Traumata

by Meera Atkinson

  But let’s be clear: when we consider western women’s relationship to beauty we’re not only talking about specific practices that have cultural significance, the possible benefits of self-determined bodily practices among those who have experienced bodily violation, or the productive subcultural tribalism of certain body-modifying communities (I take it as a given that women have the right to do what they choose with their bodies). We’re talking big business based on patriarchal power structures. These manipulative, profit-making mega-industries, which are brainwashing and exploiting a largely traumatised populace, are what I want to attend to in my exploration. We’re talking beauty in the context of a turbo-capitalist, technologically advanced patriarchy, and simplistic cross-cultural comparisons, any way you swing them, don’t further an examination of possible links between trauma and beauty in that context.

  In my family there were glaring links between trauma and beauty that took lifetimes to play out, and decades for me to understand. I can’t remember my mother’s first foray into plastic surgery, but it took place in the short years between the photos of us in the garden and my parents’ divorce. My father says he disapproved of my mother’s ‘nose job’. He liked her original nose and says he would have refused to pay if she had asked him. This admission made me wince, evoking, as it does, a patriarchal order not so long in the past, and indeed not past in some cases, where men exercise power over women’s choices and control the marital purse strings. In any event, my mother didn’t need to ask him to fund it: Glady willingly covered costs. My mother and grandmother were bound to each other in their pursuit of perfection, as I, too, became bound.

  It wasn’t commonplace for a 1960s housewife who passed her days in Sydney’s sleepy suburbia to surrender a body part to a cosmetic surgeon. Looking at before and after photos (the pictures from the garden fall into the first category) and comparing her pre– and post–cosmetically reconstructed nose, I, like my father, much prefer the original. The latter, though more ‘perfect’ and conventional, was much less interesting. The original had a beguiling bump in the middle. It had character. It suited her. It was her. And she was all the more beautiful for it. Herein lies the paradoxical truth that is unfathomable to trauma-driven body perfectionists: imperfection can be beautiful, special, admirable, loveable – and even preferable.

  My father recalls his alarm at the sight of his wife propped up in her hospital bed, eyes swollen and bruised, nose smashed and bandaged. It may appear curious that it is he, not she, who seemed most affected at the time but, on reflection, it’s hardly surprising that a woman who decided to undergo such a procedure would need to minimise the violence involved.

  The timing and nature of my mother’s second procedure strikes me as significant. I was twelve and she was forty-one when she had breast augmentation surgery. My mother was one hundred and fifty-five centimetres tall, a petite woman whose smallish breasts suited her shape and size. She decided, however, to have them enlarged with silicone. My own breasts were developing and I was experiencing the flux of a changing body. At the time my mother was having her ‘breast job’, I was learning about the critical relationship between beauty and sexuality. Around this age I began to notice a seismic shift. Men and boys stared, middle-aged women looked at me misty-eyed, friends’ mothers said things like, ‘Aren’t you going to have a nice little body.’ I was peaking while my mother was tormented by the visible signs of ageing and the bearing of two children. I found her breast job baffling, intriguing and affecting.

  Secrecy surrounded the whole affair. I was instructed to inform anyone inquiring about my mother’s stay in hospital that she was suffering from ‘women’s troubles’, a telling phrase that implies a double bind: I am ashamed that this body is not perfect and I am ashamed of being ashamed, of wanting myself altered. I demanded to see the new breasts as soon as she was able to remove the bandaging. The impact of the row of big blood-raw stitches under each big, bold breast was repellent and visceral (the procedure has since been modified and scarring is minimal). I think I must have experienced that moment with the same incomprehension my father had felt ten years before upon sighting my mother propped up in bed, post–nose job. I was curious but I recoiled from the bloody evidence of interference, and I didn’t like the new breasts. I never did get used to them. There was something about their shape, about the way they threw her body out of proportion. I disliked their hardness when I held her close. I couldn’t quite bring myself to accept them as part of my mother’s body.

