Free An Apple a Day by Emma Woolf

the catwalk modeling bikinis three weeks after giving birth (with no pain relief, at home, in the bath). For weeks before the 2011 Royal Wedding, the media gleefully reproduced images of the “shrinking” Kate Middleton, feigning concern and speculating on a possible eating disorder, although no such scrutiny was given to the premature hair loss of her future husband. There were numerous web pages devoted to the question Is Kate Middleton Anorexic? The daily, casual sexism is so pervasive that we’ve gotten used to it—we’ve internalized the message that our value is bound up with our attractiveness. The message is clear: women’s appearance is fair game, whereas men’s doesn’t really matter.
    Jennifer Aniston, in her early forties, is regularly portrayed as a sad singleton, unable to keep the same man for very long, her bikini figure closely measured on her “lonely dog walks” along Santa Monica beach. (Maybe she’s just walking the dog!) Meanwhile George Clooney, a good ten years older, is seen as a carefree bachelor. And when it comes to youth and beauty, women are caught in a catch-22. If they have cosmetic surgery they are ridiculed—the procedures are shocking and the results often horrendous.
    But wait, surely cosmetic surgery empowers women? It gives them the breasts or the nose or the thighs they always dreamed of, right? No. It’s not about reshaping or refining, it’s violence dressed up as choice. Why are these women paying thousands of dollars to men in white coats to have their noses broken, their cheekbones sawn down, their jaws clamped and stomachs stapled, their eyelids sliced and hairlines lifted? Have you seen the bleeding and the bruising, have you read about the fluid loss,the skin ulceration and infection, the nerve paralysis? I don’t think there’s anything sadder than those stretched, painful, frozen expressions. Scalpels and Botox—cutting and poison. How did it get so bad for women?
    The fact is, women aren’t having cosmetic surgery to stay beautiful. As Naomi Wolf wrote in The Beauty Myth more than twenty years ago, many women who undergo surgery are fighting to stay loved, relevant, employed, admired; they’re fighting against time running out. If they simply age naturally, don’t diet or dye their hair, we feel they’ve “let themselves go.” But if they continue to dress youthfully we feel they’re “trying too hard” or brand them as “slappers.” Poor Madonna, who has dared to be in her fifties. In order not to look like a woman in her sixth decade of life she exercises furiously, and is sniggered at by trashy magazines for having overly muscular arms and boytoy lovers. When Demi Moore’s marriage to Ashton Kutcher, fifteen years her junior, recently broke down, the media reaction was almost gleeful. Of course, it was what they had been waiting for all along: how long could a forty-eight-year-old woman expect to keep a thirty-three-year-old man? As allegations of his infidelity emerged, the Internet was flooded with images of Demi looking gaunt and unhappy—and extremely thin.
    Sometimes you want to say: just leave them alone. Then again, it’s mostly women who buy these magazines, and women who write the editorials and online comments and gossip columns, so you could say we’re our own worst enemies. There is already plenty of ageism and sexism out there—why do we add to the body hatred?
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    To me, the woman who exemplifies the modern female conundrum is Victoria Beckham. Don’t laugh—I find myself weirdly fascinated by Posh Spice! She’s a few years older than I am, and the Spice Girls were the hottest group when I was a teenager in the 1990s. I remember Victoria then, plumper than she is now and smiling in a miniskirt, getting engaged to David Beckham. I watched as she lost weight, got pregnant—those ridiculous wedding costumes (the