Always Too Much, Never Enough

I saw a post on Instagram recently about the way women are discussed in the media. It put photographs of famous women beside the things that have been said about them over the years. One was too thin, another too fat. Sarah Jessica Parker is apparently ageing terribly while Nicole Kidman is criticised for not ageing naturally enough. Taylor Swift is now too prudish. Kim Kardashian is too sexual. Meghan Markle is too ambitious. Victoria Beckham is too thin. Adele lost weight (good) but now she’s lost too much (bad).

None of this was particularly surprising. We've been talking about impossible beauty standards for decades; pointing out that women can't win is hardly a revolutionary feminist position. But, something about seeing the contradictions collected together made me think about how much time I've spent trying to get it right anyway.

I'm 47 years old and I still care about how I look. I love clothes and fashion and make-up and hair…sequins, silk, colours, styles. I adored experimenting with fashion when I was younger and went through various phases. I spend money on all of the above, sometimes more than is sensible (as my family will certainly attest to). I enjoy dressing up and I like feeling attractive when I do. I also worry about ageing and have spent too long thinking about the return of my cheekbones when I put on weight. I use filters on photographs sometimes. None of this sits particularly well alongside being an intelligent, feminist woman who understands exactly how beauty standards work, but then most of us don’t fit lazy stereotypes or expectations.

I've been thinking recently about when I first started looking at myself from the outside.

I grew up in a family where humour could be (at times brutally) acerbic. I should add as a caveat that I do love that kind of humour. I know I have inherited it and my own children would have a lot to say if I claimed I was someone who has never taken the mick out of anybody. There was a lot of laughter in my childhood and a lot of love. There were, however, also jokes that hurt.

I have a naturally deep voice and speak quite slowly, and people close to me would sometimes do impressions of it. My feet were funny and turned in “like a hen’s”. I had the family inheritance of a lazy eye. These weren't huge childhood traumas, and I don't want to inflate them retrospectively into something they weren't….but… I do remember them, which is interesting in itself.

I remember laughing too, because being able to take a joke was important. If something did hurt, there was always the (slightly weak) defence of “it's only a joke”, which meant that admitting you were upset risked making you look humourless too.

I wonder now whether those jokes taught me something that I wasn't consciously aware of learning at the time. Hearing someone imitate your voice makes you hear it as other people hear it; and a physical feature you hadn't once given any thought to becomes something people notice – so you start to wonder what else they're noticing.

I think I learned to laugh at myself before I learned to ever be kind to myself.

By adolescence, appearance had become much more complicated. Peer pressure. Fashion. Make up. Boys arrived.

I cared a lot about whether boys fancied me, which is hardly unusual for a teenage girl, but looking back I think I was doing something more than simply wanting to be fancied. I was using their interest as “evidence”. If somebody wanted me, then that told me I was attractive. (My self esteem was very low if a 15 year old boy’s opinion was that important!) If somebody I liked didn't appear interested, I rarely considered all the other possible explanations. I assumed the answer was me and all my faults and appearance.

Years later, I've discovered that some boys I thought weren't interested had actually just been shy; there were people who fancied me and never told me. Who knew?! I've also learned since that girls I thought were confident around me were sometimes intimidated or judgy, and in a few cases jealous. At the time, none of this occurred to me. Of course, many boys weren't interested. Some girls probably didn't like me. No doubt I was annoying at times or wasn’t someone’s cup of tea.

What interests me is how confidently I filled in information I didn't have… I interpreted other people's behaviour through my own insecurities, and then treated my interpretation as fact. I was particularly great at doing this with compliments and criticism. Compliments were lovely, obviously, but didn't count for very long; criticism did. I could be told repeatedly that I looked beautiful and still remember the one person who made a negative comment. I still remember comments by a couple of boys when I was 15, related to my (non existent) chest size and twig like legs. I trusted the criticism more, because it felt as though compliments might be kindness, whereas criticism was someone accidentally revealing the truth.

