7:00 P.M.
ANYWAY, ENOUGH ABOUT EVERYONE AND EVERYTHING ELSE, FOR THE time being. Amidst all these problems and crises and issues and profound thoughts about how the patriarchy basically needs a good night out with the girls, I am still me.
I’m still here, under all these things—I am still managing to be “an actual person,” sometimes for up to twenty minutes a day. Things are still happening in my life, and, when I go upstairs to the toilet, to enjoy some luxurious “me time,” and look at myself in the mirror, I cannot deny a very obvious thing: I am aging. Possibly because of all the crises, issues, and profound thoughts, but more likely because once you get to thirty-five, it feels like the world slams its foot down on the accelerator, and you go through three hundred sixty-five days in what seems like three weeks, screaming like you’re on a roller coaster, and saying, repeatedly, “But it feels like I only took the Christmas decorations down last month—and now I’m putting them up again! WHAT THE FUCK!”
I look in the mirror and assess what “aging” means, visually. We are led to presume that everything to do with aging is negative, but there are so many aspects to it that it seems statistically unlikely you will hate every single one. Personally, I find I am fine with most of it.
Yes, I am losing skin elasticity—but I find it quite amusing, and oddly comforting, to bunch up all the loose skin on my arm, or thigh, and turn it into a little ruched skin pelmet. As a child of the 1980s, brought up on endless pleated bed valances, to my eyes, it looks kind of . . . “fancy.” And besides, whilst you lose skin elasticity, you also lose the amount of fucks you give. Perhaps that’s why the skin is so loose now—from all my fucks leaving. If so, I’m happy enjoying the space they have left. Byeeeee.
Encroaching loss of skin elasticity is all about a state of mind. Yeah, you could look at it like you’re losing something—all your collagen—but you could also look at it like you’re gaining something. It’s all about abundance. For, as I wave goodbye to my thirties, I say hello to an entirely new development—my wattle. As foretold in the prologue of this book, it has started to assemble, on my neck.
I should probably slap some moisturizer on that, I think, on Monday, spotting its wobbly beginnings—and then immediately forget about it.
And by Friday, it’s too late—some final, tremulous outposts of muscle and collagen have, seemingly, collapsed, and I now have, overnight, what looks like a dangly neck bollock garlanding my above-the-collar area. Now I know what it is: It’s a wattle. Such as turkeys have. I have a wattle. This is what Nora Ephron meant when she penned the essay “I Feel Bad About My Neck,” in which she wrote the most famous—and, indeed, only—description of the female neck over forty.
“Sometimes I go out to lunch with my girlfriends, and I look around the table and realize we’re all wearing turtleneck sweaters,” she said. “Sometimes, instead, we’re all wearing scarves—like Katharine Hepburn in On Golden Pond . . . . We all look good for our age. Except for our necks. Oh, the necks. There are chicken necks. There are turkey-gobbler necks. There are elephant necks . . . . There are scrawny necks and fat necks, loose necks, crepey necks, banded necks, wrinkled necks, stringy necks, saggy necks, flabby necks, mottled necks . . . . One of my biggest regrets . . . is that I didn’t spend my youth staring lovingly at my neck.”
Having also not spent my youth looking lovingly at my neck—as far as I recall, I spent most of my youth looking lovingly at the works of Nora Ephron—I now, for the first time, look at my neck. I vaguely remember that, before, it looked like a thigh or a piece of bum. Now—now, it looks entertainingly more prehistoric. Like those delightful ruffs on dinosaurs, which puff up when under threat, before reverting back to a deflated dino-flesh cravat, suspended from their jaw.
I have to admit—I like it. I like to move my jaw from side to side, and watch it ripple—like the sail on a galleon, catching the breeze. I like to pinch it together and make a little neck-buttock. Most of all, I like to wobble it with my index finger—like an executive stress toy I will always have with me. I find it soothes me. I’ve always wanted to have a long, gray beard that I could stroke, whilst pondering things—to give me the air of a distinguished professor. However hard my chin has tried—and it really has, to give it its due—to grow face fur like Brian Blessed, it’s always fallen short. Now, I have a beard made of skin. I am proud of it.
