by Libby Brooks
The question is whether there is something in the contemporary experience of childhood that makes bullying behaviour more likely. There is the fear that violence on screen makes children more aggressive towards one another. But if childhood is an experience of disempowerment, perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that some children misuse the only power they hold: over each other.
Laura says her teachers didn’t really notice what was going on until she left, and by then it was too late. When so many people start not to like you, you have to think it’s something about you. ‘I always feel like people judge me when they meet me and I always think it must be something to do with the way I look. I maybe don’t look good enough or look right for people to like me.’
And this is how the spell was cast: ‘When they started beating me up I actually remember thinking to myself, “I want to be pretty.” Part of me thought something must look wrong with me for them to hate me so much and part of me thought if I become really pretty next time I see them that’ll show them that I don’t care what they did to me.’ But the more she tried to make herself pretty the uglier she felt. ‘I used to spend hours just staring in the mirror and it got quite bad, every morning, every evening. If I wanted to get to school on time I’d wake up at six in the morning, though I didn’t have to leave till half-eight and sometimes I wouldn’t get in till eleven.’
Laura wears her make-up like armour. It appears impermeable, as though it will protect her from all onslaughts. Beneath, the skin may not actually be able to breathe. Though she is attractive, it is her own cosmetic painting that renders her striking – glossily female, defensively so. Laura still feels ugly enough to die, but the bullies have moved on to the next person. Sometimes she’ll see them on the street and they’ll look through her like she doesn’t exist.
Laura lives in a tall house with many rooms in a nice part of town, sandwiched between an even more expensive area and a rotten estate. She calls this the patchwork. In the other rooms live her sister, who is twenty-one, her brother, who is eighteen, and their mother, a university lecturer, who divorced from their father when Laura was five. They have lived here for as long as she can remember.
She did make some friends when she moved to her second school. There’s a group of nine of them, all girls, and they’re extremely close. She’d never found that before apart from with her sister, but with these friends she can be completely herself. They go round to each other’s houses, or up on to the common. They have parties when people’s parents are away or when they make friends with rich boys with big houses. They buy the vodka and buy the Coke and mix it. She giggles. Not very classy.
She doesn’t consider herself a child, but ‘teenager’ doesn’t sound nice either, because teenagers aren’t given any credit at all. ‘They’re made out like these creatures that for seven years of their life stop feeling for other human beings. I think really they’re just more sensitive than most people but not good at showing it.’
‘That might be a reason teenagers get pissed off with parents is that parents are always asking how you feel and sometimes you don’t want to talk about it because you just don’t know how to.’ When Laura can’t explain herself out loud she writes poetry, or writes in her diary. She’s been to see loads of psychologists – she attends an NHS child and family psychologist now – but some really aren’t good at their jobs. ‘When I was in the psychiatric unit the psychology there was really good. But I’ve been to see a few that were really crap.’
Laura never went back to the school with that one stupid boy. Over the past few weeks she’s been sleeping late and feeling low. Today she’s wearing no make-up and her skin is peachy and plump. Her voice is still so slight it’s as though a wicked fairy has stolen it away, but her mood is more combative. Perhaps it’s because she’s only just got up. She’s sitting outside in the garden by a patio table strewn with empty ten-packs of Malboro Lights. She’s still seeing the psychologist once a week, but it’s moving quite slowly. Her dad and her psychiatrist want her to go back to hospital, to the intermediate unit that’s next to the one she was in before. She’s refusing, and her mum’s on her side too.
‘Like, I do want to get better and I know it is affecting my life in a big way but I don’t want to miss out on my whole social life and my summer being stuck in some mental hospital.’ She pulls a face. ‘There’s maybe this other clinic that I would go four times a week, or I might go to this place called Fitzroy House in September which is like a day hospital where you get education and therapy but you don’t have to live there.’
She’s still dissatisfied with her appearance. ‘But it’s getting better, because I used to have really bad mood-swings every day and now it’s just once a week. And before I’d blank my friends for weeks because I thought I didn’t look good enough and now nearly every weekend I go out with them. And that’s why I don’t want to go back into hospital. If my life’s at least OK then I’d rather be outside.’ She’s very convincing.
Laura is looking slim today. Her weight goes up and down. Before, she was on Prozac. She thinks that it really makes you lose weight and she was seven and a half stone. (Prozac is not usually associated with weight loss.) Then she went into hospital, and she was just lying in bed getting her dad to bring in McDonalds. A few weeks later she was nine stone. ‘The whole time I was on Prozac I didn’t cry once – Prozac won’t let you cry. It blocks your depression off from you, just makes you happy, and that just meant I was bottling my depression up even more,’ she states knowledgably.
She just gets so frustrated with the way she looks. ‘I think it’s unfair that some people are born into life looking so much better than other people and they get treated better throughout their lives because of it.’ She’s sparring. ‘And I feel like people are always going to judge me because I don’t look as good.’ There’s definitely a lot of pressure put on girls and women to look a certain way: ‘Because men, if they’re not good-looking they can still get far in life just by being intelligent or funny. But girls are told you have to be good-looking as well as everything else.’
