Now That Botox Is The New Normal, Normal Ageing Looks Weird: A tale of two celebrity Instagram’s.
I don’t often find myself on celebrity Instagram. It’s a bad neighbourhood I try to stay away from — I don’t feel safe there. But this weekend I was visiting my 98-year-old grandmother and found myself anxiously scrolling a lot. Maybe it was the stark confrontation with mortality, something I’m not quite used to in this form. I would turn from a manual task, like fastening my grandma’s bra, helping her go through her iPhone contacts to delete the people who’ve died, or washing the breakfast dishes, and find myself in a kind of compensatory reverie, lost on social media for fifteen minutes, as though trying to even some imaginary scales, reset myself.
Doing this, I was reminded of a review of Richard Seymour’s The Twittering Machine that I read in Book forum last year. The book and the piece, by Max Read, are about what’s driving our social media addiction from a psychoanalytic point of view. “What the Twittering machine offers is not death, precisely, but oblivion” Read writes, “an escape from consciousness into numb atemporality, a trance-like ‘dead zone’ of indistinguishably urgent stimulus.” We engage with it in order to manage the disappointments of the present moment, of the world we actually live in.
Anyway, I was in the dead zone a lot this weekend. I guess I needed to stave off excess awareness of death itself. I landed in two notable places in particular, two different planets, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about them: Tori Spelling’s Instagram page and Justine Bateman’s Instagram page.
Both of these women have a special place in my heart for their roles in Beverly Hills 90210 and Satisfaction, respectively. (Most people know Bateman as the wild child Mallory from the 80s sitcom Family Ties, but the 1988 cult film Satisfaction, about a girl band prepping for a summer competition, made an indelible mark on me.)
Spelling is now 48 years old, and Bateman is 55, but they look like members of different species. Spelling has had a lot of work — she has multiple sponsorships and posts frequently about skincare and beauty products. Bateman has had none — she recently wrote a book called Face: One Square Foot of Skin, a series of “fictional vignettes that examines the fear and vestigial evolutionary habits that have caused women and men to cultivate the imagined reality that older women’s faces are unattractive, undesirable, and something to be fixed.” She’s on a mission to challenge our received — and, it sometimes seems, increasingly unconsidered — ideas about the window of beauty and visibility for women.
I couldn’t stop looking at the photos of these two stars because they embodied two radically different approaches to the inexorable march of time, to the difficult work of accepting aging, especially for women, and especially for women in the public eye. Spelling’s face looks otherworldly, in the supernatural but not ethereal sense, and full in the sense of having been filled. Like so many celebrities today, she doesn’t look young exactly, just different. (I think of that line from Read’s review again: we distract ourselves, seeking “not death, precisely, but oblivion.”) But I was struck by the fact that it’s Bateman’s approach — simply existing, continuing to live, not paying for expensive, painful, time-consuming alterations to her face — that seems more radical.
Taking in Bateman’s message, I couldn’t believe how political it seemed. In spite of a lifelong devotion to feminism, in 2021, her gesture still struck me as bold. It is bold. I admit (with shame) that I even wondered for a moment if maybe she’s a little unhinged. It made me angry that I had this reaction, that hers is the minority opinion online, that I couldn’t just issue a fuck yeah! So accustomed are we to taking in the homogenous filtered imagescape, to seeing these interventions as a necessary evil, to seeing images of women’s faces that look somewhere between engorged and embalmed, that it’s actually jarring to see Bateman’s (natural, beautiful) 55-year-old face. So successfully have we been conscripted into a corporate, capitalist feminism that we’ve come to conflate plastic surgery with empowerment, success, and self-care, even with sanity, normalcy. Which is of course Bateman’s entire point. Why should it be an act of bravery and resistance to just…have your same face?
Satisfaction Cast
But more and more, it seems women are opting for interventions. We’re heading deeper into the normalization of linelessness. A recent New York Times piece called “How Barely There Botox Became the Norm” reports on women in their 20s starting with “baby Botox” routines as a preventative measure. Most of my own friends with a little disposable income, whether in their 20s or their 50s, have now tried it, and tried to pass it off as no big deal. Younger ones want to prevent aging, older ones want to “correct” it.
I guess it was proximity to my grandmother that made me obsess over these women’s accounts. In her heyday, she was the great beauty in our family. This weekend she and I ate dinner beneath old photos, including one of her at about my age, baring her perfect smile and posing in a sparkling, beaded, red floor-length gown. If she was my age now, would she be springing for injectables? Will I? Should I? I don’t want to. I think age looks beautiful on a great many faces — especially on those who continue to have joy in their lives.
But I don’t judge other women’s choices, or I try my best not to. We are each entitled to see beauty however and wherever we see it. We all deal with the sick pressures of this unimaginative, ego-destroying patriarchy in our own ways. And the bottom line is you can’t win. There’s no way to do womanhood right in a world that hates women. If you do baby Botox so no one will notice, you’ll be scrutinized and possibly mocked. If you pump yourself full of injectables and get all the surgery, you’ll be scrutinized and possibly mocked. If you eschew it all, you’ll be scrutinized and possibly mocked. Of course, there is a vast gulf between the two approaches of these particular beloved stars. But it is wild that the one that looks more real strikes me as more unusual.
