The inner voice of women's self-loathing

Building a positive relationship with your own reflection can be a life's work

On the red carpet at the Met Gala on Monday, Pamela Anderson looked the male gaze straight in the eye and said, “Deal with it”.

And some of them didn’t deal with it very well.

She has been described as ‘make up free’, but even a cursory glance can see that this isn’t the case. As far as I can see, she’s wearing foundation, blush, lipstick, mascara and minimal eye make up, and eyebrow pencil.

It’s interesting how this isn’t enough.

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As I write this next paragraph I realise it’s completely habitual at this point to make some comment myself about how she looks - whether the haircut suits her; whether the dress designer should be fired; whether she looks her age, or more, or less; how she looked then, versus how she looks now. At 57, she and I are in the same decade, and I feel like for my whole life I have been trained to look at other women and critique them. My dear dad, who would have been 99 on the day of this week’s Met Gala, would crack jokes all the time about women in the public eye: “She’s a bit long in the tooth for me”, he would say about any woman over 30 (even when he was beyond his own middle age). Older, less attractive women who had television careers, for example Esther Ranzen, he would say he ‘could not stand’. I’d feel like I was betraying his confidence and his memory a little bit by telling you this, if it weren’t for the fact that I know that you too will have had men you loved who remarked on the appearance of women on the telly, and that like me, you probably joined in at times. “What the heck is going on with her hair?”; “I’m not sure that jacket is doing her any favours”; “She’s put on a few pounds”, and so on, and so on. Maybe their comments weren’t even particularly ill intentioned - my dad’s weren’t. But the point is - they made comments. And so you learned that how women look is something to comment on.

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As women, we do this to women, and worst of all, we do it to ourselves. Today I had a photographer come to the house from the Times newspaper, an experience that ought to be fun, but that threw me into a complete spiral of negativity about my face, my body, my clothes, my hair, and even my house.

You could see this attack of anxiety as something else that women are doing wrong, something else we should find ourselves ridiculous for. But the fact is, we’ve been trained to think like this. When you see how our culture responds to any woman in the public eye, you can see how self-loathing really is the most obvious and natural default. It’s not just Pamela. Women who have the surgery, women who don’t; women who age naturally, women who don’t; women who lose the weight, women who don’t; confident women, insecure women; younger women, older women; women with multiple partners, single women; the mothers, the child-free; face full of make-up or none - whatever we do and whatever choices we make we will be critiqued in a way that men will never experience.

We internalise all this and then, when we stand in front of the mirror or the camera, unsurprisingly, there it is - our own negative inner voice. We have built this voice, brick by brick, out of every negative comment we have ever heard about other women. And now it’s huge, and it’s our own. And suddenly it’s not Pamela or tonight’s newsreader whose outfit or face we’re loving to hate, it’s ours. “What does she think she looks like?” “She loves herself a bit too much, doesn’t she?” “Gravity went to work on that one I guess” “Is it the outfit that’s lumpy, or her?” It’s like we swallow swallow swallow all the comments we hear about other women and then we kind of vomit it out all over ourselves.

As a mum, I have tried really hard not to teach my own daughters this habit of self-loathing, although I am sure they have been busily learning it all from the rest of the world. I know I’ve not been perfect at it, but I’ve attempted not to make constant derogatory comments about my own appearance - and over nearly two decades of parenting, it’s amazed me how much self-censorship this has entailed. It's shocking how often I’ve had to stop myself from saying in front of them how fat, ugly, old or downright disgusting I (or other women) look, sometimes in that ‘jokey’ way, sometimes for real. As they’ve grown into teenagers I’ve been a bit more honest with them about the odd relationship that I and all other women have with our bodies, but when they were little I would subversively compliment my reflection in front of them, just to plant seeds. “Wow, you look amazing!”, I’d say to myself in the mirror. I didn’t mean a word of it - I usually thought I looked awful, and it was thinking that, that would remind me to try and break the cycle. I did it for them, because it was definitely too late for me.

All of this is a gigantic waste of our time and a drain on our energy. In The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf writes that, “Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one.” Being preoccupied with how we look means we spend hours, and often much of our earnings, trying to change and improve ourselves - and it sometimes means we say no to opportunities because we hate ourselves so much. I nearly said no to the photographer. I literally had to have a word with myself. And no wonder I was scared. It’s not just about self-loathing. Don’t try to reassure me that people won’t critique how I look when my face is in the Times. When I got ‘cancelled’ in 2020, my femaleness was a key factor. No doubt how I looked also played its part. At some point people will have loathed me because I was young and thin and beautiful, and now those same people can loathe me because I’m middle aged and not so thin or beautiful any more. How I look can and will be used against me. My face and body can be a battleground, not just for the warring factions of my own psyche, but for those who want to tear down women like me, or just women in general.

Amidst all of this, Pamela Anderson’s zero fucks attitude is a powerful statement. She was in the back of my mind today as I waited for the photographer to turn up. It’s not the first time I’ve had my picture taken by a professional, and each time I have, I’ve noticed a pattern: I absolutely hate the pictures…until about five years later, and then, I look at them again, and I think, ‘Oh!’. When I view them with the distance of time, I realise I actually looked, not necessarily lovely or beautiful, but just ‘me’. The photos look just like me. There’s an element of also thinking, ‘wow, I looked great when I was 35’, etc. But that’s not the whole of it. It’s not just a question of ‘wishing I still looked like that’. It’s more a sense of acceptance, that somehow I wasn’t able to reach when I first saw the image. So today, I decided to try and bring that sense of acceptance forward a few years. And I looked at the pictures on the photographer’s laptop, and I thought: “Yup, that’s me. That’s how I look at this point in my life. I accept myself”. And I have to say I never thought a star of Baywatch would play such a role in my life. Thanks for showing up to rescue us from drowning in self-loathing Pamela!

See you next time. x

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