Traumata

by Meera Atkinson

  During the year before, the year I left home to tear around Australia with compulsive fervour, I had tried to turn my back on my Be Beautiful familial and cultural training. This rejection of the mainstream beauty project was not born of feminist commitment – though the second wave had surged around me throughout my childhood, I was some way yet from understanding or commitment on that front – but more in service to my new drop-out lifestyle and vaguely post-hippy anti-establishment worldview. My clothing style went from high street fashion to nomad shabby chic. I stopped wearing make-up and often went barefoot.

  My apparent withdrawal from the beauty game, along with my weight gain, proved difficult for the women in my family, particularly my grandmother. Upon our meeting, Glady would look me up and down quickly and, seeing I was still overweight and unadorned, she would turn her head ever so slightly in disappointed disdain, refraining from comment in the spirit of if-you-can’t-say-something-nice-don’t-say-anything-at-all. But I clocked her silent disapproval just the same and at other times it leaked out in subtle ways that left me wondering whether I was imagining an indirect covert criticism or being ‘over-sensitive’, as my father once announced me. As we watched television, or walked around a shopping mall, she would note the pleasing features of other young women in a satisfied tone. ‘She looks after herself,’ she might say, or, ‘She’s a good weight.’ I use the phrase ‘apparent withdrawal’ from the beauty game because despite my attempts to break free from the spell my mother and grandmother were bound by, and despite my appearance no longer seeming in step with it, inwardly I remained every bit as entranced as they were. Because of that I experienced these barbs, real or imagined, as excruciating.

  This Is What Elle Macpherson Eats in a Day (Harper’s Bazaar)

  I was tormented throughout the first four decades of my life by an ideal that shimmered just off the field of my vision. It was a constant presence, as was my awareness of falling short of it. The ideal changed from time to time, from scene to scene, and there were moments when, seeing myself positively reflected in a lover’s eyes, the gap of that falling lessened so much that for a while it might be imperceptible, but sooner or later I became aware once again of my unfortunate defectiveness.

  As I write, I ask myself how I know this has changed, and whether it really has. I’m not sure if I can articulate it. Somehow I gradually came to inhabit myself more willingly, more happily, imperfectly. Ideals still inform my self-assessments, but they don’t loom super-ego large at the front of my mind these days, and I care less about my physical shortcomings even though I have more of them, thanks to the process of ageing. There are other things to focus on, other kinds of power to enjoy. Most gratifyingly, I no longer measure myself against other women in the brutal way I did as a young woman (imagining myself better looking than another woman was no less painful than imagining myself worse looking, since in essence it all fed the same bête noire).

  Countless hours and endless energy went wasted in my youth. Driven by desire for beauty, I spent an uncalculated fortune on skin and hair products, endured more than my fair share of disastrous perms (attempts to silence my mother’s internalised ‘we don’t have good hair’ mantra), submitted to the requisite fad diets and exhausted myself with compulsive exercise jags. My teens and early adulthood were by far the most unforgiving period for Be Beautiful self-berating. During a particularly anxiety-ridden patch in my mid-twenties, I noticed I had chewed my nails down to ugly stumps and decided something should be done. Once again, I was awash with that horrible doubling of affect, anxiety upon anxiety and shame upon shame: the badly bitten nails a sign of my anxiety and shame compounded by anxiety and shame that my anxiety and shame had been manifested bodily, now visible to all. I hightailed it to a beauty salon where I underwent a treatment in which acrylic nails are built onto the original – a worthwhile improvement, I assumed, on the tacky business of sticking falsies over the top with glue, which I saw as garish and unseemly. I paid my money, sat patiently while the time-consuming nails were applied, and walked home feeling sophisticated, admiring my new talons. An hour later, I sat on the sofa staring in despair at my hands. I hated the nails even though they looked convincing. I found them grotesque and impractical. I couldn’t do a thing around the house, couldn’t pick up even the most commonplace object, and worst of all, though I’d been seduced by the suggestion of semi-authenticity, I couldn’t shake the thought that I was a phoney. I spent ages painstakingly removing them, feeling embarrassed and foolish.

