Self-perception: Relax now!
How it came to that, I do not remember - we had just drunk wine and talked about books. But then we suddenly stood side by side in front of the mirror, lifting our T-shirts and comparing our bellies. "I hate mine! Look how it stands!" - "But he's pretty tight for that - mine is so worn out and wobbly!" "Well, you finally gave birth to three children!" And so on. We grabbed our flesh with both hands and kneaded it with self-loathing, until the first came to himself and shouted: "Now stop it, that can not be true, we have more important issues - at our age!" This brought us to our senses and we sat down again. Grasping for our glasses and books, somehow ashamed of this relapse into the rather pubertal compulsion to detailed body criticism. Should not we stand over it slowly? After all, we were successful, interesting women, after all, in their early 30s! 15, 20 years later, we still meet regularly. It goes without saying that we are looking at photos from that time with nostalgic exclamations ("Man, was I slim once!"). We are seasoned women. We still have more important issues and still let ourselves sink into these abysses from time to time. Recently, one of us has won a prize, and the joy of this honor has been felt not only for her, but also for us by the question "What do we put on, and what do we look like in it?" almost overshadowed. How embarrassing is that? That we still do not "stand by" does not only embarrass us, it also frightens us. Will we still be entitled to fit into our age-old jeans at the age of 70? And: What's that claim? Is not there more important ... Exactly.
We can live more than one life today.
We have achieved so much in the last 30 years. We have freed ourselves. We can live more than one life today. We can have children or careers or both, even both on one side. We can earn money, exercise power, go dancing alone. The world is open to us, at least theoretically. At the same time - and this can not be a coincidence - the beauty and slimming obsession has increased so radically that he does not stop even before middle age. In the latest US election campaign, Hillary Clinton's numbers went down in flames after unflattering pictures of her had been published and a radio host had asked if America was really ready to watch a woman age. Obviously, the most urgent duty of an American president is to look good. What an unsheltered woman of 60 years, in the harsh winter light and photographed from below, is simply not possible.
What should we draw from this for a conclusion? Not only do you have to be better than a man, you also have to look better? You can not do anything, just old or fat? The obsession, the self-hatred that still plagues many women, keeps them from more important issues. This is an old feminist argument: Naomi Wolf has already set 17 years ago in her book "The Myth of Beauty" the thesis that the beauty and slimming delusion primarily serves to keep female potential in check.
Asked what they wanted from the famous fairy godmother, American women in a poll do not choose "big love" or "steep career" and not "world peace," but "lose five pounds."
English journalist Mimi Spencer, whose critically acclaimed anti-diet book will be released in Germany in February ("No Diet: 101 Things to Try Before You Go on a Diet"), found herself feeling really lucky She corrected her dress size by one size down, and found herself totally ridiculous: "I felt like I had done something great, and my girlfriends congratulated me as if I had torn my knees to the North Pole or found a cure for asthma was miserable, but I enjoyed it! "
"Oh god, the calories again!"
Hardly a woman who does not know such thoughts: Eve Ensler, the worldwide celebrated author of the "Vagina Monologues", hated her stomach so much that she dedicated a full-length episode ("The good body") to him. In one scene, she is sitting in a back room in Kabul behind a curtain, surrounded by admirers who had organized a bowl of vanilla ice cream in gratitude for her educational work. A not only expensive, but also totally forbidden decadent delicacy, which they had provided at the risk of their lives. Holding her breath, they watch the celebrated feminist author take the spoon to her mouth.And all Eve Ensler could think of at that moment was, "Oh God, the calories again!" A book by director Nora Ephron, which has made a very different contribution to improving female reality, namely the development of the romantic comedy for the thinking woman ("Harry and Sally", "Julie & Julia"), means "The neck never lies - My life as a woman in the best years ". And that's what it's all about over 100 pages. Around her neck, which is wrinkled. And the turtlenecks behind which she hides him (as does Diane Keaton as playwright Erica Barry in "What the heart desires"). To her hair, which are dyed. Hair color is, according to the 68-year-old author, the greatest achievement of the modern age. And the need to preserve appearance. "About Maintenance" is the chapter in which Nora Ephron lists what she needs to look like. Have hair professionally softened, apply various cream layers in the morning and evening, bleach teeth, paint nails, lift dumbbells (probably not in this order). She comes with these measures on well eight hours a week.
I calculate and come to the conclusion that she understates beyond measure. But alright, say one hour a day, and for what all the effort? "So that I look half a year younger."
This is not new. What is new is that it does not stop. Even 20 years ago, the menopause was a kind of free ticket from the beauty prison. With a certain age came a certain freedom. The freedom to let oneself go, or at least to leave it alone. Today, there is no longer this sanctuary. Television shows such as "Desperate Housewives," celebrating the woman over 40 on the surface, show a distorted image of spindly, wrinkle-free, and teen-fashioned dressmakers. The most impressive illustration of Felicity Huffman, character actress a. D. In the movie "Transamerica", shot a year before the series, she looks ten years older than on the TV screen. But strong and idiosyncratic, unmistakable. Today she is blonde, thin, mimic-free and absolutely interchangeable. "Somehow interesting that the entire Western world is paralyzing her third eye with a deadly poison, is not it?" I recently read on a poster in a yoga studio. Also an aspect.
Why are we doing this? Who are we trying to please? The men? Experience has shown that the magic of the fairy away from five kilos not at all. So who sets these absurd standards? Society? Are the media guilty? Or are we ourselves?
Why do we demand the impossible from our dependable, familiar and comfortable bodies? We find wrinkles beautiful, old faces expressive, soft bellies sensual - but not to ourselves. Why?
