Some days I feel like I would be too much of an affront to walk down the street at my age
September 23, 2024 6:00 am(Updated 6:01 am)
I was reading a review of The Substance, Demi Moore’s new film about an ageing Hollywood actress who succumbs to the allure of a new procedure that promises – with, naturally, certain caveats – eternal youth. A younger self can be extracted from the yucky middle-aged body and be employed again. As I finished reading, a fuzzy rectangle blurred the page and invited me to click on it and find out “The Ten Most Attractive Women of Our Time”. The internet is great for irony.
Because of course, it is precisely this endless reduction, this endless categorisation of women into attractive or not attractive (or sexy or not sexy, Hot or Not), accompanied, according to the feature’s intent, by flattering or unflattering pictures of the person in question, that the film is built around. Moore is perfect casting.
Her face and body have been relentlessly scrutinised since she first made her name in the mid-1980s, becoming part of the Brat Pack (along with Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez, Molly Ringwald, Ally Sheedy and so on) that dominated the box office with films like St Elmo’s Fire and About Last Night. She was the hot one, it was generally agreed. Molly Ringwald was the pretty one. Ally Sheedy was quirky-slash-intellectual, and generally dropped off the lists and eventually the pop culture radar.
Now Moore is 61 and the fascination with whether and how she has kept her looks (face lifts? Fillers? Implants you-know-where? Hot monkey sex with former toyboy Ashton Kutcher?) has dominated the last 25 years or so of coverage, since she stopped being such a hugely bankable star but never lost her ability to shift magazines or rack up online clicks.
Moore says in publicity interviews for the film that it has allowed her to confront the issue of ageing, of discomfort with her own body, and feel empowered by doing so. Which, if true, is wonderful. God knows, she’s earned it.
I wonder how the rest of us are supposed to go about it, though? The Substance is well-populated with figures representing the external pressures faced by women (for example, the producer auditioning a young hopeful who comments: “Too bad her tits aren’t in the middle of her face”) but it’s equally good (underneath an exuberantly gory body-horror carapace) on how profoundly women internalise those pressures and the inner deformation that inevitably brings.
I was always told, when I was going through the usual – I was about to say natural but I think the whole point here is that there is nothing innate about hating your body; it is an induced state – insecurities about my adolescent appearance, and then my failure in my twenties to emerge as a graceful swan as so many of my contemporaries were doing, that soon I would be old enough not to care.
I would be happy with myself, able to look in the mirror without mentally bracing myself for the lacklustre collection of facial and body parts that had turned out to make me me, to be comfortable – nay, even grateful! – for what I had, which at least functioned as it should and caused me no physical pain.
Thirty years on I am still waiting. The pressures on women to stay thin (though they call it “healthy” now, and you have to pretend it’s a wellness rather than diet industry you’re buying into, for the sake of the sleekness of your organs rather than hair and skin) are just as great, if not greater.
With the internet, our culture has become more visual not less, and combined with the ever-growing number of procedures and interventions that can be carried out (from tiny “tweakments to ever more radical cosmetic surgeries) the aesthetic standards to which women are supposed to aspire have only become higher, arguably narrower, and certainly more costly and time-consuming.
I find that my confidence-that-was-expected-to-come-with-age has not kept pace. The most striking moment of The Substance for me was Moore’s character Elisabeth scrubbing lipstick off her face, so overcome by self-loathing that she cannot leave her apartment for a date.
There are many days of mine that follow a similar trajectory. When I feel too fat to go out, when I feel like I would be too much of an affront walking down the street at my age without having made the full effort with hair and make-up, when I sit on the sofa instead and curse my younger self for not knowing what she had when she had it and not making full use of it as a result.
And I know, rationally, that this is absurd and that I am an idiot. Strangely though, this does not make me feel any better or any more like striding confidently out of the house. The best I can do is berate myself for being so narcissistic and then slide into worrying about other generations.
Because mine – and I think those before mine – had it easy. At least our consciousnesses had a chance to form before Instagram and its pressuring, homogenising ilk arrived. When I think how powerful its trickle-down effect has been on the crone-ish likes of me, and think what girls and young women these days must be internalising, I could weep. And then I hope it’s just the last rush of hormones making me feel like this.
Perhaps once they finally leave, in the next 10 years or so, I will find at last that – as the inwardly-brutalised, even if they don’t yet know it, young people say – IDGAF. But I wonder. At the moment I think I’d take The Substance without hesitation. And so I wonder.