Away from the neck and on to the hair, and I find I also super don’t mind my hair going gray—which is just as well, as my original gray streak on top has now been joined by a second one, over my left ear. I am, it seems, very slowly turning into a badger—perhaps the actual Badger from Wind in the Willows: authoritative; a bit grumpy when dealing with foolish, young toads; but always willing, in the end, to help them out. Again, I like this vibe.
Personally, I can’t wait until I have so much gray that I can bleach my entire head white, like a swooshy glacier. I’d like to pretend that this is because I am so feminist that I will be able to loftily dispense with dyeing my hair, unlike my weaker and less feminist contemporaries—but it’s actually because white hair will really suit my skin tone, and make my eyes pop. When it comes to the politics of graying and hair dye, this is, really, the only criteria by which to make a judgment. If feminism is to mean anything, it is, surely, for women to have the hair that looks most awesome? If you look best dyeing your hair jet black until you’re ninety, you keep dyeing your hair jet black until you’re ninety. If you’re lucky enough to have the genes that give you the gift of great hair for free, enjoy the cash savings—but don’t pretend you’re Malala for doing it. (Who knows what Malala will do with her hair when she’s in her forties? I’d like to think the least we could do for her, given what she’s done, is let her keep her options open re: Clairol Nice’n Easy.)
And still the benefits of aging go on—for I’m even enjoying my dwindling party stamina. I entered my thirties still able to rave all night long, but in my middle age, I find myself not only unable to do that but also newly horrified by the mere thought of it. Ever since I got so drunk I twerked on my brother Eddie on Christmas Eve, and, therefore, spent Christmas Day in some manner of Shame Booth, going to bed at 9 p.m. and reading a book has seemed like some blessed reward for giving up wine. No one ever woke up regretful that they’d had ten hours sleep and read six chapters of The Language of Trees.
But there are ways in which I am aging that I (a) didn’t expect and (b) am not enjoying. Take, for instance, the Day of the Great Wardrobe Betrayal.
I have spoken to many middle-aged women about this, and it appears to be a common, although undocumented, phenomenon. One spends one’s twenties and thirties doing what we are societally encouraged to do: building up a perfect capsule wardrobe of items that can be relied on, no matter what the occasion. Eschewing the madder fashions of our youth, we invest in a couple of nice cashmere things, a posh coat, three nice frocks, a selection of the most cheering trousers, some trustworthy blouses, jolly T-shirts that make your tits look great whilst not overly troubling your belly, and the only holiday shorts in the world that don’t make you want to throw yourself out of the window. At the end of this process, you are covered for everything. Your wardrobe stands as a moving testament to learning what colors, shapes, and cuts suit you. You feel as if you can, finally, tick “Attain perfect capsule wardrobe” off The List. You’ve done it. You’ve nailed the fucker. Well done you.
And then, at some point between thirty-eight to forty-five, overnight, and for no reason anyone has been able to ascertain, all your clothes turn evil. Inescapably, there always comes a day in a middle-aged woman’s life when she opens her wardrobe and realizes that all of her clothes have decided, suddenly, overnight, THAT THEY HATE HER.
My Day of Wardrobe Evil came when I was forty-one. I woke, as my normal self, got up, took off my nightie, and opened the wardrobe door—wondering which fabulous, friendly outfit I was going to wear that day.
Forty-five minutes later, I was on the verge of panic. Most of my clothes were on the floor. Somehow, whilst I slept just three feet away from them, all my clothes had gone to shit. Every single thing. Everything I’d tried on was too tight, too short, too floral, too weird, too slutty, not slutty enough, or just, somehow, conspired to make me look like Su Pollard—and not like how hot, young hipsters look like Six from Blossom—and not how hot young hipsters look like Six from Blossom, but in a bad way. My clothes, clearly, hated me. When I put them on, they hung, sulkily, off my tits, with a palpable “I didn’t ask to be here” expression.
Of course, as a woman, when you’ve been round the block a few times, you’re used to days where many of your outfits seem momentarily “on a break” from your relationship. You’ve woken up a bit water-retention-y, perhaps, and learned to deal with half your clothes becoming temporarily unwearable. You know, in a few days—maybe just after a particularly pivotal poo—you’ll be back to rocking that badass fleece with a motif of a wolf howling at the moon and those burgundy leggings like a pro.
