Dancing in the Theatre of my Enslavement

Reflections on turning forty as a female, and forty things I know.

Susan Sontag, ©Lynn Gilbert 1979

Authors note: I have been hesitating to write this post, because it contains a lot of themes which are coded trivial (and not accidentally) female, and part of me still wants to be Taken Seriously as a Smart person by both men and women. I’ve written it, and I hope you will keep reading it even if it is not your ususal fare, because I no longer believe in the sacred/secular divide, nor, really, the serious/trivial, nor of course, that things that mainly concern women are a minority issue. I believe there are instead sacred and serious forms of attention that can be turned to anything that is forming us.

I am just back from a delightful festive triple whammy of Christmas, New Year, and my fortieth birthday. I have sung and feasted and danced and felt genuinely hashtag-blessed. Multiple people greeted me with the conventional “21 again!”, and others, all women, with “you don’t look forty! Tell me about your skincare?”

Why thank you, I thought, my ego purring. Thanks for noticing. I do wear SPF religiously, actually, I said.

The part of my that is not ego, though (my soul? My conscience?) furrowed her brow. Then rapidly unforrowed it to avoid wrinkles, then forrowed it again, because, FFS, what is forty supposed to look like? What is this test I have apparently passed? And why don’t I remember signing up for it?

Ignoring this tiny, wrinkle-related mental wrinkle, in the midst of all the feasting, I wandered into a Space N.K. to check out the sale. The UK’s version of Sephora, these are stand alone beauty halls dedicated to skin care and make up and other shiny things. I love them. I find thinking about serums deeply soothing. Regular readers may have noticed I spend a lot of time on the Big Stuff; death, meaning and what a good life actually is, but no-one can live at depth full time. My skincare hobby occupies the same role in my life as fantasty football does for my philosopher husband - a deliberately superficial (and yes, annoyingly gendered) mental pressure valve. It’s relaxing. I rarely buy anything expensive, but several of my requested birthday presents were designed to make my epidermis smooth and supple (plus a non-requested set of creams from my Mother for “an ageing neck and décolletage”). My routine of cleansing, serums and SPF is far less likely to be skipped than the quasi-monastic rhythms and spiritual practices I am in theory more deeply committed to. Yes, sometimes when despair for the world overwhelms me I will go and lie down in the peace of wild things, as Wendell Berry advises, but sometimes I will do a double cleanse and a hyaluronic mask in the bath instead. I have felt no qualms about that

Until, that is, an eight year old walked into that Space N.K and handed over her Christmas money for a resurfacing toner everyone was talking about on TikTok. I was midway through testing a brightening vitamin C lotion I would never afford, and thought I must have misheard. A present for her mother, surely. The startled assistant asked the same question. No. This tiny, blonde-plaited pixie child wanted to buy a bottle of acids that would strip her peach-smooth, poreless skin, because the idea it was somehow in need of improving had been incepted into her.

I put the bottle I was holding down. Absently, I grasped about for a tissue to wipe the shiny substance off my face. I listened as the assistant tried to steer the child towards a gentle cleansing wash that was not £40, and felt sick. She doesn’t know, I thought. She doesn’t know that all these brightly lit, beautifully designed bottles are for us, the fully grown women, who have been told our skin should look like hers.

In 1972, Susan Sontag wrote an essay entitled The Double Standard of Aging. I went to it, hoping I would find the problems it was addressing gently dated. While some of her references are, the argument that part of being female is an obligation to act out youthfulness, is not:

“Only one standard of female beauty is sanctioned: the girl. The great advantage men have is that our culture allows two standard of male beauty: the boy and the man…

The single standard of beauty dictates they must go on having clear skin. Every wrinkle, every line, every grey hair is a defeat…..This is not to say there are no beautiful older women. But the standard of beauty in a woman of any age is how far she retains, or how she manages to simulate, the appearance of youth…..most of the women who successfully delay the appearance of age are rich, with unlimited leisure….Often they are actresses. (That is, highly paid professionals at doing what all women are taught to practice as amateurs.)”

In Space N.K. there are many mirrors and they are surrounded by lights, like a star’s dressing room. Sontag’s description of beauty as a kind of theatre makes sense to me, because that is part of the appeal. I love theatre. I acted all through my teens, planned to audition for RADA. I like the ritual of tending to my skin. I don’t always bother, and I only bother in limited ways (I have hairy armpits and welcome the silver in my hair) but I mainly enjoy it. Sontag, though doesn’t see this dramatic element as a positive

Being feminine is a kind of theatre, with its appropriate costumes, decor, lighting, and stylised gestures. From early childhood on, girls are trained to care in a pathologically exaggerated way about their appearance…

Beauty, women’s business in this society, is the theatre of their enslavement.

The theatre of my enslavement? Surely not.

Emma Dabiri, in her short 2023 book Disobedient Bodies, reflects on these same themes nearly 40 years later. Given the very real feminist gains of the decades since Sontag was writing, why, she asks do “do many young people, and young women specifically, seem to feel under so much more pressure when it comes to their appearance, not less?”

