Maintenance of Woman

Every two weeks or so after I get out of the shower, I’ll sit in front of the double-sided, double-cracked mirror on my desk, and use a derma-stamp to inflict tiny, needle-sized wounds all over my face. This procedure began about six months ago when my obsession with wrinkles did. Sitting in front of my small mirror – with only one side cracked, at the time – I was probably picking at my blackheads or plucking my far-too-thin eyebrows, when I noticed them: fine lines in my forehead. Even when I relaxed the muscles, the lines remained, accompanied by some on the outside of my eyes. With horror, I frantically researched how to get rid of forehead wrinkles. 

 

The dermastamp doesn’t hurt all that much – once, I used rubbing alcohol to clean the needles before inserting them which, as one might expect, did induce a sharper sting and an angry redness afterwards. Sometimes they bleed, the way a small whitehead might if you scrape off its head without popping it. It’s never enough blood to run or drip, just a red pin prick welling on my skin, evidence of the tool’s efficacy and my own barbary. 

 

Expression lines, they’re called. Unsurprising. Of all the faces I make, the most common one – my are you fucking serious face – involves me pinching my eyebrows together, lifting them in the center of my forehead while narrowing my eyes. Another one of my favorites, my you can’t be serious face, requires me to pinch my eyes and raise my eyebrows in misanthropic disbelief. 

These are faces I share with my brother, a year and a half my senior, although everyone thinks we’re twins. Partly for this reason: we have the same mannerisms, the same laugh, the same facial expressions. 

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I visited him recently. Each morning before we left, I went through my daily skincare ritual – gentle cleanser, Hyaluronic Acid and Vitamin C serum, followed by SPF 30 sunscreen to combat the formation of any new wrinkles or further skin damage. Lou, from what I could tell, indulged in none of these habits. 

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While we sat in the Starbucks drive through waiting on coffee, I glanced at him, wondering if he, too, shared my forehead wrinkles; after all, if we share the same expressions and relatively sun-delicate skin, he should have them too, right? 

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But I couldn’t tell; all I noticed between the curls hanging into his forehead was the one inch scar vertically bisecting his forehead, a remnant from our childhood. 

 

It took me days to decide between a Dermastamp and a Dermaroller. The very idea of using microscopic needles on my face to promote collagen turnover and skin cell rejuvenation started like all of my best ideas have recently: Tik Tok. 

A creator came up on my page Dermarolling her face with one of those padded headbands, swearing that her wrinkles disappeared within weeks of using it. 

I liked the idea of rolling it around my face – it would be similar to gliding the Gua Sha that I purchased a year before and had used a handful of times before discarding it. I really am the perfect consumer. But upon further research – probably hours – it turned out the roller was not a good idea, as it can cause further irritation and redness, antithetical to my mission. So I purchased the stamp. 

 

Do you have forehead wrinkles? I asked my brother as we waited for our coffee. Without hesitation, he roughly shoves the hair of his forehead back and looks into the rearview mirror. 

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“Huh,” he said, turning to face me. “A couple.” 

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They’re the same lines I have, radiating out in the center of my forehead. But he lets his hair fall and turns away, uninterested. 

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I feel like mine are getting so bad. Plus, look at these. I point at the crepey skin under my eyes, the crow’s feet that have been forming for years. 

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“Yeah, what the fuck are those?” He asks. 

 

I only use needles between a millimeter or less, but the device actually has a setting that extends up to three millimeters. Sometimes I unroll it entirely, watching the needles grow terrifyingly long, and I wonder what sort of blemish or imperfection might require such lengths (figuratively and literally, here). I wonder if I’ll ever be compelled to use them. 

 

Fine lines, the dreaded scar of age marketed to women in skin care commercials and on tiny glass vials in drugstores. When I first noticed them on my forehead and my eyes, I researched the difference between fine lines and wrinkles. I scoured Reddit for methods that actually worked. I texted my mom asking if they can even go away, and what I can do about them. 

“I guess I’ll have to keep an eye on your expressions when you come down to visit,” she responded. Instead, she insisted that she couldn’t see any wrinkles marring my skin. Even after I directed her attention to the thin fine lines crossing my forehead, she insisted they weren’t noticeable to anyone but me. But who else notice them, to eradicate them, if not me? 

 

After a month of structuring my weekly skincare around Dermastamping, the tool now sits unused in my desk drawer. True to my recently diagnosed ADHD, I often jump on fads, hyperfixate on self-inflicted flaws (usually suggested by Tik Tok), obsess over how to fix them, and abandon the course of treatment once I don’t acquire immediate success. Then I see a new suggested solution online, and the cycle continues. Over and over again, I prove myself to be the ideal American consumer woman: insecure enough to buy, lazy enough to fail, desperate enough to repeat. Over and over again, I consume. 

