Contrary to popular belief we are not just drama queens, mercurial bitches or simply hormonal, but our feminine DNA may be responsible for making our life a tragi-comedy marked by earth-shattering moments.
There’s that moment we hear harps in our head, playing the theme from ‘Love Story’, as we look into a man’s eyes, quickly estimate that his yearly income will make up for his receding hairline, his expanding waist and his disgusting habit of cleaning his ears with his index finger (and thank God he’s not the ball-scratching type) and realize that this is the man we want to spend the rest of our life with…......Then there's the moment the ‘Ave Maria’ starts playing and it’s our man up there and we’re walking up the aisle…..... Or the point when, even as 97% of our brain function is employed in controlling our panicking bladder, we first see a heartbeat on an ultrasound scan and feel all teary as motherhood grabs us by the guts.
Then there’s that fateful moment when we look in the mirror and find our first gray hair.
Now a sane woman would simply pluck the offending hair out and continue about her life. But we all know the sane woman belongs in the realm of legend, along with mythical figures like JPO - the Green politician of the year. So when your average 20-, 30-, 40-, 50- year old woman first finds that tell-tale gray hair, she rushes to a mirror for further investigation and then call up her bosom friends for counselling (only the ones who’ve grayed before her of course - the rest are lying bitches who've probably been dying their hair for years without admitting it anyway. Not good-book material at that delicate moment!).
But eventually we’ll all have to sit down with just our reflection for company and take the greatest test of self-acceptance. If we pass the test, we’ll accept that though time may not be catching up yet, the race has started. Our looks have not yet left us but they've started packing their bags (and ‘bags’ is a dirty word when one has been in denial about the shadows under one’s eyes for so long).
If we're wise, we'd admit it wasn’t really just the gray hair either. The weight that will have started piling on will not be an easily removable bit of a tummy anymore: those areas which have never been fat targets before will be developing into retirement homes for it. Our cute, little ass will seem less little, and by consequence, less cute, our thighs slightly more reminiscent of those of a Reubens' beauty than Twiggy's, and our lower legs.... hmm…..‘fuller’.....
It probably won’t just be the weight, either. We may have to admit that the smile creases round our mouth are threatening to become certifiable wrinkles, and that the subtle frown lines and the crow’s feet round the eyes were now detectable from some 15 millimetres further away from the mirror than the year before. Oh what the hell - wee lines that weren’t there a decade before will seem to be cropping up everywhere. And perhaps because we know what reality minus our push up bra is about, we finally admit that our boobs have started threatening to race each other to the ground ….and even our ass seems to be planning a trip South.
This is when the decision is taken: either to go down fighting or surrender to defeat on the spot. The truth is, if we dare be crudely honest with ourselves, that we're fighting a lost battle from the start. We are going down-hill anyway: it’s just a matter of when and how, and even our control on the ‘when’ is questionable.
Firstly, if God wills us to live long enough we'll eventually grow old, wrinkled and ugly in any event (uglier, if we’ve never been blessed with extra-enviable looks in the first place). Our breasts will slowly overlap our waist and our faces will wilt, whatever we do that is short of repeated surgery to make us end up looking like some eerily expressionless, sexually ambivalent Barbie doll with a serious case of thyroxin imbalance.
Whether it’s because we’re optimists or just sad, gullible victims of advertising campaigns, most of us will launch the fight. We'll fill our bathroom shelves with ‘total care’ face cream, eye cream, lip cream, under-eyes-this, eye-contour-that. We’d always played Cinderella to our face and washed, scrubbed, exfoliated and cleansed for all we were worth, but now the routine will take on a new urgency: milks, gels, washes, serums, creams...If it promises to be skin-replenishing, eye-refreshing, pore-tightening or some other how stall time for five seconds we’re ready to dig in our pockets and slap it on. And woe unto our man if he dares to ask why. Given its name, the ‘total care’ cream was obviously NOT doing it all. Magazines, diets, slimming treatments, hairstyles, workout routines.... some of us will go through them with the same lithe gusto with which Liz Taylor went through husbands.
But to what effect? My aunt has spent a fortune, and then some more, on anti-ageing treatment. My mum occasionally resorted to a bottle of ‘Oil of Ulay’. Today, at nearly sixty, they both look…how do I put this?.....ummmm…...sixty? And my aunt is the younger of the two!
So is the fight worthwhile? The short answer is it probably is not. Men would say it's not. But then men can see the far-fetched rationale in our National football team taking on Spain again. They can also see nobility in fighting to the last man in an obviously falling St Elmo! So where is the insanity of a woman’s decision to fight the course for beauty’s sake?
And more importantly, is it really a woman’s decision? Is it her nature that leads her to this fight? Is it a question worth considering when we live in a culture that daily threatens women through adverts that tell her it is shameful to look her age if she is a day over thirty? That she owes it to herself to go to extraordinary measures in her quest for eternal beauty? That the modern woman never grows old and, most resoundingly, that men fall for women who don’t grow old?
Let’s face it: advertising campaigns are basically feeding on a knowledge that’s as old as the human subconscious - most definitely a little voice in every woman’s head tells her that men want younger, more sprightly women and, at the same time, a little voice in many men’s pants screams the same thing twenty four on seven. It’s what evolution has programmed into the sadder sex: big hips, big tits, child-bearing age.
So there seems to be a resounding, universal agreement about this point: men tend to go for younger women or at least - because they’re somewhat stupid or maybe just plain shallow - younger-looking women. Hence, does this crippling obsession concerning a woman's self-preservation have its roots not in women’s DNA...... but in men’s?
To complicate things even further, we’re now expected to be grateful to the powers that be that new EU regulations on accountability in the claims of beauty products are being drafted. Well, they do get my perfunctory ‘thank you’ for the effort, but let’s face it, these policies are way overdue. If there are so many regulations protecting every damn feather that flies over this little island, how come they haven’t as yet come up with anything decent to protect our pockets from false claims on products?
On the other hand, I reconsider. I, too, will find my first gray one day and then, thanks to the EU I’ll be able to get my hands on products that will tell me exactly how they will (not) affect my ageing process: ‘Dinkey face cream smells nice but will do pretty, damn nothing long-term for old bats like you’ the EU-approved literature will scream. I wonder if that will be the kind of honesty I'll want after decades of imbibing the ‘look young’ message from a male-dominated society that’s reflected everywhere I turn? Who are these people, up there in some EU institution, to deny me the psychological crutch of an anti-ageing placebo when they have never lifted a finger to do anything to make that crutch unnecessary?
It’s unlikely the wise people making up part of this EU institution are planning to mess around with men’s DNA, or to re-program the human subconscious to make the rules of attraction read ‘menopausal, sagging tits and crow’s feet lines’ as ‘great sex without the emotional and self-centered outbursts of the younger specimen’. So, even if I know that finally time will emerge victorious, when push comes to shove I’d rather face that first gray hair with the empty promises of a false fountain of youth than the super-honest nothings coming our way, thank you.
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