The Area

A few weeks ago in the David Jones change rooms, I was eavesdropping whilst I had my head stuck through the armhole of a particularly confusing dress. The conversation went something like this.

Customer (to salesgirl): Excuse me, but can you give me a bit of an opinion on this dress? I’m just not sure…

Salesgirl: Well, I think it looks great. It really brings in your waist and your legs look fantastic.

Customer: Yes, I know, but it’s just my upper arms. It’s The Area, you know?

Salesgirl: Ah, yes, The Area. We’ve all got one. Honestly, it really doesn’t look that bad. But if it bothers you, would you like to try the dress on with a cardi for a bit of extra coverage?...

The salesgirl and the customer continued to trade musings on their various Areas while I wrestled various bits of myself into the corresponding parts of the dress. Although the rather complicated frock was occupying a lot of mental energy, I couldn’t help but be enthralled in the areas that these women were listing – body parts I would never have even thought could be a problem, apparently, were. Whilst I was buttoning up, thinking how silly it all was – I mean, who would be upset about their shoulder blades, honestly – it occurred to me that the salesgirl and the customer had touched upon a peculiar and pernicious truth. No matter how beautiful a woman is, no matter how confident and flatteringly dressed, there will always be The Area – the part of one’s body one simply cannot stand.

Our beauty culture is built upon the premise that women – and, increasingly, men – always have to be working on changing something about themselves. Even if you go the whole hog – the botox, the lipo, the nipping, the tucking – our beauty culture increases the magnification on the lens through which we look at the body so that things which we weren’t aware of before are suddenly bought into focus. I’ll never forget, a few years ago, reading an article about shoe-crazed Manhattanites having surgery to reduce their ‘toe cleavage’. That’s right folks, toes ain’t just toes anymore – there’s good and bad toes, bad toes having a crease of skin between your big toe and the next toe along, creating a line similar to a busty woman’s cleavage. Anyway, thinking that was a load of bollocks, I promptly went out shoe shopping. Lo and behold, when I tried on a pair of darling red patent pumps, I had the dreaded toe cleavage. The salesgirl commiserated with me, and suggested I wear them with socks.

Of course, I bought them, and I still wear them to this day, toe cleavage and all, without the coverage of a sock (which would look daft anyway). But, for a moment, I got to feeling that perhaps I should get something done about my toes because they’re just not right. I got suckered in, momentarily, to one of the most ridiculous myths our beauty culture has created.

Not to blow my own horn, but I’m a sociologist – I study this sort of thing – and most days I think I’m pretty good at being a critical reader of the messages our culture constructs. I’m steeped in literature that is critical of the demands women are coerced into placing on themselves. Yet the messages are so pervasive that, even as I’m laughing at them and deconstructing them with my sociologist’s cap on, I still look at my toes – or my breasts or my ankles, or my ears – in a slightly different way than I did before. Every time, it’s an intellectual and emotional fight to remind myself that my body is fine as it is.

It’s a fight that I’m not alone in, as the conversation I overheard in the change room illustrates. Be honest – you probably fight a similar battle most days too. Indeed, in the UK, fighting with one’s Area is the subject of the reality TV phenomena of the makeover show – Trinny and Susannah, and Gok Wan, have made careers out of working with women in their battle with The Area(s). How good these shows actually are for women’s self esteem is a discussion for another post. What is pertinent about these televisual forays into women’s deepest insecurities, however, is that there’s a market for watching women struggle with, and eventually accept, their bodies, their Areas, as they are. Anyone who has done first year film studies knows that we like to live out our fantasies, the lives we can only imagine for ourselves, though what goes on on-screen. I think the most useful thing we can take away from these shows is how very much we are fighting, and how very much we want to win the war.

As alluded to above, for all the talk that I talk, I still can’t always walk the confident walk. I don’t think I have developed the secret weapon that will, once and for all, end all the battles we fight with ourselves over Areas which are more imagined than real. If I do find that secret weapon, you’ll be the first to know. In the meantime, though, we can take comfort in the fact that this is something we’re all fighting. As I finally arranged myself into the rather confusing frock, with a bit of help from the salesgirl, we both looked in the mirror.

‘It’s my knees,’ I said, ‘they’re my Area.’

‘They’re mine too,’ she said, ‘but you know, if you hadn’t of told me, I wouldn’t have known.’

Sometimes, all you need to vanish an Area is for someone to be your mirror, and to let you see more clearly through their eyes.