  Some take a social constructionist view of beauty, maintaining that society teaches us to measure, and respond to, human beauty in keeping with the conventions of culture and the times. Others view the determination of, and attraction to, beauty as strictly biological, insisting that it boils down to hardwired genetic selection, with basic biology explaining the relationship between beauty and sexuality: a young, healthy, good-looking mate promises a healthy baby and survival of the species. This is a dispute for social theorists and scientists but, whatever the fundamentals of beauty, few would argue with the observation that girls and women have increasingly been conditioned to be beauty-product consumers, and to value and produce beauty as a kind of currency. Men are also increasingly concerned with their physical appearance and targeted by the multifaceted beauty industry. Barely a day passes when the average computer-literate or city-dwelling individual is not bombarded by pornified advertising, journalism, film and television, reiterations of the ideal, and relentless handy hints and hard sells on how to achieve it. It is this order of beauty obsession that is most often critiqued, but those criticisms usually fail to illuminate why we are so susceptible to brainwashing and manipulation and how ‘normal traumatisation’ sets us up to be shame-based, compulsive consumers.

  Weight Loss Tips and Diet Advice for a Bikini Body (Shape Magazine)

  Behind closed doors, another layer of learning is in process in the unique microcosm of each family. My mother and grandmother championed beauty the way others barrack for a sports team. Natural-born beauty was highly prized but they also valued glamour. They wore make-up religiously, were partial to wigs, and even bought, to my dismay, a fur coat each with the proceeds of Glady’s miraculous mid-’70s trifecta win. This layer of artifice offered them protection, provided a shell for their vulnerable beings. My mother had beautiful girlfriends. My uncles’ wives were both gorgeous. My mother, dazzled by the beauty of her friends and my aunts, considered herself inferior to them in looks and style. The flipside of this veneration for beauty was a sharp critical eye. Nobody was sacred. Contented evenings of watching TV beside my mother on the sofa (sometimes wearing matching mud-packs) were marked by a running commentary on people’s appearances. Our favourite targets were famous people and contestants in beauty pageants. While Miss Brazil or Miss Sweden posed in their bikinis and confirmed their wish for world peace, my mother and I would nit-pick. Thick ankles, she might say. Big teeth, I might add. This attention to flaws and detail was, in the end, turned most mercilessly on ourselves.

  Not long before I turned fifteen my mother and I decided that I had the foreshadowing of a double chin. I was still girlishly lithe, but the slight lack of definition around the jaw sent us into a panic, which spiralled into farce. My mother thought it through and figured that the best way of reshaping the inadequate region might be to apply a vibrating device. We researched back massagers but they were not shaped for our purpose. It was my idea, I think, for I was neither a sheltered nor an unresourceful child, that your average sex-toy vibrator might fit quite nicely under my chin. And so, while I waited in the car, my mother snuck into a city sex shop and bought her teenaged daughter a shiny gold dildo. Needless to say the chin routine was ineffective and short-lived, and a more traditional application soon followed.

  If I were in my early teens today and disappeared my temporary and ever-so-slight double chin through cosmetic-surgery magic, it would not be especially noteworthy. It is no longer only women
who fill the coffers of this industry. Children and men are a rapidly growing client base. Would my mother and grandmother have paid for surgery? Almost certainly, if my distress, or the offending shortcoming, was deemed significant enough. The American Society of Plastic Surgeons reported that more than 64,000 cosmetic surgery patients in 2015 were aged between thirteen and nineteen, adding: ‘Teens frequently gain self-esteem and confidence when their physical problems are corrected.’ That sounds, cheerily, like the end of the story, a plainly desirable outcome, but if trauma is a motivating factor, might the focus shift to dissatisfaction with another aspect of physical appearance? Meares teases out an operation that might offer answers.

