(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
The 28. February at 17 I took a pedicure and manicure on West 79th Street, Upper West Side. It is stated in my notebook. About this, I write briefly and soberly: “There was an older white woman sitting next to me and giving detailed instructions to a younger Asian woman about how she wanted it. Talked about getting old. Called himself like a brown, shrunken apricot. ”I like to admit it. I'm a voyeur. In all secrecy, I constantly listen to people's conversations and watch their interactions with each other in the public space. In my bag I have a Moleskine notebook. If I forgot the notebook, napkins, paper bags or the back of bills will come out. It gives a certain intellectual satisfaction to document things I overlook and see, people who never return. As a writing person, it trains my gaze for stories and connections, and for life to be bigger than me and my smartphone. At least that's what I tell my self-righteous self. But if I'm going to be completely, quite frankly, it still matters more like Joan Didion writes about in the essay On Keeping a Notebook (1968) – that we who have this tendency to note, collect and thus perpetuate stolen moments of people's lives do most for our own sake. It's about remembering what it was like to be me. Didion writes that it is difficult to admit this, because we are raised on the basis of an ethic that we should be the least interesting person in a room. Thus, Didion believes that only the very young and very old tell about their dreams over breakfast, or interrupt with nostalgic memories of fine dresses or a rainbow trout once fished. We others, we as adults, we care more about other people's dresses and trout. When I write myself back to that afternoon in February, digging into why exactly this made such a big impression, it strikes me that it is about fear. The fear that one day I'm sitting in a massage chair and referring to myself as shriveled fruit. That one day I hear myself say things like, "I can't live without shaking my toes and my hands every four weeks," and that one day I'll bring my own shower soap to the beauty salon, with a scent that was popular twenty – thirty – forty years earlier. The scent of past youth. I remember clearly when I first saw the gray hair of a year and a half ago. "Neiiiiiii!" I said aloud to my mirror image and sent a self-pitying text message to my partner. A quick google search on "when do women normally get gray hair?" showed that for some, it starts as early as the age of 24. Fun fact: 23 other people are interested in the same theme, believe the search history. Raw industry. We are obviously many passengers in the same fear-of-aging boat, and just as many commercial players know how to make money from this. In few places is this as pronounced as in the United States. According to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, in 300, 000 cosmetic surgeries were performed, an increase of 2014 percent since 15. This trend has continued despite the country having experienced one of its worst economic crises since the depression in the 622s. years. The biggest increase is in minimally invasive procedures such as botox and restylane injections, chemical treatments and laser hair removal. The flourishing of metrosexual beauty ideals in the 866st century means that more and more men are also fixating on their appearance, especially with breast reductions, as well as nose and eyelid surgery.
Eternal youth is not only related to a neat and well-groomed exterior, but also to virginity.
As an American philosopher, I tend to say that everything the best the world has to offer comes from here (social liberation movements, sophisticated critical theory and feminist philosophy, the best universities, the world's most beautiful roadtrip stretch along the California coast), but possibly the worst: a crude one beauty industry, hypercapitalism and a double-minded double-standards of sexuality. As the feminist writer Jessica Valenti, who next year publishes her autobiography with the title Sex Object: A Memoir, has stated, American women grow up in a culture that rewards women for being sexy but hates them for having sex. Eternal youth is not only related to a neat and well-groomed exterior, but also to virginity. The United States is the country where young girls give so-called virginity pledges and enter into symbolic marriages with his fathers on so-called Purity Balls. If you still have committed a breach of the ideal of virginity, there is advice: You can get artificial virgin skin, or decorate your genitals a little. «Restore Sexual Pleasure. Feel Tight And Wanted Again With Surgery, ”attracts online ads for vaginal youthfulness. In reality, this euphemism conceals that it is a form of genital mutilation in late modern, capitalist and beauty-industrial packaging. Resignation. Although, of course, there is a big difference between being a woman in the African countryside who is being held by force and getting her genitals cut with a dirty razor, and voluntarily lying under the plastic surgeon's knife on a sterile operating table in the western world – the phenomenon is about the politics of aging. Politics fades differently in time and space, but is rooted in a historical obsession with female youthfulness, which can be observed in most cultures around the world. The trend is more striking here in the US than at home in Norway. But it seems that many women, no matter how well feminist schooled we are, have given up. I see it myself when I stand there in front of the mirror and converse with my wrinkles and tease out the gray hairs, one by one. My notebook is constantly being filled with records of prominent American feminists, who are a few generations older than myself, and who seem to have completely surrendered. A few weeks ago, I was at an event at Barnard Women's College that gathered several interesting women for a panel discussion on beauty and aging. The once hard-hitting feminist Naomi Wolf emerged as completely resigned. She stated, for example, that facelifts can "be liberating on one's journey if one decides to do so," and that we must not get women who want to be pretty ashamed. A young woman in the hall got good tips on being a little more class conscious. When Wolf, as a young woman herself, came to Yale's elite university to study, she – who did not belong to the upper middle class – had to learn to wear light clothing, mind you. Women need to learn the difference between sexual charm and tactful professionalism, we were told. Is it really the same woman as in the book? The Beauty Myth documented how thousands of young American girls have died of anorexia, and described how women's sexual self-esteem is forced to their knees by the porn industry? The same woman who in the nineties warned against the health dangers of breast implants, and explained how beauty myths mutate so that even older, affluent women can be sex objects a little longer? You can cheat. In the same debate, Rhoda Narins (who in addition to being a Barnard alumni has also established herself as a dermatologist with botox and facelifts as her specialty) said that women only have to find themselves working twice as much as men: “If you look good, feel you better yourself – and then others treat you better too. Unjust? That's the way the world is. ” Ms. Wolf had no objections. The message from all sides is that you can not win. Does the policy of aging also involve the policy of resignation? I do not know anymore. But I know I'll keep writing notes. To remember what it's like to be me. It is simply a question of not losing your mind in a world where we are constantly told that your rainbow trout, your dress and your dream are less important than others, and that it is "feminist liberating" to exchange self-worth for the benefit for erotic capital. Anne Bitsch is a social geographer and columnist in Ny Tid. Visiting researcher at Columbia University in the spring of 2015.
