I watched one single make up tutorial video earlier and now I feel extremely distressed about my face and my failure to perform femininity. That’s all it took! The woman used some sort of product that “blurred“ her pores. She pleasantly referred to it as a “filter effect”. I watched her skin go from a normal human texture to, yes, looking like an Instagram filter in real life, mimicking digital manipulation. I immediately became aware that my face is not smooth, and desperately wished I had whatever the fuck she just smeared thickly over her entire face so it would be, so my skin wouldn’t look human anymore.
Just the feeling of my skin under my fingers without a mirror or camera was enough to make me cry. I am fighting a lifelong battle against my acute distress about my body. To be reduced to tears from a single video feels equal parts pathetic and a brutal representation of the unbearable pressure every female person lives under. I can track what these tears mean more accurately now than ever. I am upset because my face has texture instead of being smooth, because being smooth means being beautiful, because being beautiful is dangled as a false promise that you will be happier and treated better by your peers. My smooth and textureless face would signal to everyone around me that I am aware of how to be a beautiful woman and possess the time, skills, means, and energy to achieve it. My flawed and human face signals that I am hopeless, lazy, stupid, etc.
The battle is long and hard and feels stupid. I no longer allow photos of myself to be taken, and on the rare occasion one is taken without my permission, I avoid it stringently. I no longer participate in selfie culture, except when I am weak and I do, reducing myself again to implicitly begging to be seen as beautiful, worthwhile, but not even myself as these things, but carefully chosen, carefully angled false image of myself. To be honest when I see selfies, what I really see is how many pictures before and after that image were discarded, how many minutes or possibly hours we have spent staring at one dimensional images of ourselves taken in short bursts, poring over them for supposed flaws until the images warp and all we see is a monster. Every time a woman posts a picture of her self With a disclaimer, sorry my hair is messed up, ignore my eyebrows, sorry these are dumb, lmao I’m so ugly, I know that she, like myself right now, is losing this battle in the war of her lifetime.
I don’t take pictures. I don’t post pictures. The mirror is OK now, most of the time. But sometimes all it takes is one little thing and it’s not. Beauty is truly a trap. How far is not being able to leave your house without make-up on from full-blown scopophobia that leaves one housebound? And of course it’s not just make up. Whatever beauty standards target and paralyze you, and things constantly escalate. From makeup to plastic surgery, etc. From being satisfied with 50 likes to 500 and 5000 and 50000 and constantly seeing who has more, telling yourself that if you had that much, you wouldn’t feel something positive that lasts instead of a brief rush quickly replaced by that empty feeling.
I don’t tell myself that anymore but I can feel the remnants of those neural pathways firing. I am laying in bed letting the poisonous wishes pass by my mind. Wishing my skin was smooth like an Instagram filter and that my hair looked like a shampoo commercial, that I had the money to spend on an incredible array of shapewear, that I could open up my body in a character creator and change it all until I looked like something easily consumable, sellable, stylish.
I don’t want to want to be the product: Woman™. I want to just be what I am.
tangentwithtanner
germansingergirl
amandla
areudirty
titsay
