Surgery, shame and self-erasure: four female writers on the tyranny of impossible beauty standards

This Friday, one of the most shocking films of the year opens – a blood-drenched body horror with an unusual theme for the genre: Hollywood’s impossible beauty standards. The Substance stars Demi Moore as a 50-year-old actor who tries a mysterious procedure that claims to “unlock your DNA and a younger version of yourself”. Literally. It’s an extreme take on a universal theme. Here, four women write about how beauty standards have affected their lives.

‘I met a woman who had 26 plastic surgeries because she believed she would one day be perfect’

V ( formerly Eve Ensler)

My mother was pretty, like movie-star pretty. She was blond and had an hourglass figure. She was 20 years younger than my father and clearly his showpiece. I think if she had just sat beaming on a couch, never uttering a word, it would have made my father perfectly happy.

I remember watching my mother at her vanity brushing her long blond fine hair that would fly off in the late sunlight like gossamer. Then she would carefully and expertly wrap those delicate yellow strands with pins, holding and moulding them into the perfect French twist. I remember seeing myself reflected in that same mirror right behind her and thinking, “She is blond and perfect. She has entree into a world I will never know. I am dark and have moles on my face. My hair is straight and pointless. I already look sad.”

I remember when she cut off her hair my father stopped talking to her for weeks – as if she had cut his hair, because to all intents and purposes she was his property. I remember thinking right then: fuck beauty. Fuck pleasing men. No one will ever own my fucking body. Fuck fuck fuck. I stopped shaving my underarms and legs. I refused to wear a bra. I wore overalls and Frye boots and purple suede and leather headbands. I had a lot of sex. I almost drank myself to death.

In my 40s (I’m 71 now) I became obsessed about having a not-flat stomach. My obsession took me around the world where I talked to women about what it means to be beautiful. I was researching a play called The Good Body that went to Broadway in 2004. I met a married lady in her 60s from Beverly Hills who tightened her vagina as an anniversary gift to her husband. I met a woman who had 26 plastic surgeries on most of her body because she believed if she kept going she would one day be perfect and someone would surely love her. I met an astounding woman in a field under a marula tree in the Rift Valley in Kenya. I asked her if she was obsessed with being beautiful or thin. She pointed to the tree. She said, “Do you say this tree is more beautiful than that tree? Or this tree” – she pointed to another – “is more beautiful than this tree?” You’re a tree. I’m a tree. You have to love your tree, she said. Eve. Love your tree.

I desperately tried. I even started a short-lived Love Your Tree movement. Then I got stage 3/4 uterine cancer and almost died. I lost seven organs and 70 nodes and 30 pounds. I stood naked in front of the mirror. It was not a vanity. I was bald. I had a huge thick scar down my entire torso like a tattoo of a snake or a river. My skin was flushed from chemo. My lips were reddish, the way they get when you have a fever. My eyes were sparkling, wild from the steroids. I looked like I’d been though something. Something huge. I looked like I’d travelled somewhere, gone to the other side. I looked fucking beautiful.

‘Navigating beauty standards means walking a tightrope that keeps getting yanked’

Arwa Mahdawi

I had a brush with anorexia as a teenager and it wasn’t pretty. My hair fell out, my skin got thin. I looked sad and skeletal. But an interesting thing happened. The girls at my school in Manhattan suddenly became more interested in me. Girls in more popular circles who had never noticed me suddenly started talking to me. It felt like, by making myself smaller, I had grown in their esteem.

My eating issues, I should note, weren’t directly linked to beauty standards. It was more about a need for control. But I learned an early life lesson: women who punish and control their bodies are respected. A woman at peace with her body, happy with her bulges and blemishes, can be seen as somewhat lacking, whereas a woman at constant war with her body is someone to be admired.

Of course, that war must be silent; it must rage under the surface. All that plucking and shaving and taming and injecting and filling and sculpting can’t be too in-your-face. You must try hard but you can’t look like you’re trying too hard. You must ward off the ravages of time but not make it too obvious that you are doing so. That would look desperate.

Navigating beauty standards means walking a tightrope that keeps getting yanked one way and another to find an elusive balance. My first job out of university was as a trainee solicitor in a corporate law firm. High heels were considered professional and I ruined my feet for years by squeezing them into beautiful but torturous footwear. I also felt obliged to wear makeup, albeit not very much. Still my face didn’t quite fit. Once, my female boss informed me not to wear makeup because people would take me more seriously without it. Perhaps she meant well but changing my sex and my race might have done me more good in that environment than a bare face.

I left law to go into advertising, where the rules were completely different – bar Hollywood, there are few professions as obsessed with youth and beauty. In law, my youth had been a liability; but in advertising, even in my late 20s I felt as if I was over the hill. Sometimes I think about going back to a full-time job in the industry but, at 41, I’ve aged out. The ad world is slowly addressing its ageism problem but you’d still be hard-pressed to find many women over 45 in a lot of agencies. And that has a knock-on effect on the work being produced. It’s no surprise that studies show most older women don’t think they’re positively portrayed in advertising.

