No wonder I'm 'vain'
I 'came of age' in the 1990s
The other Saturday night I went out dancing with no makeup on. And fuzzy hair.
This was a radical act for me.
I was tired that afternoon. I napped. I woke up half an hour before I had to go out and my priority was eating. Not doing my hair or my face or moisturising. Eating. Because I knew I’d be dancing like no-one was watching for about three hours, I’d need the energy.
I go to the gym without makeup, or running. But never ‘out’ or to work, or to a meeting, or to a bar or pub or date.
I have long been somewhat concerned with my appearance. Or vain, or whatever you want to call it. Or, I dunno, insecure about my face and how people will react to it if it’s bare.
And I forgive myself for this, because I became a teenager in arguably one of the most confusing and objectifying decades for women in the late 20th century: the 1990s.
If the 1960s and 70s were about the fight for equality - contraception, the women’s liberation movement and the Sex Discrimination Act - and the 1980s represented the beginning of the ‘career woman’ with Britain’s first female prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, in office for the whole decade, then the 1990s seemed to be about exposure.
Lads’ mags, Baywatch, a naked image of the model Gail Porter being projected on to the Palace of Westminster without her permission, the tabloid press having a go at Britney Spears and Monica Lewinsky. Wonderbras, boob jobs, crop tops.
I turned 13 in 1990, a tender age for most young women, and I was certainly unaware of my own sexuality or attractiveness. I remember an assembly at my single-sex school where our head announced that we should not be wearing black bras under our white school shirts in case we distracted the male teachers, of which there had been a recent influx. I had absolutely no clue what she was talking about, but now I realise it’s not the pupils she needed to have a word with, it was the fully grown men she had employed.
I remember my first 1990s bodysuits. Scoop necked, short sleeved, one in black and one in burgundy. I saved up and bought them via mail-order. I also bought my very first pair of Levi 501s, and one day I proudly wore them with the burgundy body to walk to my local shops.
As I left home, a car pulled up beside me. Inside were two men, asking for directions. I tried to help them, being the polite and compliant person I was. And then, after a minute or so of chat, the driver leant over the passenger and looked me up and down and said: ‘You’re very nice, you know’.
I felt uncomfortable. I knew straightaway that the man had said something wrong, and that I needed to get away from them. And I walked off.
What a shattering moment for a teenage girl. There I was, excited about dressing up and going on an independent mission, right at the beginning of becoming a woman, while still very much being a child. A moment of empowerment, of independence, of freedom, of blooming, became a moment of objectification by men who should have known better, and whom I would now report to the police immediately for sexual harassment of a child.
Later in my teenage years, I started to wear a little makeup. A teenage boy a bit older than me noticed it at somewhere like a youth club when I was about 15.
“You’ve discovered makeup,” he said.
I was feeling confident. “So have you,” I replied.
He wasn’t wearing makeup, but that moment felt significant, a kind of coming of age where I wanted to look and feel attractive to myself, but mainly to the opposite sex. At the same time I felt annoyed with his comment, so my response was a way of telling him off a little.
Even though I wanted to be attractive, I maybe didn’t want it to be obvious that I wanted to be attractive - and I certainly didn’t want anyone to notice I’d made any effort.
And now I think the paradox continues: Be attractive enough so you are socially acceptable, the message seems to be (and do it in a ‘natural’ way), but don’t be so attractive that men can’t control themselves around you - back to that school assembly message. Sadly, we have a long way to go to a time when women are ‘allowed’ to look how the hell they want without commentary.
When I went dancing without makeup the other weekend, I noticed the others around me, the younger women with swishing hair and crop tops and bright lipstick, and I wondered how they felt about it all. Did they also, like a younger me, want to look and feel beautiful and confident for themselves? Did they also fear objectification?
I am still confused. I continue to think and care about what I look like, and I don’t know quite what I would tell the 13-year-old me about the world.
And I don’t know if it is age that’s helping me rise a little above the paradox, but at the dance event, I looked in the mirror, saw my natural face and smiled. I looked and felt attractive, and that’s for me.