 

There used to be a catharsis in the ritual – cleaning my skin with the same soap every morning and night, applying a serum from the clearance rack at T.J. Maxx. It was a simple, selfish rite. 3 small minutes I stole and clutched to my chest each morning and night. 3 minutes doled out before the bathroom mirror. 6 minutes a day. 42 minutes a week. Somewhere along the way, catharsis turned to compulsion. A gift to myself turned into the ordinary maintenance of my existence. 

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This obsession spans my entire body from head to toe via the myriad products and rituals I horde to enhance or maintain myself. This voracious consumerism in 2023 is certainly not unique to women: though the aisles of women skincare, haircare, and myriad other products may be significantly larger than other aisles, all of us flock towards the product willing to cure our ailments and promising to improve our life. 

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What is unique to women, however, is the alienation from her physical self she faces as a symptom of this voracity. For it is necessary to first alienate the body: it is no longer her body, it is a product. And as a product, it no longer belongs to her, at least not entirely. 

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It’s impossible to conceptualize a woman without talking about her body: it possesses, after all, the dimorphic qualities that separate her from the other sex. Beyond that, inhabiting a woman’s body extends beyond her possession of tits or weight around her hips or ass or any other combination of physical traits. For most, it is feeling like your body is not entirely your own. It is knowing that a piece of yourself, physical in the context of this discussion, will never wholly belong to you.

 

For me, it’s long felt like other people have had a stake on my body. It started when I was little. I had to wear a two-piece bathing suit to the beach while my brother wore swim trunks. When prompted, I had to hug any family member who requested it, even if I protested. I had to sit like a lady. I could no longer dress myself in eclectic, ramshackle outfits of blue houndstooth socks and a matching blue cape. 

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Then, it became about my weight. I was warmed vehemently against the dangers of my sweet tooth: that I would “balloon up” in college. That I would look like [insert any woman’s name here above a size 6] if I further imbibed in sugary foods, and that boys wouldn’t like me if I was “fat.” That my thighs were getting too big, then my breasts dutifully followed. But then, the fat of my breasts wasn’t such a bad thing. And don’t even get me started on breasts, the word itself. I’m not sure I possess the faculties to describe how spectacularly I despise the word ‘breast,’ but it is still somehow the best option. My roommates and I created a list, fit with a matching font, to rank the phrases by which we can describe the sacks of tissue which adorn our chest. They are as follows: 

1. Breast (too literary and anatomical) 

2. Boobs (too puerile) 

3. Tits (too vulgar)

4. Mommy Milkers (self-explanatory)

5. Bosom (Freudian)

6. The GIRLS (not horrible, but not widely understood) 

 

Honorable mention: jugs, rack, bazookas, bazongas (suggested by my male roommate – the women dislike this one), knockers, chesticles, twins, tatas.] 

 

Barring very specific contexts, each of the words feels woefully inadequate to describe that piece of my body. I don’t have the right words to describe what is probably, in the opinion of most straight men, my best and most sexual feature. Initially, I struggled to fathom why conceptualizing these features into a word was so impossible. When I hear someone refer to my finger, for example, I don’t instinctively rear against it and wish they had called it a digit or phalange. 

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But breasts are unique: they are an intensely symbolic, intensely commodified feature. They are our only sexual organs separated from the groin region. We are the only primate species with permanently enlarged breasts (not just during lactation). Some hypothesize it gave our ancient primate relatives a piece of their mother to cling to. Others think large breasts signaled virility in a mate, thus prompting the inadvertent selection of larger breasts among our species. 

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I’ll never forget the horror of looking down in 6th grade, realizing that I needed to wear a bra. Or the mortification of, at the age of 12, having a male family member pull me aside after a family function to warn me of their temptation and their obviousness. As I leveled him the are you fucking kidding me stare to mask my embarrassment, tucking my cardigan closer around my torso, he invoked freudian benevolence. “Look, Maddie, I’m just trying to help. Your grandmother had big boobs too. Have you asked your mom to take you bra shopping yet?” 

 

At first, I wanted nothing more than to hide them. I wore modest and cheap bras, only to insure their camouflage within my frame. Soon, I was easily filling out the same bra size as my mother. Then I needed a size up. Then, surrounded by the cloying, 2-for-1 perfume of Victoria’s Secret, I discovered my first pushup bra. Then, it happened: my freshman year of high school, someone noticed. A group of us girls headed back from the auditorium after some random presentation, talking about bras or something of the like, when one of the girls said: “You know, for how small you are, your boobs are actually pretty big.” 

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Embarrassingly, I was proud. It felt like I had received some invisible award, some validation of my own womanhood. If this singular, feminine trait looked good, did it validate my claim as a woman? Was I finally feminine?

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It became my mission to market this feature of mine subtly. I wore a relatively modest pushup bra with v-neck shirts, I wore tight tops, I posted pictures in my bikini. One bathing suit, a hot pink, Victoria’s Secret, push up top, was jokingly dubbed my “boob suit” by my friends. When I heard rumors of girls wearing a regular bra and a sports bra or stuffing their bras with tissues, I supplied them with performative pity. And, finally, this campaign inevitably (and successfully) landed me within the crosshairs of the male gaze. 