When I grew older, weight became part of this too. When I put on weight, I was told about it. (Ironically this worked in my favour at uni, when I grew two cup sizes, mostly due to plastic pints of beer). When I lost weight, I was praised (by women), and I felt people responded to me differently. I need to be careful here because I don't think every change in how I was treated was necessarily caused by my size. When I feel attractive, I'm more confident, and obviously confidence does change how we interact with people. But equally, we live in a culture that demonstrably values certain bodies more highly than others, and it would be disingenuous to pretend I haven't benefited from that when I was slimmer.

On a good day, at a good weight, and when I make an effort with hair, makeup and clothes, I am lucky enough to be considered fitting into the vision of what is mostly conventionally attractive. If I'm slimmer and I put in the effort, I know I can look good according to fairly conventional standards. I know what suits me. I've learned how to do my hair and make-up and dress to suit my body.

In some ways, though, knowing I could achieve that made appearance feel like something I was responsible for maintaining. If I could look good when I made the effort, what did it mean when I didn't? That's where I think my relationship with appearance became muddled. Looking good wasn't simply enjoyable all the time. A lot of the time I couldn’t be bothered and wanted to wear the leggings and stained hoodie and show my spots and roots. Somewhere over time, looking good became connected with approval, and approval became tangled up with acceptance. There is a question underneath that which I don't particularly enjoy admitting to myself: would I still be loved and accepted for who I was if I didn't look good?

Intellectually, I know how stupid that sounds. I know what I bring to the people I love. I know my children aren't examining the angles of my jaw before deciding whether I'm a good mum. I know my friendships and loyalty don’t depend on my waist size. But knowing something rationally doesn't automatically undo everything you learned emotionally from a very young age - an age without social media.

I'm also conscious that I've experienced all this from the relatively fortunate side of conventional beauty standards. I teach teenagers. I'm raising three children - two are girls. I know how vicious adolescence can be when somebody is considered unattractive, or simply different. Sometimes it only takes one feature for a child to become a target. Weight, acne, body hair, teeth, clothes, height, shoes, eyebrows, the speed at which their body develops. Teenagers are capable of real kindness, but they can also identify another child's vulnerability with an efficiency that is downright alarming.

I can't really imagine what it must feel like to go through those years knowing that you don't fit whatever narrow version of attractiveness happens to be valued by the people around you. I found adolescence difficult enough while receiving “evidence” that I was attractive now and then by insignificant adolescent boys.

I think that's one reason I'm uncomfortable with the way we sometimes talk about beauty standards, as though the answer is to teach girls that appearance doesn't matter. It does matter. They can see that it does.

They see which girls get called beautiful and they know who gets mocked. They pick up from a young age how adults talk about weight gain, diets and other women’s bodies, often through a warped, misogynistic lens. The enthusiasm with which weight loss is greeted. Pretending none of that exists isn't going to make them immune to it. Personally, I'd rather help them recognise what's happening, without allowing it to become a measure of somebody's worth.

I've been forced to think about this more recently because of experience, of comments made about me by somebody close to me. An example of this is a designer bag I posted online because I'd found it for £40 and was delighted with my bargain. What was apparently registered with this person was not the bargain, but the fact that it was a designer bag; because, presumably, that fitted an existing idea about me.

I've used a filter on a photograph and had it interpreted as evidence of a “midlife crisis”. A photograph in which my eyebrow looked “different” prompted speculation about whether I'd had Botox. When I lost a dress size, there was an automatic assumption that I'd used weight-loss medication.

The oddest part is that none of those things would actually even matter if they were all true.

If I'd paid full price for the bag, so what? If I had Botox tomorrow, what would that tell anybody about my character? There are excellent medical treatments for weight loss now, so why should using one be regarded as evidence of moral failure?

It was the contempt behind the assumptions that bothered me more than the assumptions themselves. There seemed to be a desire to take superficial pieces of information and use them to build a lazy, two-dimensional caricature of the sort of woman I must be: materialistic, vain and desperately fighting middle age. I found that painful, because it bore so little resemblance to the things I value about myself and others.