  I’ve tried several body modifications and some have stuck: the piercing of my earlobes, for instance, which I begged my mother to let me get when I was thirteen; and the now-faded tattoo on my back. For me, motive matters, the spirit in which I get the thing done, the integrity of both my approach and the product. The desire to be more attractive, to modify the body, may or may not be driven by traumatic shame. It’s not only the choices I make, but also the way I make them that matters. Even so, there’s no denying the fact that the Be Beautiful business is paradoxical in its capacity for ugliness. Much of the beauty industry involves the exploitation of women, children and animals – the traditionally ‘feminine beings’ deemed possessions of men in patriarchal societies. Sweatshops staffed by Third World labourers (often women and children) produce a huge percentage of the clothing and items western women buy and wear. A gruesome reality hides behind the glossy promise of ‘scientific’ anti-wrinkle creams. Despite growing numbers of women choosing cruelty-free cosmetics (which are now widely available), the majority of consumers still patronise companies that either test on animals or use ingredients that others have tested on animals, and millions of animals continue to suffer and die unnecessarily. Each batch of the enormously popular Botox has to be tested, often by way of the barbaric LD50 method, which involves poisoning animals with a substance until half of them have died, thereby establishing the lethal dosage. Though Allergan, the manufacturer of Botox, has developed a cell-based test to replace LD50 and the use of animals, the company has not made an airtight commitment to alternative methods. According to Animal Aid, LD50 is still used in the UK despite the government’s claims it has banned the test. We turn a blind eye to please ourselves, to please others, protesting or condoning unethical practices with every dollar we spend. In these ways, we western women, who fought, and continue to fight for our own gains, collude in the oppression and traumatisation of other sentient beings, those trapped on the lowest rung of the hierarchical ladder established by patriarchy.

  A couple of years after the acrylic nails experiment, at the age of twenty-seven, I gained entry into a prestigious degree and resumed the formal education I’d turned my back on at thirteen. During my first year of university, Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth hit the scene. Wolf’s instant bestseller proposed that the progress made by earlier feminist waves and wins – women’s greater access to social options and power, and their unprecedented engagement and representation in public discourse and institutions – masked another, retrograde development: increased pressure to meet unrealistic standards of beauty constructed and circulated by those with commercial interests. Citing a rise in pornography, eating disorders and cosmetic surgery, Wolf claimed that the myth of an impossible, flawless beauty generated a self-hatred that kept women consuming, striving for an unachievable ideal: ‘in terms of how we feel about ourselves physically, we may actually be worse off than our unliberated grandmothers.’ This makes broad sense, since advertising as we know it and advanced capitalist consumerism came together in the post-war boom of the twentieth century, right before second-wave feminism emerged.

  From the start, advertising used women to con other women, initially (and ironically) under the guise of first-wave feminism. The documentary The Century of the Self tells the story of how Edward Bernays, the American-based nephew of Sigmund Freud, got women to smoke by slyly manipulating gender politics. Bernays was a propaganda specialist who set up business in New York City, having invente
d the term ‘public relations’ to replace ‘propaganda’ on account of the Nazis having given the word a bad rap. Drawing on his uncle’s theory of the unconscious, with its hidden desires, sublimated instincts and irrational emotions, Bernays set out to work out a way to profit from what he saw as a positive form of group mind control. When the president of the American Tobacco Company (ATC) approached Bernays, there was a firmly entrenched taboo against women smoking, and the ATC wanted Bernays to crack it so as to double their market. With his uncle in Vienna, Bernays consulted New York’s top psychoanalyst and asked him what cigarettes meant to women. Unsurprisingly, the good doctor advised that cigarettes symbolised the penis, male sexual power.