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My sophomore or junior year, I was having a conversation with two guys in my friend group when he mentioned that the guys were quite vulgar when we weren’t around. They talked about each of the girls' best features. I couldn’t resist asking about mine. 

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“Do you really want to know?” he asked, as if my salivating curiosity could be diminished by now. 

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I insisted, promising I wouldn't say anything. He didn’t say a word, just held his hands in front of his chest, pantomiming holding breasts of his own. 

At that moment, I wasn’t sure what to feel: pride for having been noticed as something more than a tomboy or an object unworthy of desire? Or gross for having been objectified in the first place.

 

Since then, my breasts have only become a further object of male attention, and a further source of personal ambivalence. For as much as my breasts are a feature I enjoy accentuating in my style for my own enjoyment, doing so invariably garners the worst kinds of attention, both male and female. Doing so makes me a target of my own femininity. 

 

The day after I had a drink spiked during a spring break trip to Florida, I was on FaceTime with my Mom, explaining the highlights of the story. I left out the goriest details – to tell her that I comatosely made out with** two men would feel too salacious and inappropriate,  like watching a movie’s raunchy sex scene with your parents. At least that was my rationale on the surface; beneath it all, I didn’t want her to see me as vulnerable, didn’t want to let her see beneath the armor I’d crafted under her care. So, she wouldn’t worry, yes. But mostly because she is the type of woman who only respects a certain kind of strength, one which I had always struggled to naturally embody. 

 

My mother has never understood the differences in our bodies, the ways and places mine is soft where hers is lean. The femininity draped across my hips and my chest while she crafts hers into muscle and strength. This too, she did not understand. "I just think you should be careful what you wear," she explained, after I’d gotten frustrated at her insinuation. "There are always going to be creeps out there, and you don’t want to paint yourself as a target with your outfits. All I gotta say, girl, is that you’re really putting it out there with what you’re wearing." 

 

And, setting my knee-jerk reaction to not blame what a woman is wearing aside, she may be correct. I suppose I’ll never know what it was that garnered his attention. Whether it was the form-fitting shirt I was wearing, or something I said, or standing at the bar alone, or my height, or whether I was just his type. But to accept her suggestion to alter the way I dressed, the way I presented myself, to mitigate the lust of men? That felt like admitting defeat, like finally offering up my body in its entirety for public consumption. 

 

Recently, I came across the artwork “Continental Breakfast” by Anna Uddenberg, which features a contraption that a woman climbs into propped up on her hands and knees until she is strapped in, her legs spread wide. The woman is dressed in a drab gray business jacket and pencil skirt, and the contraption itself boasts all the aesthetic splendor of an airplane seat. She is primed for an intimate sexual act, and yet she is expressionless and alone. She is unremarkable. 

 

In her press release, Uddenberg describes the exhibit as follows: “the body is wilfully supported, entrapped, pampered and ultimately rendered useless, all while on view for public consumption.” It is designed to make viewers question to what extent we will let technology encroach on our privacy under the guise of making things easier or better. To me, however, the piece flawlessly resembles what it feels like the ideal woman ought to be: pliable, submissive, expressionless – poised for public consumption. It is the perverse intersection of her intimacy laid bare and her identity shunned. She has reached her ideal state: object. 

 

In Continental Breakfast, society has found a way to market a woman's own sexuality and pleasure back to her. Certainly, we would not have arrived so poignantly here without today’s rampant consumerism. But you can’t sell someone that which they already possess. It is necessary to first alienate the woman from her body, to make her question its worth, its function, its utility not to herself, but to others. To then convince her that she needs what you sell in order to make herself more desirable, more acceptable, less lonely, less unhappy. In marketing these products to women, and in turn marketing to us what women ought to look like, we have been convinced that there are few ways to properly physically inhabit our existence as women. We have been convinced that woman is an object suited for maintenance and constant upkeep.

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It is like any other object or machine or tool: our body has an external utility besides our existence. The external utility is projected upon implicitly and explicitly by others. Our bodies have never been our own. Instead, we are a capitalist canvas, an amalgamation of retinol creams and low carb diets and Skims underwear and pink razors. We are at once the voracious consumer and the supplicant product poised for palatable consumption. 

Maintenance of woman is more than our skin – trim a little here, be more here, far less here. Fit into this mold, or better yet, mold yourself into something palatable and desirable. 

 

My body has become the site of public and private consumption and productization. Even things as innocuous as skincare can turn into a deeply compulsive and private desire to maintain myself properly. Even something as intimate and personal as my breasts can become a public forum, one for opinion, for desire, for conquering. It feels like there is no part of myself off limits. I am reminded of this daily when I see another video selling a product to revolutionize my skin. Or when I see another woman wearing beauty or femininity differently – of course, far better – than I wear my own. It is the ways in which boys seem unable to appreciate any of my beauty beyond my skin, the ways in which they lay claim to my body without a second thought, often without even realizing they’ve done so. It’s the way that it has never been enough to simply exist and inhabit space. 

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