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| Many more "girls" look like this than any Victoria's Secret model |
I don’t read Playboy, I’m not informed enough to know
whether people do “read” Playboy but I read an interview they did with Lena Dunham. In this piece, she is asked what she would do if she woke up in the
body of a Victoria Secret model. Lena
mentions she’d be freaked out “I don’t want to go through life wondering if people are talking
to me because I have a big rack. Not being the babest person in the world
creates a nice barrier.” As I read, part of me admired how grounded she
sounded but a much larger part of me thought yeah right and I wouldn’t want to
have a house on the beach in Hawaii, what would happen if there was a storm?
This was all before I had ever seen a single episode of Girls. Let me be honest, this was before I binged on HBO on
demand’s first two seasons of Girls.
Have you seen the show? I know I was late to the party; Girls follows a group of 20-something friends living in Brooklyn. As much as I
hate using the word, it feels like an “honest” glimpse off dating, work, friendship
and all the messiness involved with finding your way. The characters are
quirky, the main character Hannah is played by Dunham who also directs the
show. Dunham is often undressed. There’s nothing unique about that except for Dunham’s
seeming total lack of self-consciousness about her body. In one episode, Duhnam
plays ping pong in her underwear in the way a young child would before they realize
clothes are worn for certain activities.
Let’s be clear, Dunham’s body is very average. This is not
the busty, bronzed, groomed and posed world of Victoria’s Secret. This is basic
underwear, lumps and bumps, the things we all tend to cover up. I work with
women all day long and I could not figure out where such a lack of
body angst comes from. After all if you create a show, you can decide when and how often you disrobe.
While away last week, I read The Beauty Experiment. The book’s author Phoebe Baker Hyde was
living in Hong Kong with her husband and young daughter. She felt she was
overly distracted by the trappings of appearance. For one year she goes on a beauty
fast foregoing makeup, buying new clothes, paying for haircuts, hair removal-
you name it. The premise was if she was fixated on her looks, what else was she
missing? In some manner, when Hyde frees
up time previously spent on makeup application and shopping she feels liberated.
In other ways, new insecurities flourish with a bad haircut, old clothes and no
“concealer”. At one point in the book when Phoebe shares the concept of her
experiment with friends, one friend replies “you’re not one of those women”. While she may not have ever been covered in jewels
and decked out every day when it comes to that critique or as Hyde calls it
“The Voice” most of us are “those women.” Whether it’s appearance, parenting or
related to our professions, we can relate to Hyde’s frustration “the distance between me and the person I
needed to become seemed insurmountable”. As with Dunham, in The
Beauty Experiment I saw something real, something most of us don’t share
that much or aren’t proud of.
I was disheartened while reading a scene when Hyde looks
through teenage pictures of herself and laments that her boyfriend-less, chubby
16 year old self and her 30-something self are in many ways the same. I would
hope that The Voice is softened, at least a little, with age. This week, we
were away in Mexico. I’ve mentioned it before but Mexico was the first vacation
I took with my then boyfriend and now longtime husband Marc. At one point in
the trip, Marc joked “oh my god do you remember yourself then?” How could I
forget, I ran laps around “the trail”
the size of a tennis court because I was losing my mind without a gym and changed
multiple times before getting dressed to go out. Almost 20 years later, I
remember my blue bathing suit and bad beach hair but cannot name the hotel we stayed
in.
Why did he marry me?
Last night, as we
sat with the boys enjoying our last guacamole of the trip and a
not-so-Santana-ish mariachi Oye Como Va a young and lithe college-aged woman
jogged past our table. On a street full
of restaurants, she stuck out like a sore thumb. “What- she just has to get in a workout before going
out” Marc observed. There’s hope for the Mexico jogger. While we had an active
trip, I didn’t go to the gym the whole time. I may never be a “Lena” but “The
Voice” is very different than it was in college.
Do you worry you spend
too much time thinking about your appearance? How do you think you become “a
Lena”? Do you find your “Voice” has changed over time? What would your Beauty
Experiment or “fast” look like?