And what about Madonna? Our "material girl" would be like no other predestined to cool middle age to celebrate it as well as any other of their phases and incarnations, from the sex cannon on the super yogini to the holy mother figure. The floral silk dresses of their British phase gave hope for a moment. Growing old with Madonna could be fun right away. But the thinnest 50-year-old in the world leaves us mercilessly in the lurch. She claims unabashedly that her strangely puffed, wrinkle-free face is the result of good sex. They talk more about their wire arms than about their music. And she wears fishnet stockings and satin hot pants again. How should we keep up? Do we even want? "This is what looks like 40!" - The famous saying of feminist Gloria Steinem is stuck in your throat today. Today, 40 looks like 27, and 50 is the new 30.
Is this the result of women's liberation and sexual revolution?
Because we do not know any better. We have no role models. We are no longer doomed to creep into widow's black and say goodbye to the world, but what's the alternative? To stay forever young? Plunging wrinkle-free into the grave? Is this the result of women's liberation and sexual revolution? Searching for role models, I leaf through the big, thick "Ageless issue" of American "Vogue", in which wonderful, exciting women of 70, 80 and 90 years are presented and celebrated. With great pictures. For example, the over 80-year-old gastro-critic Betty Fussel is standing on a meadow with her white hair blowing. She studied at a Northern California university in the 1940s and insisted that women in jeans could come to the lecture (assuming the shirt was in her pants). She published her first lyrics to "have money for cigarettes and beer, clothes I honestly never cared". She has never been to the hairdresser, the manicure or the beautician (if Nora Ephron probably reads "Vogue"?). She has many friends, she travels, has her favorite restaurants everywhere, and her undiluted enjoyment of food makes every meal, be it a hamburger, a feast.
Hamburger? Exactly. Betty lint makes no diet, neither the line nor the health sake. She does not bother with grains and sprouts, but eats what she feels like. And that could well be a reason for her good mood.Lucky researcher Manfred Lütz, who attests to religious beauty religious proportions and thinks that we spend more time than medieval Christians for their faith, is right for them. Selbstkasteiung brings nothing.
I consider myself actually relatively immune - relative is the deciding word.
To live happily, he says, one has to be aware of the finite nature of life. And that's exactly what we're trying to avoid with this beauty, slimming and health terror. We try to subjugate our bodies to our will. We conceive ourselves by mastering them, we dominated life and death. Bah!
I definitely prefer looking in the mirror today than I did 20 years ago, and when my body sporadically torments me with its decay symptoms, then this seizure always passes quickly. He never stops long enough to stop me from eating, drinking, going out. I'm not even vain enough to go to sleep before a photo session. As a result, I am repeatedly approached by women who congratulate me on my courage. Courage? Does it really take courage to look the way I look? As I said, I usually find myself pretty pretty. "You wear your wrinkles so confidently!" Well - mostly I do not even see her. Until I used the contact lenses, I have long since turned away from the mirror.
I owe my relative serenity to two influences: on the one hand my mother, who has left me not her classic genes, but at least her lightheartedness, with which she fell on her 70th birthday unadorned and white-haired in a high-slit designer dress - simply because they are liked it so much. Himself and nobody else. (On the contrary, some ladies of the same age did not find it fitting.) She likes clothes, she likes good food, she likes it, but she does not spend ten minutes a day on the subject. She has more important things in her head. When I compliment her, she just dismisses it: "To be beautiful is no achievement!" (Ha! That says it all!) The other fresh wind comes from San Francisco, the city in which I have lived for a long time and in which the streets are much more heterogeneous than in this country. Every week I visited the Japanese women's bath there, week by week I got used to the picture of the naked variety. Ancient, tiny Japanese women with match-legged legs wrapped in a thousand-fold crumpled skin next to luscious Jamaican women balancing their dreadlock hairstyles like beehives on their heads. See-through skin through which blue veins were shining through. Tight-stretched skin over smooth bellies, softly rolling beads, bulging buttocks and wrinkles. Young women, fat women, thin women. Tattooed shoulder blades, amputated breasts. Gradually, I lost the idea of a single valid beauty model. In this variety, I also had space, long and angular and a bit crooked, in this diversity I found myself.
When I set up my writing workshop in a former chocolate factory two years ago, it was an omen. The chocolate spirit is still in the walls, blowing through the rooms, inspired. And since we meet there, our women's evenings have changed their tone. We work together, we write four readers letters, we propose weird actions, we encourage each other, cheer each other on. And if one again "Oh God, I've gained weight again!" groans, then the others are guaranteed to call out: "Exactly!
If we do not have suitable role models, we just have to be ones ourselves.
To read and to read
? Nora Ephron: "The neck never lies, my life as a woman in the best years" (t: Theda Krohm-Linke, 192 p., 14.95 euros, Limes)? Naomi Wolf: "The Myth of Beauty" (t: Cornelia Holfe, 445 p., From 5 euros, Rowohlt Tb)? Alice Schwarzer: "The Answer" (192 p., 7.95 euros, Kiepenheuer & Witsch)? Manfred Lütz: "Lust for life: Against the diet sadists, the health mania and the fitness cult" (288 p., 8.95 euros, Droemer / Knaur)? Mimi Spencer: "No Diet: 101 things to try before you go on a diet" (t: Monika Schmalz, 320 p., 17.95 euros, Berlin Verlag)? Eve Ensler: "The Vagina Monologues" (T: Peter Staatsmann, 116 p., 7.95 euros, Piper Tb)
