Taxidermied Women
Women are much prettier when they smile instead of frown, stare blankly instead of scowling when you say something inappropriate to them. Honestly, more women should visibly appear alive but simultaneously lack all humanity and kind of make you question if they’re stuffed with cotton fluff and newspapers on the inside.
Personality gets in the way of some girls’ beauty, you know. Like she’s so beautiful one minute, but then she laughs, and her face morphs into this ugly, wrinkled mess. It’s so unattractive how full of joy she is.
Cosmetic injectables serve as restrictions on women’s liveliness and personalities. By limiting the physical movement of the muscles, women’s facial expressions are suppressed, which projects only a safe or acceptable state for women to exist as.
See, smiling is great because it shows a woman is friendly, but it’s rather undesirable to have lasting proof of her joy etched onto her face in the form of smile lines.
With precise placement of botulinum toxin, you can achieve the perpetual look of glee with raised brows that won’t leave you with those heinous forehead wrinkles that ruin your face.
Because that’s the thing: you, as a woman, should not look like you feel emotions aside from baseline content. Your sadness is an inside process others shouldn’t be privy to. Frustration, disappointment, disgust, among every other negative emotion, aren’t light and feminine, right?
I struggle with the popularity of Botox and dermal fillers because they limit normal human emotions. Alongside a dozen other gendered expectations, this pressure falls predominantly on women. It’s the woman who has to look put together. It’s the woman who has to watch her expression lest she be labelled as anything less than perfect.
Do men have resting bitch faces?
A specific procedure is designed and marketed toward women to keep them looking desirable while they’re expected to fade into the shadows of the men before them. It physically limits their abilities to frown or show distaste; it keeps them in a perpetual neutral gaze or smile because that is what’s acceptable. That’s safe.
She’s paralysed to prevent frowning, and she’s forced into agreement. She can’t sip out of a straw properly, and she can’t tell you “No,” even without speaking.
A good woman is seen and not heard.
The Quicksand Drags You in Deeper
But is it her fault from dropping hundreds on units that will realistically only last three to four months1 before she has to get more? The answer, like most questions I find myself drawn to, is complex.
I couldn’t blame a woman for falling victim to societal pressures she’s experienced since childhood. She grew up with marketing campaigns demonising ageing and was left with a feeling of dread at the thought of getting older.
Your youth is your value, and it depleats as the years pass. God forbid a woman desire to be worth something at age thirty, which isn’t even slightly old.
She saw figures in the media age at inexplicibly slow rates, wondering why she, at twenty, had more texture in her skin than they did despite being twenty-five years her senior. The women in movies shifted from expressive acting to sharing the same face—and she knows it’s not just new lighting techniques and higher camera quality.
Now girls in their late twenties promote a preventative approach to ageing: Baby Botox. Why wait until you’re horribly disfigured by ageing to make a change when you can push off that god awful experience as long as you can?
Even though dermal fillers were intended for older people filling lost volume in the face, which comes naturally with reduced collagen production (a byproduct of ageing)2, a growing number of patients seek filler and neurotoxins as preventative measures.
Paradoxically, for the extremely young patients seeking this preventative treatment, over-use of fillers has a reverse ageing effect, with many online users noting some recipients are ageing faster because of the fillers, which stretch and over-inflate the skin (see: the “pillowface” phenomenon34).
I’m not yet twenty years old, but I understand the appeal of reverting back to a youthful look. I can’t imagine the distress and dysphoria one could feel looking at the mirror and seeing someone unrecognisable.
It’s not your fault for disliking what you see because you’ve been taught that your reflection is unattractive past a certain age. Once you show signs of living and emoting, there appears an unspoken pressure to “fix” this.
But here’s the real problem: feeding into those pressures.
We normalise Botox and dermal fillers instead of normalising the existence of wrinkles and creases and whatever other skin texture a person wears. By getting the “treatments,” we set a precident that visibly ageing is problematic.
The standard is youthfulness, and if you don’t have it, you’ve failed.
You don’t have to look at your grandmother and tell her that you don’t want to look like her in fifty years. Your actions speak volumes enough.
You don’t have to tell other women that injectables and surgery are necessary for preserving whatever value they have left at their age. The sheer act of you receiving these procedures tells them that they should too. They’ll learn subconsciously.
Your body is your choice before anything else. You can, and should, do whatever you want with it. But let’s not pretend that engaging in and promoting these procedures perpetuates anything but reinforcement that women are in need of physically altering their bodies.
It’s Never Just Been About You
The psychology student in me questions both the societal and developmental impacts of Botox and filler. For this section, my primary focus is on children and how their lives are altered by parents who use injectables cosmetically (and those who have had elective plastic surgery). This issue is two-fold:
#1 Emotionally, how do you bear the burden of knowing your parent changed their same features you were born with?
Imagine this: You’re born with a hooked nose. Or maybe you have one with a bump on the bridge. Your mother’s nose is straight, but it wasn’t always. In fact, she hated your nose when she had it.
Maybe she was teased for it, her beauty belittled, or perhaps she saw that society’s most famous figures often fall into eurocentric beauty standards. Whatever her reason, she shaved down her a sign of her ethnicity, physical proof of human evolution to better advantage certain climates.
How does it impact you knowing that your mother paid thousands to remove this feature?
What if you grew up to look exactly as your mother would have without intervention?
