to make the change out of feelings of hope or fear? a longing for self-expression or a need for other people’s approval? pleasure or pressure? Keeping these fundamental questions in mind can help us thread our way through the morass of media images and body-changing techniques to find only what is healthy and empowering—and reject the rest. Plastic surgeon Thomas Rees, a pioneer in the field of what is known as aesthetic surgery, is one of the few who seem to use such questions as criteria in selecting patients for whom the surgery will be helpful. In an article addressed to his colleagues, he warns against the teenager whose nose is being changed to suit the wishes of his or her parents; the woman who seeks breast enlargement because her husband wants other men to envy him when they’re sitting around the swimming pool; the perfectionist who can never be pleased; the patient who has just gone through the death of a loved one, a job loss, a divorce or other major transition, and so may be looking to surgery for an unrealistic rescue; and even the patient who betrays a self-esteem problem by being over-flattering to the surgeon but rude to the receptionist.
“Despite all that has been published about self-image,” he warns, “our knowledge of it is exceedingly superficial. It is often astonishing to the young surgeon to find out just how people visualize themselves, and how far removed this self-visualization can be from the interviewer’s or surgeon’s evaluation.”42
It’s a sign that self-image is negative and self-esteem is low when cosmetic surgery becomes just one more occasion for shame and thus for lying. I think of socialite Sunny von Bülow, who had a face-lift, apparently because her husband was having affairs with younger women. She swore her personal maid to secrecy with such desperate vehemence that even after she lay in a permanent coma and her husband was on trial for attempting to murder her, the faithful maid went on trying to conceal “my lady’s” face-lift. Conversely, the very act of openly seeking such surgery can be a sign of self-esteem. I think of the teenage boy I read about whose face was ravaged by smallpox and acne, and whose fundamentalist Christian parents would not let him erase this evidence of “God’s punishment.” He held himself blameless enough to seek permission for surgery from a judge, but he was denied; yet for him cosmetic surgery could have been a great blessing.
I think, too, about the contrast among three women I know, two of whom had breast-reduction operations in their twenties to change the physical discomfort of backaches and street harassment and to feel more of the comfort and freedom they believed they deserved. The third had breast implants in her fifties, still trying to make up for being a flat-chested adolescent whose father teased her by calling her “my son,” while marrying a succession of ever-younger and more bosomy wives. For all three, the results of the surgery were implicit in the motive: the first two started out feeling positively about themselves and became more so; the third started out negative and felt even worse afterward. When last seen, she was worried about whether her lover “knew.”
Real-life examples like these—not unrealistic, intellectual positions that are totally against or totally for cosmetic surgery or other body changes—can lead us to the right questions. For the answer, we can turn inward and listen to an always honest inner voice.
Among women, especially on the culturally loaded subject of our bodies, there is always a danger of diminishing each other’s self-authority. Therefore, the point is not to give each other answers, but to share questions and experiences. So let me be clear: I’m still trying to thread a path between outside images and inner self, and this is just a progress report. For instance: I’m still suspicious of the degree to which I make choices that society rewards. (When I lived for two years in India, I loved wearing saris and kohl on my eyes; I know that, wherever I am, I absorb the going aesthetic.) I’m still angry when people ask me accusingly: Why are you thin? Would they ask a recovering alcoholic why she isn’t drinking? Nonetheless, I answer because I know this is a serious question for women: I’m thin mostly because of my family history, but also because I listened to my body and discovered the weight at which I feel best (which, interestingly, turned out to be the same weight prescribed by a medical fat-to-muscle test), and more and more, because I’m enjoying the feeling of being thin-and-strong as opposed to being only thin—a benefit of my belated discovery of exercise and weight-training. I’m still getting over my bias against any body change that isn’t “necessary,” however, and it took me twenty years to walk two blocks for a simple office procedure to remove some of the fat over my eyes so that now I can wear sleep-in contact lenses. Seeing the ceiling when I look up at it from my bed in the morning and my feet when I look down in the shower—not to mention having peripheral vision, when you’ve worn glasses since the sixth grade—is a big treat. It’s also meant that I could get rid of those big glasses I’d been hiding behind for so long. Of course, now I get letters asking: Whatever happened to your big glasses?
Finally, I’m still uncomfortable talking about all this stuff and look forward to the day when the bodies of women in public life (and private life) are no more subject to scrutiny than men’s are. I got two calls in one day, one asking if I was pregnant (the press has a fragile grip on age and biology), and the other asking if I’d had a face-lift. So for the record: No, I’m not pregnant or likely to be, unless there’s another star in the East, and no, I haven’t had a face-lift—I’m just now getting used to the face I have and don’t plan on changing it. I’d like to help push the age barrier. This year, however, my favorite press question was: Why do you part your hair in the middle? Now, that’s a secret I’m keeping to myself.
But this is self-description, not prescription. As Naomi Wolf says: “A woman wins by giving herself and other women permission: to eat, to be sexual, to age, to wear a boiler suit or a paste tiara or a Balenciaga gown or a secondhand opera cloak or combat boots, to cover up or go practically naked; to do whatever she chooses in following—or ignoring—her own aesthetic. A woman wins when she feels that what each woman does with her own body is her own business.”43
I’m still not quite the winner that I want all women to be, but it’s amazing how much the body is willing to respond to healthy motives at any age. Recently, a woman I didn’t know came over to compliment me on my muscle definition, the result of my recent conversion to both yoga and weight-training. Muscle definition! It was a compliment that made me more body-proud than all media references to “the pretty one” combined.