Laura has been diagnosed as suffering from body dysmorphic disorder, a recently registered condition which was only reported on by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence in 2005, and which is thought to be a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder. As yet under-recognised and under-researched, it is defined as ‘a preoccupation with some imagined defect in appearance’, and preliminary estimates suggest that it may be present in up to 8 per cent of cases of depression.
Even in cases less extreme than Laura’s, levels of dissatisfaction amongst girls with their bodies are high and rising. Four in ten teenage girls surveyed by the magazine Bliss in 2005 said that they had considered plastic surgery. Two thirds of the 2,000 fourteen and fifteen-year-olds who took part in the questionnaire said that pressure to look ‘perfect’ came from comparing themselves unfavourably with celebrities.
Interestingly, they turned this pressure on each other. Of the one in six who said that they had been bullied, the majority had been harassed because of what they looked like. Only 8 per cent were happy with their bodies, while a quarter had suffered from an eating disorder.
The cultural critic John Berger once wrote: ‘A woman … is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself … She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to others, and ultimately how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as her success in life.’
The accessibility of cosmetic procedures, along with a cohort of minor celebrities who are glad to discuss their own surgical enhancement, is gradually distorting not only young girls’ idea of what is beautiful, but their notion of what is natural. The more shapes and sizes that become technically possible, the slimmer our inventory of desirable looks becomes.
In many ways, it is the logical extension of the way that capitalism has co-opted the language of empowerment to sell shampoo and mascara, ‘becaus
e you’re worth it’. After more than a century of the women’s movement fighting for the right to participate in public life, liberation has been appropriated for the private preoccupation with presentation. What this tells young women is: you can’t change the world but you can, and indeed you have a responsibility to, change yourself.
Aside from the physical consequences and side-effects, how does the burgeoning trade in surgical self-improvement shape young women’s sense of self? In her 1990 classic The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf described the inevitable conclusion of what she called ‘the Surgical Age’: ‘Women in our “raw” or “natural” state will continue to be shifted from the category “woman” to the category “ugly”, and shamed into an assembly-line physical identity. As each woman responds to the pressure, it will grow so intense that it will become obligatory until no self-respecting woman will venture outdoors with a surgically unaltered face.’
Worst of all, the further we grope towards commodified physical perfection, the further we stray from what makes us individual – the flaws, the scars, the deterioration. The more we define our own attractiveness in terms of what we can construct, the less likely we are to have a truthful discussion about the nature of attraction itself.
Laura lists her plastic surgery requirements without pause for thought: ‘I want a boob job as soon as I’m eighteen. I want liposuction and lip enhancement and eye-bag removal.’ There’s no point in questioning the motives behind plastic surgery, she says. ‘It’s so much easier said than done, to just be happy with the way you are. People don’t have problems with you wearing make-up, though I know that’s not permanent. But if you feel self-conscious about the way you look, what’s wrong with paying to change it?’
She’s not been feeling so good about the way she looks recently. ‘I think that’s one of the reasons I’m not getting out of the house much is ’cos it takes so much effort to get ready.’ Her routine is extensive and well-honed. ‘First of all I have to prepare my outfit, then have a bath, shave everywhere, and exfoliate, then have a shower and wash my hair, ’cos I don’t like doing it in the bath, blow-dry my hair, straighten it, moisturise, fake tan, then I have to wait around for the fake tan to dry, then put my outfit on, deodorant, do a hairstyle, and then all the stages of my make-up, foundation, concealer, powder, blusher, then eye make-up, eye-shadow, eye-liner and mascara, then lipstick, then accessorise.’ She comes to rest. ‘But it’s the bath and fake tan that takes so long.’
She learned her routine from magazines. She doesn’t exactly feel better afterwards, but she does feel like she’s acceptable to go outside. She only goes out at night now because it takes the whole day to get ready. It’s difficult with magazines. ‘Everything always appeals to me. They do make me feel depressed about the way I look ’cos there’s a pretty woman on every page. And – this is going to sound so spoilt ’cos I’ve got loads already – but it makes you wish you had enough money to buy everything. It makes you want to be a celebrity so you could buy everything.’
‘In a way I think the magazines are a bit wrong ’cos of the way the women in them are absolutely flawless. And you know you buy cigarettes and it says on the packet “these will kill you”? It’s not the same at all but girls look at those adverts and think that’s what they should look like and there’s no sign underneath saying “these women are completely airbrushed and fake and no one ever looks that perfect”.’ She looks pleased with a point well-made. The trouble is that the longer Laura stays at home because she feels ugly, the more time she has to pore over those magazine images of supermodels, and the less chance she has to compare herself to other ordinary teenagers, with doughy skin and thick thighs.
Once you have such a set opinion of yourself it stays in your mind and it’s hard to change, she says. ‘Sometimes, when I’m with my psychologist and she’s doing all her little therapy things, it’s just really simple stuff. Like she’ll give me a thought that I have about myself, like “I look bad”, and then give me an alternative thought, like “I look good”, so whenever I think I look bad I have to think of the alternative thought. And you can’t really imagine that something that simple will actually work.’ The delivery is sweet enough, but there’s sharpness beneath. Laura is an unhappy creature, but she is tough. It remains to be seen whether she is ultimately a survivor.