What if you had thinner lips while hers were full, your breasts smaller and hers were made of silicone or saline, and her skin was smooth, like glass, and yours had deep wrinkles and creases?
Do you see your potential? The woman you could be—if you just invested enough money and energy into the right areas. Beauty hurts because you have to first accept that you don’t have it yet. Yet!
The augmentation of natural, typically ethnic, features sets a standard that specific body parts are in need of correction. Insecurities are not innate. Humans are taught to hold them, to have something they wish they could change. And by changing these features, erasing them, a precident is set, teaching others that this feature was wrong. Because why otherwise would it have been “corrected?”
The question shifts from being pretty enough to being wealth enough. Is being pretty only for the rich, or can the poors do it too? Access to beauty is a luxury, it’s a privilege, and if you’re awfully lucky, the generations of women and men getting rhinoplasties will defy evolution and produce beautiful babies who don’t need to be fixed. We’ll call them perfect as is then.
#2 Communication Falters and I Now Have No Emotion Recognition?
I am a newborn baby learning how to communicate through my parents’ facial expressions. As a baby, I have a distinict preference for my mother’s face, which is honestly difficult to interpret in my little baby brain because she had neurotoxins injected into her forehead, temples, brows, undereye, uppereye, jowls, and nasolabial folds for volunary paralysis.
Discriminating between expressions proves difficult to me at five months old, when I’m developmentally old enough to match the image of a person’s expression with their voice5.
I hear my mother’s sadness because her voice breaks. I see the tear trickle down her face. But she fights to produce the tear. She struggles to pout and frown. Her brows hardly move.
We don’t know how this will follow me through childhood and beyond. I’ll notice it’s been four months because my mother’s muscles tighen again6. When the majority of adults in my life can’t emote, I’ll think it’s normal. If the studies are right, I might struggle with mimicry and empathy7. We’ll have to wait and find out.
There’s Always a Caveat
As “what-about”-isms become all-too frequent in modern discourse, I feel the need to clarify that while I discuss elective cosmetic Botox and dermal filler in this article, I do not see medical-use injectables as problematic nor contributing to any real harm.
For many people, Botox is the stepping stone to a better quality of life. The desire to cease pain is not problematic.
Botox has been used in the armpits and palms to reduce overperspiration (hyperhidrosis). It is also commonly used to treat TMJ-D, tension headaches and migraines, and neck pain among dozens of other ailments8 by paralysing over-active muscles in the mandible, forehead, and trapezius, respectively. Those with osteoarthritis may also feel relief through hyaluronic acid injections9.
People with chronic pain should not feel guilty for utilising a treatment available to them. If the symptoms are being alleviated, then the Botox and/or fillers are doing their job.
Not all Botox or fillers are cosmetic—much to the same vein that not all plastic surgeries are necessarily cosmetic. Reconstruction post-cancer, cleft-lip/palate, injuries and burns, developmental malformations, paralyses, even people who have physical and constant pain from their upper-bleph weighing down on their eyes10. There are entirely valid reasons to elect intervention.
As we have these complex conversations, I implore readers to appreciate nuance where it arises. There are no clear answers to what is “good” versus not because this is not a black-and-white conversation. Healthcare is complicated. The aesethetics industry is complicated. Categorising the in-betweens is (shocker!) complicated.
Additionally, this article’s target is women. That’s not to say men do not experience any pressures to improve themselves, because they certainly do, but it is to emphasise that women’s aesthetics are valued much higher compared to their male counterparts. Women are disproportionately targeted in anti-ageing campaigns and have the notions of their beauty discussed far more frequently.
Anti-woman and anti-ageing rhetoric harms everyone. It knows no bounds of race, age, gender, social class, or religion. It prevents humans from full expression and living authentically to themselves.
These are normalised restrictions on our bodies and the true extent to the harm is still unknown.
If you made it all the way to the end, I love you!
Please tell me all your thoughts!
References
American Society of Plastic Surgery on Botox: https://www.plasticsurgery.org/news/blog/how-long-does-botox-last
Hyaluronic Acid Fillers: History and Overview: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22205525/
Derm Rochester on Pillow Face: https://www.dermrochester.com/blog/pillow-face-the-perils-of-too-much-filler/
Rejuvination Skin Lab on Avoiding Pillow Face: https://rejuvenationskinlab.com/pillow-face-an-aesthetic-epidemic-how-to-avoid-it
The Conversation on Infant Expression Learning: https://theconversation.com/face-time-heres-how-infants-learn-from-facial-expressions-53327
CNN on Botox Moms: https://edition.cnn.com/2012/09/20/living/botox-moms
Emotion Perception Accuracy: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1948550611406138
Cleveland Clinic on Botox Injections: https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/treatments/8312-botulinum-toxin-injections
NYU Health on Osteoarthritis: https://nyulangone.org/conditions/osteoarthritis-of-the-knee/treatments/therapeutic-injections-for-osteoarthritis-of-the-knee
Mayo Clinic on Plastic Surgery: https://www.mayoclinic.org/departments-centers/plastic-surgery/sections/conditions-treated/orc-20473072
I like that I have laugh lines. It means I’ve experienced joy in my lifetime. Good article KB!
A tik tok you made about substack just came up on my for you page. When I saw the title of this article I closed tik tok and quickly opened substack because I had to read it. I really loved this article and I am excited to read more of what you write!!!!