  Bernays then recruited a group of attractive and wealthy debutantes to hide cigarettes while marching in a popular public parade. They were to light the cigarettes when given the signal. He ensured the press gallery was in place, and informed them that a group of suffragettes was staging a protest by lighting up ‘torches of freedom’. It was a sensation, and thereafter women who wanted more than the oppression that was their lot were obliged to demonstrate allegiance by taking up smoking. Women started smoking in droves and cigarette sales went through the roof. We’ve been falling for the smoke and mirrors ever since. This is just one example of how women’s desire to Be Beautiful, and men’s desire for women to Be Beautiful, is inextricably bound up with the imperialist, capitalist, patriarchal project of post-‘Enlightenment’ modernity and its sprawling traumata.

  In the introduction to the most recent edition of The Beauty Myth, Wolf suggests women have more ‘breathing space’ from this myth than they had at the time of the first edition, but warns: ‘The beauty myth, like many ideologies of femininity, mutates to meet new circumstances and checkmates women’s attempts to increase their power.’ One of those very mutations is evident in the response to a more recent public outing by Wolf, where she discusses her understanding of third-wave feminism on the Big Think YouTube channel. What Wolf has to say in the clip is, as feminisms go, relatively benign, easy listening and notably man friendly. She coined the term ‘third wave’, she explains warmly, to entice a revival of a flagging feminism for a new generation of young women. She goes on to say that some of its characteristics include a more pluralistic and less dogmatic approach to sexuality, fashion and make-up, more attentiveness to issues of class and race, and a canniness regarding the use of media or consumer practices ‘for a good outcome’. Despite the mildness of Wolf’s words the comments range from raging ignorance to sickening misogyny:

  • Fuck feminism.

  • 3rd and 4th wave feminists use sex as a weapon. They dress provocatively, tease, and reject men in an effort to dominate men through sexual frustration. They manipulate unknowing, brainwashed men to get what they want then leave them high and dry. The only way to reverse 3rd, and 4th wave feminism is for the majority of productive, and professional men to become MGTOW [I had to look this up – it’s an acronym for ‘Men Going Their Own Way’, a movement of men who subscribe to this term as ‘a statement of self-ownership, where the modern man preserves and protects his own sovereignty above all else’ – in other words, it’s a separatist, pseudonymous, online community that inhabits the ‘manosphere’ associated with the ‘alt-right’].

  • what is she doing outta the kitchen?

  • The feminist UGLY FUCKS tried to change our video games, now they’re ruining our films!

  • feminazi bitches

  • Third Wave Feminists are so sheltered they get triggered over anything and thing [sic] men are so inferior that they made a law against “manspreading.” It’s not the guys fault that they can’t sit a certain way because they have a dick.

  • Third wave feminism is full of sexist cunts who think the world owes em something

  • Here you have Naomi Wolf, a feminist, boldly and happily admitting that she completely made something up and then invented a lot of nonsense to describe this thing she made up to along with it as well … So, why should we believe anything Naomi Wolf says? Oh but wait, facts and credibility mean nothing to feminists, so, it’s all good then …

  • so.. shes the one we shoot. got it.

  how?

  with a bullet?

  with ejaculate you ninny

  she would talk and i’d go limp [sic]

  Toxic masculinist trolls like these stalk and abuse women online routinely, and Wolf’s ‘beauty’ is used against her as she dares to take up public space and express a point of view (‘she would talk and i’d go limp’). While I don’t agree with Wolf on all points, I vehemently defend her right to give voice to her ideas in the public realm without being subjected to abuse. Is this hatred, unleashed with abandon on countless public threads, a fair measure of the state of masculinity in the twenty-first century? While some of the researchers furiously studying this behaviour link self-identified trolls with narcissism, psychopathy, Machiavellianism and sadism, others, such as Whitney Phillips, maintain trolls are ‘mostly normal people’. If this statement appears to be pointedly neutralised in terms of gender, Joel Stein, the Time journalist who noted the above findings, lets slip when he writes: ‘Trolls are turning social media and comment boards into a giant locker room in a teen movie, with towel-snapping racial epithets and misogyny.’ Unsurprisingly, then, women are among their favourite targets and attacking women’s appearance is a primary strategy.