Both Dabiri and Sontag trace the political currents that lead so many women - including highly educated, extremely capable, theoretically feminist women - feeling the pressure to conform to a thin, young beauty ideal. From the Enclosure of the Commons which annexed female power into the domestic sphere, to the history of art in which, as John Berger famously summarised, “men act and women appear….Men look at women, and women watch themselves being looked at”, to the biological-political fact of a smaller female fertility window, that moment in Space N.K. was the product of powerful forces. All that, plus the now constant surveillance and voyeurism of profit-hungry social media and the ubiquitousness of video calls. For anyone of us, especially women, to be blissfully unconscious of what we look like, would be a miracle. Even, it seems, an eight year old girl.

What does this all mean, soul-wise? Should I dump all my new birthday serums, cancel the facial I am so looking forward to? I am troubled by the sense I have allowed myself to be formed without my consent, that I am also the product of messaging that I received as a very young girl (including from my beloved and smooth-skinned mother, about always moisturising my neck). I can sense some danger, but there is also a strand of something I don’t want to let go of. I like my soft skin. I don’t spend time agonising about looking old, or at least not consciously. I am actively looking forward to my crone season, just…..not yet. Beauty also sometimes feels like a form of feminine rebellion. Make up is silly and girly and somehow anathema to the world of serious men in serious suits? Pass me that red lipstick. Dabiri writes about the joy of adornment, the creative and nurturing care of our own bodies which can be done in ways which feel fully alive.

I don’t know what the boundaries are here. As I go into my fifth decade, I want to pay attention to this, the question of what spiritual core strength looks like as a woman in a visual culture. I’d love to hear your wisdom in the comments. If you are a man, the women in your life will also have been formed by these forces. Why not try asking her how she navigates them?

My scriptures tell me that Man looks at the outside, but God looks at the heart. The same ones claim that God gives good gifts, like food, “wine to make the heart glad, and oil to make the face to shine”. What is a good gift, or at least a harmless distraction, and what is an idol, an agent of enslavement? Maybe I’ll work it out after my facial.

One thing I can commit to is no longer complimenting people, especially women, on looking young, as I long ago stopped complimenting them on losing weight. I don’t want to reinforce that thin and young are the goal. That is not the value system in the Kingdom I am trying to participate in. I want to compliment them instead (maybe even aim to be complimented on) looking happy, at home in their skin, exactly as it is. On a face that shines, not only because of the oil.

Forty things I know

1. All brassicas taste better a little bit burnt (Burn your Brassicas! Not your Bras!)

2. Just say the thing that is playing on your mind. You’ll almost always feel better afterwards.

3. “All Life is Meeting” (Buber), or, always choose connection if you can

4. Attention is a moral act (McGilchrist), and the beginning of devotion (Mary Oliver).

5. Cycling is always better than public transport, even when I’m tired, cold or it’s raining.

6. Eggs are magic and every fridge should always have them (unless you’re vegan.)

7. In tense moments, pivot to playful. Humour goes a long way to reduce cortisol levels and help everyone stay connected.

8. Unless you are pivoting to playful because you are still learning to deal with hard feelings. In which case, feel them, for the Love of God, Elizabeth, they will not kill you.

9. The Bible is very comfortable with Hard Feelings. The people in it have lots of them. So does God (!). It is not a fan of fear though. So don’t avoid grief or rage using anxiety. That isn’t healthy.

10. A bright lipstick is a lazy girls outfit plan.

11. Life is too short for bad tea.

12. But getting a taste for Good Coffee and Good Wine is just expensive and unnecessary.

13. How you structure your time and where you spend your attention is how you shape your soul.

14. Institutions are almost always deeply disappointing but we can’t get anything done without them so we should invest in building or maintaining healthy ones.

15. Attractiveness is 80% confidence.

16. Be honest. Authenticity as a concept has been drained of all its power, but as far as possible, be who you are, not who your context demands. One persons honesty creates space for everyone else’s.

17. Nothing good happens without courage.

18. Friendship is as important as marriage/romance and needs tending almost as much, but society will not remind you to do this. Find ways to remind yourself.

19. Don’t fight hungry.

20. Lucas Hollweg’s Mustard Dressing is the only salad dressing you ever need.¹

21. Never turn on the Overhead Light

22. Listening is magic. It takes a lot of practice

23. Learn to tolerate uncertainty

24. Children’s stories tell us about who we really want to be

25. Our chosen practices, rituals and rhythms orientate us and act as counter-formation for all the un chosen things which are also trying to form us. They are resistance.

26. Poetry is liturgy

27. The Bible is dense and complex and strange and enervating and unendingly generative of meanings and I want to spend my life wrestling with it.

28. I will never be a morning person. Despite this, I feel better when I get up and pray with my community.

29. Invest in good sheets, good shoes and good underwear. Everything else is better second hand.

30. Get people around a table and feed them as often as possible.

31. Growing up into a flourishing, purposeful person shoul involve increasing amounts of both authority and vulnerability (Andy Crouch).²

32. Instead of watching trash TV I should probably watch a fire, the sea, a tree or a candle instead. I almost never make that choice.

33. Nothing was ever existentially satisfying that did not involve meaningful risk.

34. Clothes need washing way less than you think

35. In the kitchen, if in doubt, add lemon, pepper, cream or cheese.

36. Connect before you correct.

37. Never buy cold white fairy lights

38. Spend money on holidays with precious people

39. Commit to the discipline of celebration

40. We can only take with us what we have given away.

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2. Photo by Lynn Gilbert under Creative Commons