Everybody's doing it

All the older ladies (and some gentlemen) of “Benidorm” flocked to the discount Botoxerie until the incident.

Haley Nahman, popular Substacker and former Man Repeller staffer, was interviewed for a piece on The Cut about The Botox, and wrote about the experience, and about anti-aging more generally. The newsletter in question does a couple different things, some I thoroughly endorse, others that left me wondering.

I will begin with the spot-on bit.

Nahman is right that there’s something irresponsible as well as advertorial about claiming that ‘everyone’ is doing something that objectively few are doing. One also sees lifestyle articles about how everyone smokes cigarettes again, which is also, objectively, not true, and a bizarre assertion to anyone who remembers the era when this was closer to the truth. These story templates are similar because they can be written about in a similar way because it could feel true, as in, might be true in a particular friend group, and because of the looming possibility that people are doing mildly scandalous things in quasi-secret. It’s the covert angle that allows for the possibility that there’s an everybody doing something but you’re the last to know. Even if the thing in question isn’t interesting at the level of murders and affairs, it’s always a bit exciting if there’s information about other people you’re not privy to.

And you do have to ask yourself, is someone possibly… selling something? Is this a vibe being picked up on, an organic trend, or more like, someone trying to make fetch happen? ‘Everybody’ is buying $5,000 shoes. ‘Everybody’ is summering in this one resort you’ve never heard of, link to reserve.

Point being, I could see it being frustrating to be interviewed for an article about whether all the 30-year-olds are Botoxing, to have said no, all the 30-year-olds are not Botoxing, and then to appear in the story as the last un-Botox’d 30-something.

Now the part where I cannot say I was entirely on board.

“Nearly all my friends, ranging from their early 30s to early 40s, had abstained so far.”

Here I wanted to know how you would know this. Botox, unlike having the Bill of Rights tattooed onto your forehead, or for that matter a Nazi insignia on your chest, only lasts a few months, and can be subtle enough that people have told me they’ve used it and I would never have known. Outside extreme usage, my sense is, it’s often addressing things on a person’s face that only they notice. And as we also know from The Cut, people sometimes withhold specific information about their beautification choices from specific friends they anticipate will have specific reactions to it. Moving on.

“I told [the journalist from The Cut] I was entertained by witnessing my own aging process; that I thought it was healthy to understand myself as an evolving creature, with all the complications of that.”

It’s not that I don’t believe this is true of Nahman. It seems a weird thing to make up so I’d assume it is! I do question whether this is broadly applicable. Are most women not getting Botox? Indeed, most women are not doing that thing. I wonder about the math that leads to the 96% figure for non-users, but I would assume it is something in that ballpark. But once you look at the numbers of women buying skincare products that promise to fight signs of aging, the notorious gazillion dollar industry, the creams in the medicine cabinets of every woman over whatever age, the fact that mysteriously, women past a certain age have far less gray hair than their male counterparts, it becomes untenable that this sort of serenity about aging would be anything other than an outlier position.

Indeed, one begins to suspect the reason most aren’t Botox’d isn’t ‘that’s not chic’ but rather ‘that’s expensive.’ If they were giving away free Botox on the corner, the line would be around the block. This is a Benidorm episode, give or take, because of course it is.

Also:

“Have you ever gotten a wrong-feeling haircut and found yourself a little fascinated, in a neutral sense, by your image in the mirror?”

No. I have never had this happen. I cannot relate, sorry! I have been different levels if displeased with bad haircuts but “neutral” and “fascinated” never entered into it.

Nahman’s essay does things and doesn’t do them. She “can’t speak for all [her] friends,” but does more or less that, speaking on behalf of a cohort or clique, rather than simply sharing her own experiences. It’s not an ‘I don’t get Botox’ essay but a ‘we don’t get Botox’ essay, and it’s not clear how many people we’re talking about, only that the author comes across as someone who probably has more than two friends. I kind of get why she’s doing this (her point is that even chic women aren’t all doing injectibles) but also, she doesn’t know how these other people feel or even know-know what they’re doing, so I’m not sure it helps her case.