  Evoking trauma researcher Lenore Terr’s finding that an isolated trauma is typically remembered, while recurring traumas are associated with poor recall (Terr differentiates these as Type I and Type II trauma), Meares states that multiple traumas of sufficient impact to disrupt effective psychic processing and reflection are processed by a different memory system from that of the indexical memory of ordinary consciousness. Such traumata are ‘not recorded as incidents, but as a form of “knowledge”’. This knowledge involves the ‘creation of quasi-narratives’, which give the unprocessed traumatic experiences meaning. These quasi-narratives are expressed as negative self-characteristics and experienced as feelings of inadequacy. Thus, a person can come to the conclusion they are ‘bad, stupid, ugly, incompetent, or a failure’, based on both ‘normalised’ gendered trauma – those disapproving looks or admonishments that boys might experience for wanting to play with a doll or that girls might encounter for expressing anger – and more extreme forms of trauma, such as childhood sexual assault by a neighbour.

  I’m glad the option to undertake unnecessary surgery wasn’t available to me then. I know, from painful personal experience, that resolving one site of imperfection is never the end of the story when this kind of trauma-as-quasi-self-loathing narrative is in play. As a young woman I gained weight and lost weight, and gained and lost again. I was less burdened by relentless self-criticism when I was slim, felt better in my body and, yes, more confident in the world, but I was no happier, no less ashamed at root, no less traumatised. My quasi-self-loathing simply recalibrated, expressing itself in other ways, in other perceived failings. In other words, when trauma embedded in the psyche attaches to a physical attribute, changing the offending attribute does not dissolve the internal trauma: it just reasserts itself via another route.

  I endured a vicious bout of chicken pox in my early thirties, which left visible pockmarks on my face. I underwent laser treatment to reduce the scarring. And during my forties, I developed rosacea, a common and progressive vascular condition that primarily affects facial skin. I have yearly laser treatments to help manage it. It goes without saying there is great value in technologies such as these and in reconstructive surgeries and their ability to improve the lives of those with abnormalities or disfigurement. Some of these people have suffered traumas relating to accident, abuse, bullying and social disadvantage. But there are those who undergo such treatment pathologically imagining themselves flawed, and who are at risk of cosmetic intervention becoming an addiction. Medical literature is rife with studies on the psychological make-up, motivations, adjustments and needs of people who present for cosmetic surgery while suffering from body dysmorphic disorder, which is characterised as an obsessive preoccupation with an imagined, or grossly exaggerated, defect in appearance. It’s yet another label that might perhaps be added to the long list of trauma symptomology.

  Many women report life-changing inner and outer transformations as a result of the cosmetic industry. A friend of mine who underwent breast augmentation surgery is overjoyed. Having been as flat-chested as a boy, she now feels more confident and contented in her body. Trans men and women now more commonly undergo medical transitioning that involves surgery. Many people sign up for cosmetic surgery for pragmatic reasons, such as extending the life of a career in a youth-obsessed industry (though that road leads back to a proverbial and patriarchal Rome). Results aren’t always as hoped for, and when things go wrong, surgery can be traumatic, ruinous or fatal. But does that give us the right to condemn a person for seeking to address a physical attribute they want transformed? Even if there has always been a human urge towards bodily revision, there is a critical point to be made about choice. I baulk at culturally enforced prescriptions and revisions forced on children or indoctrinated in such a way as to rob people of choice in any culture. I don’t begrudge people who seek out cosmetic procedures that I’m unwilling to undergo. I can see the value of an extended career or increased confidence, but I question the patriarchal base and ingrained sexism of a society in which a youthful, sexualised appearance is a prerequisite for being able to continue to do one’s job, especially when this applies primarily to women.

  Kim Kardashian Weird Beauty Treatments (Elle)

  I’m digging down here, through layers of thinning skin, into memory, history, into the muscle and bone of the western world, fat and malnourished. I’m going back in time to the girl that I was, to the torments of my early teens when I learned to sacrifice comfort at the altar of beauty. Back to the longed-for blonde hair, to the two-day grape diets, to the over-tweezing, and the zealous shaving, and the agonies of acne – the many micro-traumas absorbed and regurgitated as self-hatred, the body blows that shattered the inner world, shrinking me, distorting me in the dogged chagrin of not-good-enoughness, of body as worth, of I do not deserve, of I am unloveable.

