Being needled
After ten weeks of Covid-19 lockdown, my beautician’s appointment book is packed. We clients all emerge into the winter half-light like shaggy bears awakened from sleep. The décor has been refreshed; the staff have faces that seem especially bright, made up, sparkling, clear-eyed. They are so cheerful it seems positively rude. Don’t they understand we are all in crisis?
Seated, motionless as I am attended to, I explain to my brow sculpting queen how my eye is drawn always to the Frida Kahlo tattoo on her forearm, and the diamond etched into her neck below her ear. Inwardly, I wonder what it is to be punctured so deliberately. If I were to try it one day, it would need to be on some fleshy part of my body with as few nerve endings as possible. Probably my arse.
(Later, at a café, as the smiling young waitress scribbles my order on her little pad, I will stare briefly at the parallel cuts on her arms, in various states of healing. There are hundreds. I know I don’t fathom the experience of going out into the world, functional, employable, while chronically self-harming. There are so, so many things each of us can do with our bodies, and to our bodies. What is it to scratch the surface?)
Molten wax is applied to my brow in slim streaks. I cherish the sensation of heat against my face. Pressure on the small strip of unbleached cotton, then the sudden burn of it being whipped away, hairs in tow.
As she works, I tell her of my appointment with a plastic surgeon; that he recommended Botox to lift the brow line, feminising the features framing my eyes.
This is how I learn that most of the staff here have Botox and fillers. As she carefully begins tweezing my arches, I look at her face, registering how smooth it is, utterly unlined. I had thought this was merely because she was young.
Her fingers delicately dance across her face, demonstrating where the needles prick her.
Whereas my perennial fear is pain, she is unconcerned; but then, that much was already obvious, given she has tattoos across her entire body.
“The injections actually within the brow line are a bit spicy”, she concedes.
I ask how often she has it. Once a year. But, she adds, that’s because over time if you have it repeatedly, the muscles are weakened. At the start, she thinks, it would need to be every 3 to 6 months. I feel revulsion at the idea of using toxins to intentionally deaden muscles in my body.
Curious, I ask her to raise her eyebrows. She obliges. And nothing happens. This disturbs me; it is an effect my surgeon had not mentioned, probably because it is assumed to be common knowledge. How could I not know how Botox works?
I have a very mobile face. I am animated and forceful in conversation. This includes in the workplace, when dialling things down might serve me better. Did I learn this style of engagement? As a child, I felt the need to launch with emphatic energy into persuading my father of my position in the many debates we got into. Perhaps that made me a vociferous person. Not helpful, really.
Yet, as this forceful behaviour developed, with it came self-hatred of the very same trait. I saw how it reduced my mother to silence at the dinner table. I did not want go through all my life like this. So, here’s what I thought when I learned that Botox would paralyse my facial expression: fantastic! Perhaps that which I have been unable voluntarily to achieve – toning down my interactive exaggeration – will finally be delivered by injecting toxic botulism bacteria straight into my face.
Later, though, questions about this response emerge. Is this not just capitulation to another part of the cultural stereotyping of female behaviour? Women’s feelings and responses are modulated because they are the ones who are expected to do all the emotional labour in our society. Smile encouragingly while a man waves his hands and tells of everything, except his vulnerability. Women, absorbing with our ears, and too often our bodies, whatever anger, hatred, and above all, shame, that men unleash in our worlds.
Is this what I will be subscribing to, if I ask for those injections?
More questions. How can I consider this to be about “our” ears and bodies, when I am not one of “us”; I was one of “them”. Am I still one of them? If I were a competitive sportsperson, certainly, because my hormone levels would define me thus. Is that true also in the rest of life? What else do the biochemical agents spilling from my endocrine system determine? And how do I tell their effects apart from fifty years of male conditioning?
Shall this body become the stage for a battle between Godzilla and King Kong? Testosterone Versus Botulism: Who Will Win? It sounds like one of my son’s card games, comparing the scores of two unlikely adversaries to assess the outcome.
Enough. Questions must be asked, but also each day lived, grappling with those issues and with the image in the mirror. Turns out, for me, the physical feminising effects of botulism were just a secondary benefit. I am embracing my new blank expression.
Along with a slightly itchy forehead.
*
(To read about the role of shame in gendered violence, read Jess Hill’s See What You Made Me Do: or read Hayley Gleeson’s piece on the ABC, ‘Jess Hill's mission to understand abusive men’.
For the scientifically-minded, there is much research linking Botox to emotional expression and response, though perhaps not along the lines above! Examples include this 2018 article on the relationship between Botox facial treatments and embodied emotions.)