  I suspect the men most likely to exhibit this kind of toxic masculinity are those raised with a particularly virulent version, or a high proportion, of old-school masculinist traditions – the kind that puts stock in the superiority of men over other beings and believing their dominance therefore justified. It also stands to reason they are likely the least resourced to develop the skills and capacities in a post-patriarchal society. Women who adopt a strident politics of feminism in combination with a legacy of unaddressed personal patriarchy-related trauma also prove problematic in interpersonal and political realms, but militant male-separatist feminists and bona fide misandrists are relatively few in number compared with the swelling armies of hate-speaking trolls and ruthless male terrorists.

  Patriarchal conditioning entwined with transgenerational trauma is the root of the problem, but the secondary problem is the entrenched resistance to addressing it. At its least damaging the resistance to taking responsibility results in turning the other cheek when witnessing sexism or shoring up the last bastions of patriarchal male autonomy via poison-penned chest-beating cheap shots, and at its most damaging it explodes in crimes against humanity like the rampaging murder of blonde women in ‘retribution’ for sexual rejection, or blasting apart a venue full of dancing young people in the name of a fantasy patriarchal-religious God-head. Defending against the loss of certain privileges and beliefs causes some to cling to the remains in a mess of confusion and submerged distress. Those who show up to work with us, side by side, through this mess, deserve a sympathetic ear and support. Those willing to question their conditioning, to give up its payoffs, and to be held accountable and attend to their trauma, so that they may contribute to transforming society for the better, deserve ardent respect.

  This Flawless 45-Year-Old Model Will Make You Question Your Anti-Ageing Routine (Popsugar)

  Am I invisible? I hear other women my age talking about no longer feeling seen in public spaces, about no longer being socially validated. I like moving around, day to day, sans make-up, dressed down, flying under the radar, going about my business. I like this cloak of invisibility – if visibility means being primed for objectification and being eye-candy for men. I like getting dressed up when I’m in the mood. I still enjoy being noticed by certain people. I realise how differently I am seen in the world when I wear make-up, and I remember when I first cut my shoulder-length hair very short in my late twenties: I was instantly less visible to 90 per cent of men. Happily, they were the 90 per cent of men I most welcomed being invisible to,
but it was difficult, back then, to get used to it, since I had been raised from birth to crave the approval of men I had no desire for.

  I was a third-year mature-age undergrad student in the early 1990s, at the time of that first short-short haircut, and during the course of my studies I launched into a lengthy survey of feminist discourses about objectification, the relegation of women to the realm of the body and the sphere of the private, and the cinematic ‘male gaze’. My attempts to understand inculcations around beauty, and my struggle to free myself from their hold, surfaced in my university work. I was particularly interested in post-Freudian psychoanalytic theory. Julia Kristeva’s take on beauty and artifice as the sublimation of loss, to mask a state of mourning, made thrilling semi-sense to me. In ‘Beauty: The Depressive’s Other Realm’, a chapter from her book on depression and melancholia, Black Sun, Kristeva takes an essay by Freud as her starting point.

  ‘On Transience’, Freud’s meditation on beauty and its passing, implies beauty is bound to loss. Walking in a fecund garden one summer’s day with a ‘taciturn friend’ and a famous young poet, Freud was astonished to learn that his companions took a dark view of the natural beauty all around them, declaring an inability to enjoy it since it was ‘fated to extinction’ – the witnessing of beauty instantly reminded them of its inevitable fading, of death. Freud argued against this pessimism: ‘A flower that blossoms only for a single night does not seem to us on that account less lovely.’ Nor, he continued in protest, could he understand ‘why the beauty and perfection of a work of art or of an intellectual achievement should lose its worth because of its temporal limitation’.