"I have a memory that I frequently find myself returning to these days. I'm in high school and we're in the change room at the local pool for the dreaded stint of swimming. Like most of my peers, I am embarrassed by my body and am therefore changing into my swimmers under a towel. The changing room is filled with older women in my memory, they're elderly, which means in reality they were likely all somewhere between 40 and 60 and they're naked. I am horrified by this, but not because I am awkward about witnessing their nudity. Instead (and I acutely remember this being my thought at the time), I feel sad and disgusted by the complete lack of care these women have at the impression their bodies will make on the rest of us. They walk calmly between the showers and the mirrors, bodies on display, jiggling, sagging, flopping. Didn't they realise they were meant to be ashamed to look like that? At the very least, I thought, they should quietly fade into the background, or make their bodies occupy as little space as possible."
"Now, in the classic Uno reverse card of life, the revulsion I had for those women has morphed into pitying shame for my younger self. I can see now I was held hostage then, and 20 years after, by the patriarchal obsession with youth and beauty standards, and that I thought occupying the world without care for how you were perceived in accordance with these was a sign you had given up. I'm now 36 years old and recently I was at the beach. I looked down and saw my own dimply, cellulite-ridden thighs, stubbly legs, and considered my makeup-free, increasingly puffy and lined face. Huh. Would you look at that? I literally could not care less what I look like right now, I thought. I had arrived, swum in the ocean, played with my son and not thought once about how others might perceive me."
A youthful memory of a high-school changing room triggered feelings of shame and disgust toward older, naked bodies perceived as careless about appearance. The narrator later recognizes that reaction as rooted in patriarchal pressure to prioritize youthful beauty and to minimize bodily presence. Two decades on, a beach moment of carefree play and disinterest in self-presentation contrasts sharply with earlier judgment, revealing personal growth and the loosening of appearance-based constraints. Simultaneously, lingering habits and preoccupations with beauty treatments reflect the persistent, complicated influence of societal expectations on self-perception.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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