The girl gang she ran with, who eventually became her tormentors, were hard: ‘That whole period of my life I was lean, smoking so much draw, high the whole time. They were such street rats, so violent towards each other.’ There is revisionist disgust, spiked with a shot of residual pride.
‘I was just trying to be something I wasn’t, like I was some rude girl, speaking like them, dressing like them. At the end of the day there’s no point in that whole attitude of “I’m from the ghetto, I’m so hard”, because I’ve got a nice house and I’m quite obviously not from the ghetto.’ She laughs easily at herself. ‘The only way I made friends with them was by completely acting like I was someone else.’
But everybody does it. ‘It’s the culture today. Teenagers nowadays aspire to violence and that’s it. They see all these American gangsters and think “that’s what I want to be.” Boys think they have to fight to prove they’re big strong men, and lots of girls fight to look good in front of the boys.’
‘They think it’s cool, anything American rappers do, all the violence and the money, the way they talk, all the clothes they wear, that whole image of being a pimp and being a gangster.’ That’s just what boys learn – that the only way to treat women is for sex.
That hoary double standard is astonishingly persistent. ‘It’s fine for them to have sex all they want, but as soon as there’s a girl who enjoys sex she’s a slag. They’ll ask her to do all this stuff and if she actually does it she’s a ho or a slut. She gets a reputation, and once other girls hear about that – girls can be stupid sometimes too – they’ll beat her up. But if you don’t do something with a boy then the boy will get pissed off with you and go round saying you’re a slag, so you get the reputation either way.’
There’s a desultory acceptance of the status quo. And Laura has met a new boy, called Kevin. It’s not a very nice name, she says hastily. Kevin is seventeen, and he’s at some music production college. They’re going out, so she’s spending quite a lot of time with him. Sometimes friends will set you up with a boy, but usually if you’re flirting with someone, it’s meant to be the boy who makes the first move. You think boys are more confident but recently they aren’t like that. It’s usually the girl who has to be quite forward.
‘I think boys are more insecure than they let on, and I definitely think women are getting more and more confident.’ But there’s a vivid dissonance between that and the ‘ho’ culture. ‘In one way you think that women are becoming much more powerful, with Sex and the City and women being portrayed as so independent. But the stuff that’s being most projected towards teenagers, the music videos and rappers, you watch any of those videos and it’s literally like women standing there in their underwear dancing for men. And then you turn on the female singers like Beyoncé and she’s just writhing around in her underwear. If girls are just going to stand there and look like all they have to offer is their bodies then you can’t really blame men for treating them that way.’
When Laura dresses up she can look fairly Beyoncé-esque herself. A few weeks later, it’s midday, and she’s just come in from a night at Kevin’s. She looks dewy. She’s wearing a short black skirt, a stripey off-the-shoulder top and heels. Her limbs seem airbrushed. Two long diamanté threads hang from her ears. Aside from a faint haze of self-consciousness, she might be twenty. She rearranges her legs, and fashions her arms into a cradle for one knee.
Kevin doesn’t know a lot about her history. Only recently she told him about being depressed and going to hospital. He doesn’t ask too many questions, and she likes that. She sniffles. It’s hay fever. She’s been seeing Kevin for nearly two months now and it’s fine. They see each other a few
times a week, which is better than when she went out with boys at school and you’d see them every day at lunch-time.
Her mum is OK with her staying over at his place. She was a bit weird about it at first. ‘Some of my friends’ mums are completely fine, and my friends have boys to stay at their house all the time, and some of my friends’ parents are really strict. So I think my mum didn’t really know which kind of mum she should be,’ she explains indulgently, ‘but she trusts me.’
It’s fine to stop when you want. ‘I think Kevin lost his virginity to his last girlfriend, and the first time I stayed at his house he didn’t know me that well, and he didn’t know that I was a virgin so he tried to have sex with me. But I’m quite scared to lose my virginity so I think he understands that and he doesn’t really mention it now.’
Of the nine girls in her friendship group, three have lost their virginity, but one of them only had sex once. Some of them don’t care, some of them have real principles about how long you should wait, and some of them are just really scared.
There are lots of reasons why Laura hasn’t done it yet: ‘I’m scared ’cos everyone says it really hurts the first time. I know that when I wear outfits like this’ – she gestures to her troublemaking skirt – ‘it seems like I’m really comfortable with my body, but I’m not that comfortable being naked around boys. There’s not that many things in life that once you give away you can never get back, but I think my purity, my innocence …’ – the thought gets a little tangled – ‘… I could never say I was pure again.’ She shakes her head. ‘It sounds a silly reason.’
Most of Laura’s friends have experienced some sort of miserable time. One took a small overdose; another used to be bulimic and now she never eats. The friend under discussion calls on the mobile at just that moment: ‘Jessie, hey baby, can I call you back in half an hour? Love you.’