This was different. Over the next month, and during every single varied phase of my uterine “specialness,” my clothes remained sullen. The condition appeared to be terminal—I had Clothes Disease. Everything was infected with crappiness. My wardrobe was now a Bad Narnia.
Thinking about it now, I understand most of the reasons behind this terrible development. Most women, when they enter middle age, experience at least two of the following three “situations”: (1) They develop an inability to/intolerance for wearing anything but the most comfortable shoes and sneakers; (2) they put on a reassuring stone in weight—nature’s way of making sure the female tribal elders will survive a bad winter, and be able to continue leading the group, as is to the benefit of humanity; and (3) they get the Middle-Age Lop, wherein thinning hair and general impatience means you get a mid-length bob, which you ask for by saying, “Something like Alexa Chung, but old.”
Whilst I have always favored the kind of clothing that is what I would call “Big-Bum Proof”—so the delivery of, essentially, four new buttocks was neither here nor there—the addition of short hair and limited “shoeage” seemed finally to torpedo my strong yet limited wardrobe. Nothing worked anymore.
For two weeks, I walked around in the one outfit that had stayed loyal to me—a baggy pair of jeans and an outsized checked shirt. Man, I wore those fucking things to death—waiting for my other clothes to fall back in love with me. Every poo I did, I did hopefully—like some kind of Sam Beckett in Quantum Leap, hoping this poo would be the poo that took me home to Awesome Outfitsville. But it never happened. Everything in my wardrobe remained too sassy, not sassy enough, or just indefinably tragic.
I found myself engaging in a very common middle-aged pastime—looking through old photos and not noticing old friends I missed, but old clothes I missed, instead.
“God—I remember that blue jumper. It was brilliant! Where did it go? Shit—that dress! That dress went with everything! If only I hadn’t spilled turmeric down the front, it would still be with me now—and maybe everything would be different.”
Sadly, and finally, I surrendered to my fate: I sent everything to the charity shop and started again from scratch. Here is what I have learned so far about dressing in middle age:
And this is what I have learned so far about middle-aged dressing. A few useful work-arounds, but also a deeper knowledge: “Get Capsule Wardrobe” is a recurring task throughout your life. It is never actually completed. Truly, The To-Do List never ends.
AND WHILST BATTLING with some manner of Fashion Black Death—looking on the Boden website, and thinking, Although everything in my life until now told me it wasn’t, maybe a hotchpotch skirt is now the answer to my problems?—a second aging problem manifested: I was fine with all the wrinkles, wattles, and gray, but what I couldn’t reconcile myself to was looking permanently sad and defeated.
Years of scowling at a laptop, and watching the news whilst shouting, “YOU ASSHATS!” seemed to have left me looking as if I was about to lie facedown on the ground and start crying. I had been absolutely prepared for looking older. I was fine with “looking older.” I even respected the thinning of my lips—as if my face was already partially preloading a disapproving hard stare at teenage boys throwing chips around on the top deck of the bus, and shouting, “You bummer.” I don’t think it’s entirely un-useful for a middle-aged woman to look like she’s ten seconds away from raining down hellfire and fury on any and all bumptious asshats in the locale.
I was, simply, happy about my encroaching Hag Years. Hey—if life has been hard, I’m totally down with that showing on my face. I want people to know I’ve gone through shit. I want to scare the more foolish and jejune away from me. THE MORE LIKE A WIZARD I LOOK, THE SOONER I CAN START WEARING A CLOAK AND BRANDISHING AN OAKEN STAFF AT SOCIAL EVENTS. Intolerance and fury, I could handle.
But the one thing I hadn’t reckoned with was . . . looking so sad all the time. Because—I didn’t feel sad all the time. In order to look how I felt on the inside, I would have to stare in the mirror and make a conscious effort to undo the sadness. If I consciously unpinched my mouth, relaxed my forehead, and held my head high again, a happier person would emerge, once again. But as soon as I forgot to relax, everything bunched up again into what I can only describe as a “deflated Lady Gruffalo.”
Some people have a Resting Bitch Face. I appeared to have its cousin—Sad Widow Surveying Her War-Ravaged-Village Face. I appeared to have Inherited Woe. This wasn’t an aging thing. This was . . . a trauma thing.