She’s derisive about a commenter at NYMag who says, “‘I’m so tired of people wanting a gold medal for not getting cosmetic treatment.’” But also, this reads like an essay from someone who wants praise for exactly this. Not a medal exactly but, she is modelling good choices, virtue signalling in the non-derogatory sense. Offering a permission slip to say, you can be hipper-than-thou and un-Botox’d. And there is genuinely something nice about that! Nice, if of limited utility to those of us who are not in her gracefully-aging circles.

“Most of us were cosmopolitan women who still like getting dressed and worked in or around media—ostensibly, we were part of the ‘everyone’ cohort.”

Here is where I’ll bring out the hammer for which all is a nail from the ol’ toolkit: context collapse. There are probably 500k women in NYC alone who fit that general description. They are not a political or aesthetic monolith. Now I don’t know Nahman, but I am able to gather context within seconds. This is a post that also recommends a book about “the media’s complicity in the destruction of Gaza”—a sign of a woman with certain politics but also a degree of seriousness and good-person-ness that might preclude staring in the mirror and having big feelings about one’s asymmetrical glabellar lines. (Among my many similarities to Lionel Hardcastle, I have more like a line between my eyebrows than the two, but off to one side, a fact about which I wish I felt “neutral” or “curiosity.” I am the meme where you age badly if problematic.)

A glance at the author’s Instagram (you cannot do a post about your own looks and have people not look at your Instagram) suggests a certain look, which, we do all have those. She is attractive, as well as clearly on a certain point on the clogs-to-Mar-a-Lago spectrum. I am like a millimeter away from where she is on that spectrum, this is not a criticism, it is a contextualization. In her world, it is chic to be the sort of person who’d have the money for Botox and the names of the best practitioners and then not do that thing. I’m not sure what people in other worlds are meant to do with that information.

I also wonder about where lines are drawn in Nahman’s milieu. I’m thinking of Meg Keene’s accurate description of how beautification values play out according to politics:

There is a list of body modifications that are tacitly fine if you’re a woman who cares about democracy: moisturizer, tattoos, piercings, religious use of sunscreen, wild colored hair.

Then there is a list of things that will make you a bad feminist, or possibly even MAGA coded: GLP-1s, botox, fillers, plastic surgery, fake boobs (or just boobs that are too big), hair extensions.

I would yes-and for that first category anything involving unconventional gender expression, as well as overt feminine self-expression if done in a sufficiently knowing/ironic/tongue-in-cheek/queer-coded-regardless-of-who-the-woman-sleeps-with manner. Or if there is a cultural-expression element, or a socioeconomic one. (Acrylic nails.) It’s not that the left or the right has a monopoly on ‘pay money you may not have, for medically unnecessary and possibly dangerous changes to one’s body.’ It’s that there’s this complex code of when different people raise objections. And objections do get raised in both directions! Blue hair is just not natural, and all that.

Also, our buried lede: Nahman is 36. This would indeed qualify her (as the NYMag journalist thought!) to comment on a new maybe-phenomenon of young women doing anti-aging injectables. But I’m not sure it qualifies her to comment on what it feels like to look haggard, to look old. I was 36 once, I’m 42 now, and the tales I could tell. There is, somewhere, a woman however many years older than I am, rolling her eyes. Such is the way. This too is a Britcom scene: Absolutely Fabulous, “Birthday,” where Bo, Edina’s ex-husband’s new wife, is holding forth at Edina’s 40th about about how chill she (Bo) was about turning 40. Edina’s mother asks, “When will you be 50?,” which causes Bo to hyperventilate, and Bo’s husband to explain, “She hasn’t started 50 therapy yet.”

My point is not that there comes an age where every woman does every beautification ritual on the market. (See above!!) We have all walked down the street and seen women in their 70s who don’t resemble Joan Rivers. But there are subcultural differences in when different groups do what. It’s a bit like the vibe that women in whichever milieu ‘don’t have kids’ but they do, they just do so at 40 and not 25. There’s a type of woman who does all the beauty stuff at 22 and is not apologizing and has a general aesthetic that suggests embrace of artifice. There’s another sort who discreetly explores such avenues at 52. You know how there’s an age before which you cannot be president or whatever? Perhaps so too, before expressing thoughts on what it feels like to have aged into irrelevance.