Falsies have become my preoccupation. But clearly not just mine. I could buy a mascara called Falsies to give myself "the ultimate false lash glam look". But why do that when I could just wear enormous false eyelashes? Or, better still, spend a small fortune on lash extensions, which hopefully wouldn't fall off for a few weeks if tended lovingly. It all seems a lot of time and energy, really.
On the train or at the supermarket I see many young girls with long, spidery, glittery lashes, even when in their uniforms. I quite like this overalls-and-drag-queen look. I like the lack of pretence that this is real. But how did we get here, I wonder – to this new aesthetic of femininity where everything is meant to look as fake as possible? Hair, nails, tan, teeth, tits. Sure, I know the rules: that we are born naked, and "the rest is just drag". Sure, I get the hyper-femininity of the big queens and the game old birds such as Dolly Parton and Cher. What is strange is that a parody of femininity is now what many ordinary women are aspiring to.
There was time when falsies were the pads shoved down your bra to make your breasts seem bigger, a kind of comedy stuffing. Now the stuffing is put directly inside the flesh, in the form of silicon implants. While not as cheap as chips, false breasts are certainly becoming as common as them.
The "boob job" industry is massive. Boom boom. And everyday. Cosmetic surgery was once only the province of the rich, famous and deluded. It was surely another era when I was ferried to an American TV studio to debate with the legendary Betty Friedan and some daft woman who was claiming that her breast enlargement was a political act. A grouchy Freidan keep shouting into my ear: "So she thinks she can buy big bazookas, right?" It was a struggle to explain I was on Friedan's side, and now I wonder if anyone would even bother with this discussion. The political language of empowerment about reproductive rights and equality in the workplace has itself been given a makeover. Gok Wan makes women feel better not by giving them more actual control, but by giving them control pants.
As the inimitable satire website The Onion once wrote, women "are now empowered by everything that the typical woman does". From driving the kids to school to eating energy bars! "Owning and wearing dozens of pairs of shoes is a compelling way for a woman to announce that she is strong and independent and can shoe herself without the help of a man." This is satire? Only just, says this humourless feminist.
Buying stuff is the way our culture encourages us to believe we have some kind of power. When it all goes wrong and we have bought the wrong stuff, then we discuss the morality of it all. The woman who died recently after having industrial silicone injected into her buttocks was a sad case of someone buying the wrong stuff. The moral of this story seems to be: next time you are having buttock implants, get a reputable surgeon.
It's the same with Botox, liposuction , tummy tucks and all the rest of it. People get "work done". Most discussion centres on whether that work has been done well, not whether it should have been done at all. The kind of feminism that espoused looking "natural" has pretty much lost the argument about body image. It was hardly ever going to be a fair match: some activist women against an entire military-industrial-cosmetic complex geared up towards getting us to commodify our own bodies. That's right. I am not saying that men do not objectify the female body, but now the gaze we direct at ourselves, at each other and in the mirror is a harsh one, too. It is sexualised in that we see what the body could become, as well as what it is. It is the gaze of search and destroy, and it certainly affects the inner lives of those who are not perfect. Which is a fair few of us.
Heath, happiness and relationships are secondary to what Catherine Hakim provocatively calls "erotic capital". This is the basic "if you've got it, flaunt it" model to wave in the face of feminism. It doesn't wind me up particularly. What is key here is who defines erotic capital, and how. Today's templates of beauty for women are very samey, but they rarely occur in nature. The tall, slim-hipped figure with huge, pert breasts – basically the body of a Brazilian transsexual – was sought after for a while. Now we are told bottoms are making a comeback (where HAVE they been all these years?). These things are spoken about it in vacuum, as if we are not allowed to talk about the racial aspects of "the bootylicious".
Increasingly, surgery cuts across race, gender and age alike. The girl in Miami has a nose job just as the woman in Tehran does. Signs of ethnicity can be erased, other signifiers or "capital" can be purchased. And once you have made a purchase, you want people to see that you have. The fashion – or indeed fetish – for fakery means women are actually asking surgeons to make their implants look as fake as their tans. Certainly, the way to counter what is going on here has to be strategic.
One way is to promote a diversity of body shapes and all kinds of beauty. Susie Orbach is launching an Endangered Species International Summit. The purpose of this is to "challenge the culture that teaches girls and women to hate their own bodies". Who could argue with that? For it is the entire culture, not a male conspiracy, that is making impossible demands. Yet none of this is simple.
Artificially enhanced femininity is on display everywhere. Older women pay to look younger. Young women start altering themselves very early on. One result is a kind of glazed uniformity. You see it in porn. You see it in all those late-30s, Botoxed faces that look neither old nor young, just done.
Somehow, though, something else is going on that is blowing apart any idea of "the natural". Some women are not saying, "this is what I really look like", rather they are saying, "enjoy the performance". Just as a drag queen would. The media then scrutinises this performance of femininity entirely as a construction. This radical idea – that gender is constructed – is being acted out in all this fakery. But as an aesthetic, depoliticised "style".
Lady Gaga may sing Born This Way, while clearly demonstrating with her hard body – complete with internal shoulder pads/prosthesis/spare ectoplasm – that she wasn't, that this is all an act.
A look that has comes to us via porn, ladyboys, transsexuals, queer culture and high fashion is a look I now see on the bus. This excess of femininity may compensate for endless anxiety about appearances. There is nothing natural going on here, and some women are not hiding that fact. To become a woman is to become a female impersonator. How, in such a world, can we say to any young girl: "You are fine just as you are"?