As a can-do person, I decided to do something about this. A huge part of my “facial bunchiness” was, I knew, down to spending most of my life hunched over a laptop—so my first stop was buying one of those facial exercise gadgets. You know the ones. From QVC.
Once I received it, I would spend a solid month dutifully gurning away on it, trying to fortify my facial abs, like some kind of Facial Athlete. I would strengthen my face the natural way! With exercise!
Of course, as a huge part of my “facial sadness” was down to working hard, and being very busy, we can all guess the outcome: I simply didn’t have time to do the things that would make me look less busy. And I never used the stupid thing.
Undeterred, I moved on to Phase Two of Operation Looking Less Like Eeyore: buying stuff. I bought all the serums; I consumed oily fish and healthy seeds, as if I were a supermodel puffin; I even bought one of those expensive silk pillows to prevent facial creasing—which I obviously and immediately shrunk down to dollhouse size the first time I washed it.
I read one article that suggested the best way to prevent “facial wear and tear” was by setting an alarm on your iPhone—so that, every half hour, when working, you could “check in” with your face, and see if it had collapsed into a scrunchy frown, and then consciously “relax” it. Every time the alarm went off, and I checked my facial expression when “thinking,” I was amused to see that its natural state is “Looking like Henry VIII deciding which wife to kill.”
As neither a monarch nor a murderer, I desired this not to be the case, so I stepped it up into third gear. I got help. As I now have the income of a middle-class woman, I went and got a couple of those posh facials you read about in the magazines—the ones they go on about in Tatler and Vogue, when detailing how “facialists to the stars” are responsible for keeping our royalty and A-list so glowy. Ones where they do mad things, like “massage the inside of your mouth,” or “electrocute you a tiny bit.”
I got on the waiting lists, trekked across London to various clinics, paid the money—and, big reveal, either looked “plumped” for twenty-four hours, then reverted back to normal, or walked out looking exactly the same as when I went in. In both cases, the most notable difference was that I was considerably poorer.
In short, I spent nearly two years doing all the things that are seen as natural and allowable to look better, if you’re a strident feminist, and it just fannied away hours I could have been working, or watching RuPaul’s Drag Race with the kids; it cost a bomb, and—crucially—made no real difference at all.
“Do I just have the wrong kind of face?” I finally asked a friend in the beauty industry. “I’ve had literally every single famous facial it’s possible to have, and yet I still look sad. I don’t understand—[redacted Hollywood actress] is ten years older than me, yet I look like her aged Victorian housekeeper. Are me and [redacted] experiencing time differently? Am I living in dog years? Am I going to ‘go to the farm’ by the time I’m fifty, whilst [redacted] continues to swan around looking like she’s made of face cream until she’s 109?”
“Oh, mate!” my friend replied. “No facial can make you look like that. There’s no point in wasting your time and money. She has Botox. They all have Botox.”
“All?”
“Yep. You know [redacted actress, famous for looking hot ‘despite’ being sixty]? Botox. Luminous national treasure? Botox. [Pop goddess] has Botox. There isn’t one of these bitches who isn’t using Botox.”
“But, in interviews, they all say it’s just down to drinking water, and never using face wipes!” I cried. “And maybe a slick o’ Vaseline on the lips.”
My friend was laughing so merrily, she could barely speak.
“I know,” she said, in the end. “It’s hilarious. Anyone who knows the slightest thing about beauty knows it can’t be the case. It’s literally written all over their faces.”
“But, to me, they don’t look like they’ve had anything done! They all just look . . . well.”
“Well, yes,” she agreed. “That’s because, if you go to the right people, you don’t look like you’ve had anything done. You just look well slept and happy.”
“Wouldn’t it just be better to actually be well slept and happy?” I asked. “Isn’t that the answer?”
She looked at me. “As a matter of interest, how much time and money do you think it would currently cost you, right now, to organize your life so that you got a minimum of eight hours sleep a night, and had no problems at all?”
I started to do the mental math. I find mental mathematics very hard. I could feel my facial aging accelerating as I frowned and gurned through the calculations. My friend, distressed by what she was seeing, quickly added: “Because, just so you know—Botox is two hundred pounds and takes ten minutes.”