It’s hard to escape the pressure to conform to often impossible beauty standards. (I’m still holding out on Botox but pretty much everyone I know has had it.) Still, location and vocation matter. Working in advertising in New York, I felt I was judged on my appearance all the time. Now I’m a freelance writer in Philadelphia (where at least half the population is wearing a sports jersey at any given moment) and it’s a lot more relaxed. I wear makeup so infrequently that my dog gets alarmed when I put it on. You don’t age out of beauty standards, but you can move further away from them.

‘We learn that successful womanhood is to be something smaller, lesser, other than our natural selves’

Laura Barton

There is a line from CJ Hauser’s 2019 essay The Crane Wife that has always stayed with me: “To keep becoming a woman is so much self-erasing work.” Hauser is describing a Japanese folktale in which a crane convinces a man that she is actually a woman, so they can marry. To maintain the charade she must spend each night plucking out all her feathers. “She hopes that he will not see what she really is,” Hauser writes. “A bird who must be cared for, a bird capable of flight, a creature, with creature needs.”

The line leaps often to my mind. It’s a reminder of how quickly women learn to sublimate their needs, how we learn that successful womanhood is to be something smaller, lesser, other than our natural selves. How over the course of a lifetime we must keep becoming a woman, we must keep self-erasing. And the nights grow shorter. The feathers more abundant.

I was 19 when I bought my first anti-wrinkle face cream. In those days I was so emaciated that I would not have my period for three and a half years (a state not wholly about beauty, but certainly to do with some peculiar notion of perfection) and I was run through with a kind of corporeal dread.

Like most girls, I had learned early that I was somehow physically wrong: too plump, too pale, too plain. At school I was teased relentlessly for being ugly; at home I tried to work out what to do about it. I was prescribed the contraceptive pill to keep my teenage acne at bay. I began to explore the transfiguring qualities of henna shampoo, body glitter, black cherry lipstick, kohl.

In my 20s I spent some time as a beauty writer, and I tried any number of potions and procedures: face creams, fake tans, machines that shivered electronic currents into one’s thighs, acupuncture facials performed with the finest gold-tipped needles. This was before the time of dermal fillers and wrinkle-relaxers; the days when we still laughed at the celebrities with their collagen-plumped lips.

At a dinner a couple of summers ago I discovered I was the only woman at the table who hadn’t tried Botox. Through a careful combination of water, diet, exercise and genetics I have kept at bay the decision of whether or not to join their number. But I know it is coming. I am merely diverting the river.

I am 46 now, and I would like to tell you something beautifully true: the older you get, the less you care. But even as I type these words, I am unsure quite what I mean by them. Is it that it no longer matters to me whether I wear makeup when I leave the house? Or that I think it inconsequential whether people have plastic surgeries or take The Substance? Perhaps both. Perhaps what I am trying to say is simply that I see now what I really am: that I have become at last a creature, with creature needs.

‘It wasn’t the £60 serum that stung the most – it was the teenage girls queueing up for it’

Kate McCusker

If you spend the first part of your life trying to look older (in my case, a push-up bra from Victoria’s Secret and many ill-advised attempts at contouring), and the rest of it trying to look younger, you suddenly find yourself with one foot on each side of the divide. Which is to say that at the tender age of 27, I caved and bought a retinol serum because a saleswoman in an upmarket cosmetics chain was benignly mean to me.

What did I mean, I didn’t use one, she said incredulously, while I stared at my shoes to communicate my deep shame and acknowledge my inadequacy. Your future self will thank you for it, she told me, as she tied the ribbon on a bag that was gargantuan compared with the serum itself. I left the shop feeling fleeced and a little dazed – like a lab rat that has just shocked itself and is resigned to the sad fact that it will continue doing so for the rest of its exhausting life.

Being lightly bullied into buying things I can’t afford isn’t an unusual occurrence for me. Recently I went to the dentist for a cleaning and emerged with a page-long smile makeover treatment plan and an accompanying £200-a-month finance package. I’ll sleep on it, I told the dentist, and then lost an entire evening trying to work out how I was going to pay for this thing I’d convinced myself I might die without. Maybe I could pawn a ring my mother had given me – the only valuable piece of jewellery I owned. Maybe I could take part in some sort of medical trial. Maybe, my partner tactfully suggested, I could go to therapy.

It wasn’t the £60 serum that stung the most. (And it stings so much it brings tears to my eyes, which is probably why I’ve used it a grand total of four times.) No, it was the presence in the queue behind me of three teenage girls, still in school uniform, holding products from the same cultish brand that I’d just been chided into buying. Of course, I’d heard of this new strain of teenager: ones who implicitly knew that overplucking their eyebrows and wearing blue mascara were bad ideas. And I’d seen their TikTok videos, in which they sent up the heavy drag-queen makeup trends of my own adolescence and expounded on the virtues of “clean beauty” – which involves herculean efforts to apply makeup in a way that looks like you aren’t wearing any. But seeing them in the flesh, gripping bottles of overpriced gunk like they were Charlie Bucket’s golden ticket, I felt like crying for all of us – gullible little idiots that we were. Then I saw one of them extract a black Amex from her school blazer pocket and felt like the only schmuck in the room.

Would I take The Substance? Probably not, given that it would make me – what? 13? No amount of retinol money could make me relive the brute years of teenage girlhood. Would I take a little pill that made me look like Demi Moore, though? Most definitely – which means I’ve probably missed the whole point.