Kepping Up Appearances
Zoe Williams: The high concept of Channel 4's 10 Years Younger, on every Wednesday for the don't-get-drunk-on-a-school-night crowd, is this: you take a bunch of members of the public, tell them they look unusually old and manky for their biological ages, and then sandblast them with the latest in surgical procedures to rectify this travesty.
The high concept of Channel 4's 10 Years Younger, on every Wednesday for the don't-get-drunk-on-a-school-night crowd, is this: you take a bunch of members of the public, tell them they look unusually old and manky for their biological ages, and then sandblast them with the latest in surgical procedures to rectify this travesty.
On the one hand, it's just a watered down, Anglicised version of America's The Swan, in which a bunch of plain women so charged with self-hate that they were, by any serious assessment, mentally ill, got prettified with scalpels and such.
On the other hand, though, 10 Years Younger has definitely hit on something. TV producers have known for some time that there is something compelling about the inner workings of cosmetic surgery. They originally thought it was the surgery itself that gives you the drama, but it's actually the mental process. You'd think it would be too obvious and repetitive ("Oh, the ravages of time! Oh, for the return of my stripling charms! Yik yak, botox, yik yak") for entertainment, but it isn't. In the style of so much of reality TV, it is car-crash watchable.
There is considerable cultural tension surrounding aesthetic enhancement: an awful lot of people are having it. The number of tweaks and jabs and slicings has risen by 50% in the past year alone, at an overall cost to the nation of £125m. And yet, the breadth of uptake doesn't mean that it's lost its stigma. Most of us have some abiding witch-sense that it's wrong to muck about with our physical attributes.
From there, we a) lie about whether we've had it, and b) post-rationalise its wrongness, generally in one of two directions. First, that it's against nature. The media have a very great fondness for stories about penis-enlargements gone hilariously wrong, and porn stars who have had 56 boob implants, which then exploded on a flight to Malaga. These little modern morality tales are extravagantly untrue, for the most part, and profoundly expressive of a wider distrust.
The whole business is grimly unnatural, a fact that I'd never given much thought until I was in a workshop in California the other day called The Moon and Your Womanly Health (it was for a piece, OK?). The moon lady said: "This is an ongoing love affair the moon and the sun have with each other. It can be a tug of war, or a beautiful mirror of awareness." And a woman from Kansas said: "So which moon cycle would be the best time to have my breasts enlarged?"
And yet, unnecessary surgery undermines nature no more or less than necessary surgery - it might be dafter to remove fatty deposits than it is to remove a tumour, but it's no more depraved. It's this truism that edges people towards the second anti-surgery argument, which is that it's somehow an assault on women. Although the number of physically souped-up males grows apace, they still lag significantly behind women in this business. The pressure to look perfect, long beyond your perfection window, is mainly on women. This gives us low self-esteem, which is the driving force behind plastic surgery.
It's interesting that nobody ever levels this charge at people who strive for greatness in fields outside the body. No one's ever accused Ellen MacArthur of diminishing our self-esteem by setting the bar too high for daring and resilience. Zadie Smith has never caught it for daunting our delicate lady-senses with the grandeur of her creative reach. It's an irritating, infantilising argument, this one-used, I believe, to avoid any discussion of vanity.
All urges for self-improvement are on some level competitive, but the momentum of physical vanity comes entirely from rivalry. People have botox and chemical peels not because Nicole Kidman's had them, but because their friends have had them. In 10 years, a botox-refusenik will seem as idiosyncratic as the person now who thinks they're allowed to get fat at 30, because that's just the way metabolisms work.
Nobody has ever embraced the loss of youth as one of life's delightful twists, but the idea that you could combat ageing with cash and technology, to no nobler or more communal purpose than the staving off of your own obsolescence, is a relatively recent one. It's a common enough paradox, that the more advanced we become, the more we use that advancement to indulge our most atavistic instincts: competition and self-interest.
That's the shiver of distaste we get from staring into a nipped and tucked and totally lineless face - it's not the insult to nature, or the attack on femininity contained therein. It's like staring into the face of neanderthal man. In a minute, he's going to bash you with a rock and steal your makeshift pot.
On the one hand, it's just a watered down, Anglicised version of America's The Swan, in which a bunch of plain women so charged with self-hate that they were, by any serious assessment, mentally ill, got prettified with scalpels and such.
On the other hand, though, 10 Years Younger has definitely hit on something. TV producers have known for some time that there is something compelling about the inner workings of cosmetic surgery. They originally thought it was the surgery itself that gives you the drama, but it's actually the mental process. You'd think it would be too obvious and repetitive ("Oh, the ravages of time! Oh, for the return of my stripling charms! Yik yak, botox, yik yak") for entertainment, but it isn't. In the style of so much of reality TV, it is car-crash watchable.
There is considerable cultural tension surrounding aesthetic enhancement: an awful lot of people are having it. The number of tweaks and jabs and slicings has risen by 50% in the past year alone, at an overall cost to the nation of £125m. And yet, the breadth of uptake doesn't mean that it's lost its stigma. Most of us have some abiding witch-sense that it's wrong to muck about with our physical attributes.
From there, we a) lie about whether we've had it, and b) post-rationalise its wrongness, generally in one of two directions. First, that it's against nature. The media have a very great fondness for stories about penis-enlargements gone hilariously wrong, and porn stars who have had 56 boob implants, which then exploded on a flight to Malaga. These little modern morality tales are extravagantly untrue, for the most part, and profoundly expressive of a wider distrust.
The whole business is grimly unnatural, a fact that I'd never given much thought until I was in a workshop in California the other day called The Moon and Your Womanly Health (it was for a piece, OK?). The moon lady said: "This is an ongoing love affair the moon and the sun have with each other. It can be a tug of war, or a beautiful mirror of awareness." And a woman from Kansas said: "So which moon cycle would be the best time to have my breasts enlarged?"
And yet, unnecessary surgery undermines nature no more or less than necessary surgery - it might be dafter to remove fatty deposits than it is to remove a tumour, but it's no more depraved. It's this truism that edges people towards the second anti-surgery argument, which is that it's somehow an assault on women. Although the number of physically souped-up males grows apace, they still lag significantly behind women in this business. The pressure to look perfect, long beyond your perfection window, is mainly on women. This gives us low self-esteem, which is the driving force behind plastic surgery.
It's interesting that nobody ever levels this charge at people who strive for greatness in fields outside the body. No one's ever accused Ellen MacArthur of diminishing our self-esteem by setting the bar too high for daring and resilience. Zadie Smith has never caught it for daunting our delicate lady-senses with the grandeur of her creative reach. It's an irritating, infantilising argument, this one-used, I believe, to avoid any discussion of vanity.
All urges for self-improvement are on some level competitive, but the momentum of physical vanity comes entirely from rivalry. People have botox and chemical peels not because Nicole Kidman's had them, but because their friends have had them. In 10 years, a botox-refusenik will seem as idiosyncratic as the person now who thinks they're allowed to get fat at 30, because that's just the way metabolisms work.
Nobody has ever embraced the loss of youth as one of life's delightful twists, but the idea that you could combat ageing with cash and technology, to no nobler or more communal purpose than the staving off of your own obsolescence, is a relatively recent one. It's a common enough paradox, that the more advanced we become, the more we use that advancement to indulge our most atavistic instincts: competition and self-interest.
That's the shiver of distaste we get from staring into a nipped and tucked and totally lineless face - it's not the insult to nature, or the attack on femininity contained therein. It's like staring into the face of neanderthal man. In a minute, he's going to bash you with a rock and steal your makeshift pot.
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