OBVIOUSLY, A WEEK later, I was on the Tube to see the best Botox specialist in London.
When I got there, the Botox lady made me look in the mirror, and said, “What do you want?”
I consciously and effortfully relaxed my face, pointed at it, and said: “Like this?”
“Easy.”
She did nine tiny injections—three around the eyebrows, two on each side of the mouth, and two on the underside of my jaw. It took seven minutes in total.
“I’ve just put in a tiny bit—come back in a couple of weeks, and we’ll see if you need more. I’d rather do too little than too much. You’ll see the difference in a fortnight. Bye!”
The whole thing, door to door, took an hour and ten minutes. It was the easiest beauty treatment I’ve ever had. For starters, there was no time for small talk. On this basis alone, I was sold. As you get older, you tend to count all your experiences in terms of the Small Talk Toll. This one had been as minimal as my relationship with the dentist, but without the precondition of having his hand in my mouth. It was win-win.
On the way home, I felt the Botox start to take effect—my face felt like it had just had two Nurofen Plus: a pleasant, relaxing, codeine warmth. This had an unexpected side effect: As I’d been told during birth visualization classes, when we tend to hold tension in our faces, it causes other parts of the body to become rigid, too. TL;DR, if your mouth is in a tiny moue of pain, your vadge’s going to close up, and that baby’s gonna get jammed.
As the weeks went by, I noticed that because my face was acting like it was on holiday in Antigua, the rest of my body relaxed, too. It was like being in the company of a non-annoying Buddhist friend who takes everything in their stride. I’d be like “Face—something stressful is happening. Should I freak out?” My face: “Nah, mate—the universe continues in its elegant expansion. Everything is as everything should be. Have a piña colada. It’s all gravy.”
And visually? What did I look like? Well, you can see on the cover of this book. I don’t look younger, or hotter, or more perfect. It’s not an actual enchantment. I just don’t look like I’m going to lie on the floor in the fetal position and start wailing, “You can run as fast as you like—but you can’t outpace eternal sorrow” in the middle of Morrisons, which is the bare minimum I need from my face, on a day-to-day basis.
As I observed, looking in the mirror, two weeks later, I just looked . . . like I did when I was making a massive effort to look relaxed. But without making an effort at all. Botox is the working woman’s facial minibreak. Botox just does your relaxing for you. It takes a job off The List.
OF COURSE, IT’S terrifying for a feminist to admit they have had Botox. Not least if, in their 2011 international bestseller How to Be a Woman, they merrily denounced anyone who gets Botox.
“When we live in fear of aging and pull painful and expensive tricks to hide it, it makes us look like losers. It makes us look like cowards. It makes us look scared,” I said, in what was the first—but I’m sure won’t be the last—case of my Younger Self judging my Future Self without walking a mile in her shoes (orthopedic sneakers, sixty-nine ninety-nine, Asics).
What I have realized since then is that women can easily believe we need some manner of . . . Botox Police. I know, because I, clearly, had the Botox Police hat.
Whilst, in the twenty-first century, we would be unlikely to launch a fusillade against someone for dyeing their hair, microblading sparse eyebrows, or getting veneers for their teeth, Botox—along with fillers—is seen as a level of artifice and vanity so extreme, women who get it must undergo a small, public punishment-beating from the Botox Police, ostensibly on behalf of other women, presumably to discourage others from seeking it.
Consequently, a great many of the women who have Botox never admit it—as very few women would willingly put themselves in a position where their face would become the center of a conversation about how it’s generally letting the sisterhood down, as badly as Eva Braun’s vagina did in 1939. This leads to the catch-22 illustrated in the earlier conversation with my friend—where most famous women of our age have to pretend they look better than “normal” people simply from an expensive serum and lots of water, or crystals, or putting a jade egg up their vulva—leading to “normal” women who genuinely are only using serums and water to despair that they appear simply to have a great deal more “tired-gnome DNA” than people on the cover of magazines.