  I was so bonded to the notion of physical beauty equating to worth and value that I would sit on buses in my twenties and wonder, when my eyes fell on someone no longer young or someone I thought of as unattractive, how those people could stand to live. It shocks me now, to recall a self capable of this thought until I remind myself that I was, at the time, young and generally considered attractive, and even so, I could barely tolerate myself enough to go on living. It’s hardly surprising, then, that suicide might spring to mind.

  Years later, after I learned to be less caustically critical, I began to have entirely different experiences in public spaces. One day, when I was living in New York, I experienced a moment of unexpected and mysterious poignancy. I was sitting on a bus looking around at the faces and the bodies slumped in seats when I was suddenly overcome by some kind of transcendent beauty in people – big, small, young, old, light-skinned, dark-skinned, spent and ravaged. Struck by a beauty to do with presence, with its proximity, its possibility, and by a closeness of bodies and a tenderness of energies beyond the superficial separations. It felt like a flash of insight into beingness as love embodied.

  Perhaps I judged people so harshly as a young adult because I felt my best years, looks-wise, were behind me by the time I’d reached my mid-teens. My Nabokov-loving twenty-one-year-old boyfriend had pegged me as a nymphet at fifteen. It is the nature of nymphetness to peak early; my Lolita-like revelling in the powers of youth and sexual appeal only just outlived the loss of my virginity that same year. By the time I turned sixteen and arrived in London, two major changes had drastically altered my body and my relationship to it: I had quit dancing classes and I had left home, embarking on a lifestyle that revolved around smoking, eating take-away food and drinking cheap booze. The hamburgers and cask wine piled it on.

  Seemingly overnight, I went from exuberant self-assurance and the ‘nice little body’ my friends’ mothers had clucked over, to being plump and disgraced. One minute I seemed set to be the successful heir to my beautiful mother and grandmother’s legacy; the next I was a disappointment. The extra weight I was carrying hardly constituted obesity but it was enough to result in a passionate dislike of certain body parts. I was travelling the highways in an effort to outrun my history. The more depressed I felt, the more I ate and drank; the more I ate and drank, the more depressed I felt.

  When I was living in London I struggled to get by, scrimping Tube fares and money for doner
kebabs. When my grandparents wired their hard-earned money every fortnight to boost my meagre income from the gallery cafe, what did I do? Pay up the rent? Stock up on groceries? Take up a course of study? Buy the decent winter coat I desperately needed? No. I spent it at the local beauty salon on a series of snake-oil cellulite treatments that involved the application of some unknown substance followed by the rotating pressure of a loud, useless machine, all of which had no impact whatsoever on the size of my despised thighs. I distinctly recall the contempt in which the staff of this salon held me. They saw me coming as I rushed, crippled by self-loathing and craving affirmation and sexualised attention, to be scammed. I still recall the anguish I felt in their presence: shame, of course, for being imperfect to begin with and for having to expose those imperfections in an effort to correct them; fear that I was unloveable, unacceptable, short of those taunting imperfections being corrected; and bewilderment – I was little more than a child, thousands of miles away from family and familiarity. There was also a faint hope and a trace of excitement that the ridiculous treatment might, as my deluded fantasy insisted, actually work and transform me into one in possession of the only form of power I thought accessible, or at any rate the only form I desired: sexual power based on beauty.

  I wonder now how those women would respond if I asked how they justified the callous treatment and financial exploitation of a girl in the grips of a daily body-image nightmare? It might seem hard to imagine anyone treating such a girl with anything but tenderness and compassion, but the patriarchy pits women against each other in myriad ways, and they, too, have their story. They were but worker bees in the buzzing beauty industry, the sprawling, many-armed multinational marketing machine that peddles the illusion of bodily perfection – spruiking its association with sexual desirability. It was not their job to question or concern themselves with my inner sufferings and misconceptions. It was their job to deliver the treatment the customer wanted, to diagnose ‘problem areas’, to make money for the business and, where possible, to bring about some improvement. I offered little opportunity for job satisfaction.