I am far from perfect and I'm sure there are people who could provide a useful and extensive list of my faults (available no doubt if required!) But, I know that I'm compassionate, and fiercely loyal to the people I love. I try to understand why people behave as they do and I'm always reluctant to reduce someone to their worst moment. Ironically, I don't particularly care whether another woman has Botox, uses a filter or takes weight-loss medication. I'm much more interested in whether she's interesting, funny, self-aware and fun.

All of this has made me think about what I want to teach my own daughters, and the girls I teach. I don't want to give them another set of difficult instructions. Telling girls they must love their bodies can just become another demand on them if we're not careful. There will be days when they inevitably don't. Telling them they shouldn't care whether anybody finds them attractive isn't useful either, as most of us care about being desired at least some of the time.

I want them to become better at questioning the conclusions we're encouraged to draw from appearance. A woman can love expensive clothes and be generous; dislike getting older without being sad or “having a midlife crisis”; change her face if she wants to and remain an intelligent person. Wanting to lose weight doesn't automatically mean she hates herself, any more than accepting her body means she has to adore every inch of it every morning. I’ve gone through phases of really wanting to lose weight and it intruding on normal thoughts, and I’ve gone through phases of really not thinking about it at all, albeit when I am slimmer!

I also want them to notice the misogyny that women can perpetuate ourselves. We owe it to ourselves to challenge it and change the narrative. Stop making comments about other women. Women absorb the same ideas as everyone else, and sometimes we do not know we are policing one another with them. I've done it too over the years. I'm certain there have been women I've judged too quickly because of how they presented themselves, particularly when I was younger. Recognising that is uncomfortable (as good self-reflection and accountability should be) but useful.

Maybe compassion is more achievable than an endless pursuit of perfect confidence and self-love. We rarely know as much about another person's life as we think we do. A woman who has lost a lot of weight may be taking medication (incidentally, as I was, when the comment was made - I had just started my ADHD medication) or perhaps ill, rather than it being a conscious decision. A filtered photograph might reflect a profound fear of ageing and remind her how she used to look, or she might simply like the photograph better that way. Even if we've guessed correctly, we still haven't learned much about the person; certainly not enough to cast judgment and make unfounded, lazy assumptions.

I'd like my daughters to grow up understanding that. I'd also like the girls I teach to question and correct any casual misogyny they encounter rather than simply absorbing it, and to recognise when they're directing it at each other. This is difficult when their mothers have grown up with their mothers, and it requires a generational shift in mindset; because any generation can do unintended damage to the one below them. I'd like this generation to be slower to turn somebody else's appearance into a judgement about her character.

I also hope they'll be kinder to themselves than I've sometimes been, although I know I can't easily teach them into that. They're going to have their own personal insecurities and make their own mistakes. Being human is complicated enough without expecting them to emerge from adolescence with a great, well resolved relationship with their bodies. I will continue buying outlandish clothes at times just because they look glamorous, or extra, or cool. Leather, sequins, satin, my band t-shirts, my fur coats, my neon. I'll probably use another filter. There will be mornings when I think I look good, not just for my age, and mornings when the mirror hates me.

What I'm beginning to question is why any of that should have any relevance as to whether I feel acceptable. I wonder why anyone else’s opinions of me should be relevant either.  Women continue to be criticised whatever they do. Going back to the Instagram post, it hit me how familiar the criticism felt, and how easily we learn to reproduce it.

We are all navigating lives that are difficult and contradictory, carrying histories that nobody else can see. It seems a chronic waste of the limited time we have with one another to spend so much of it deciding whether somebody else's face, body or handbag is evidence against them.

I'm trying not to do that anymore. Including to myself; and I hope the next generation learn more about the damage it can do than any generation has so far. At 47, my attitude isn't fully resolved: I still want my cheekbones back.