If we really wish to make women feel better about themselves, living in a world where all the hot people feel able to cheerfully share the realities of their beauty regimes would mark a considerable improvement. Now I know both how common Botox is, and how simple and effective it can be—better, quicker, and more effective than any cream, serum, or facial—it seems genuinely odd to me that there is this febrile exceptionalism to this beauty treatment, above all others. So long as you’re going to a qualified practitioner who, vitally, also has a good aesthetic sense, both adverse reactions and glassy, frozen LA faces from the ’80s are extremely rare. It’s not as if you’re drinking the potion that makes the Little Mermaid grow legs—changing your essential nature forever at the cost of terrible pain. It’s just a general “face chiller,” used by millions of women, which you can use as and when you wish. Botox isn’t a gigantic moral maze—the use of which places you in one feminism camp or another. It’s just . . . one of many options.
“BUT IT’S NOT natural!” people say. No. It’s not. And, these days, I passionately hymn all the “unnatural” things I have seen improve lives: Using contraceptives is unnatural; my emergency C-section was unnatural. The orthopedic insoles in my shoes, for my naturally flat feet, are unnatural; as are my acne medications, my eyebrow threading, and my Clairol “Dark Chocolate” hair dye.
Fuck it, I’ll keep going—my washing machine is unnatural, my Wi-Fi is unnatural, and this individual chocolate mousse I am eating right now did not grow on a mousse bush. Progress is full of everyday wonders.
Let us be honest: A “natural” life is, often, an actively dangerous one for a woman. In my “natural” state, I would have lived a life as a waddling, spotty woman with mousy hair and a monobrow, who was pregnant at seventeen and died during a difficult labor at the age of twenty-four. Whilst there are many natural things that we can love and enjoy, as I have gotten older, I have realized that unnatural things have been—time and time again—my best friends, as a woman. The idea that a woman is born a fixed and unchangeable thing is dispiriting. I don’t accept my fate! I’m absolutely the kind of person who wants lifesaving surgery, and/or a face that isn’t hunched in misery! I mean, why not? Give me all the good things that science can provide, during my short span on this earth! Show me your inventions, that I might use them! I am unashamed to say that I am interested in partaking of all things that are awesome! Why ration the good things, because they are “unnatural?”
Don’t insist I must die as I was born! That was not my hottest day! Let me change! Let me be a thing I dreamed up myself!
There is a further twist to the idea of “natural beauty”—one I could probably argue in favor of myself, at various points in my life, to wit: Why shouldn’t having a sad face be acceptable for a woman? Why shouldn’t you be able to walk down the street looking utterly sorrowful—but with pride? You should be militant about this! Don’t give in to societal constructs! Fight!
And in many ways, of course, this is a valid argument. I cannot argue that were we to live in a world where it was deemed not only acceptable but even desirable for women to walk around looking very, very sad or “a bit rough,” we would be living in a more truthful world. I used to be a Goth. A scruffy Goth—of course I would like that. For, in that world, I would be as a god.
However, the simple truth is that if I have only twenty minutes before I leave the house for a work engagement, not only do I not want to look sad but I simply don’t have time to change all of society.
Indeed, as a rule of thumb, I’m incredibly wary of situations where women, or girls, have a small, urgent, specific problem, and the solution to it is “boldly fly in the face of convention, then devote the rest of your life to effortfully and exhaustingly effecting the revolution.” That kind of feels like you’re lumping someone already dealing with quite a lot with a pretty chunky chore—changing the hearts and minds of seven billion people—and one, let’s face it, they’re unlikely to achieve before catching the 3:35 p.m. bus.
So if you really, really want to try some Botox, but are worried that’s it’s not feminist, give yourself a break. If you don’t want Botox, enjoy spending the money you’ve saved on shoes or rent. It’s all gravy.
And whatever you choose to do, it’s important to remember the biggest, and most crucial thing about aging: Every so often, you will look at pictures of yourself from ten years ago—when you were convinced you looked shit and were going downhill—and exclaim, “My God, I was so young and hot back then! I was at my peak! Look at my fucking legs! They’re like those of a sexy horse! Why did I not appreciate it at the time? I should have just walked around naked all the time insisting people take pictures of my face! I will never be that beautiful again!”
And this will happen every ten years until you die.
Whatever age you are, and whatever’s happening in your life right now, one thing is constant: older you is totally perving on you right now. Enjoy it.