July 26, 2023

On looking young, and not being Martha Stewart

Posted in Uncategorized tagged Media, Personal at 12:35 pm by chavisory

You know that thing about how every time I identify with a character, and especially with a female one, even for like a second, someone will unfailingly pop up to go “She’s nothing like a real girl, though,” and often in the name of feminism?

It turns out they’ll even do that with actual, real, living women!

And I never for a second thought I was ever going to have to feel this way about…Martha Stewart.

I could not ever have predicted that I’d ever look at Martha Stewart on the cover of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue and see someone I could be in the world, in any way. A version of a possible future.

Trust me. At no point up until that moment could I have foreseen a future in which I’d even have to construct that sentence.

I have not lived my life, generally speaking, being able to look at swimsuit models and see a version of womanhood that has anything to do with me.

(I never would’ve thought when I was 18 or so that I’d be following Britney Spears or Paris Hilton for their disability rights/anti-institutionalization work, either, but here we are.)

I look really young. It is not always a privilege, when you are not Martha Stewart. People try to baby me at work. People younger than me try to sideline me and treat me like I don’t know what my job is. People have assumed that the birth year I’ve written on a form was a typo or mistake.

It’s not anti-authenticity to look the way I do. It can be hard, and alienating, and I don’t have a choice. Other people already have a hard time with it, and I’m half Martha’s age.

I was out one night after a show I was working on, a few years ago, with the cast and our PSM. We chose a bar, and nobody else even got carded on our way in, but the bouncer grabbed my arm as I tried to follow my friends to pull me backwards and demand my ID. I was in my 30’s.

I’ve been wondering what things could possibly, possibly be like for me at 80, if I keep looking like this. What does it look like for me to keep working? What does it look like for me to retire? At what point do I need to look into getting a fake ID to say I’m younger than I am to avoid accusations of faking my real ID?

Obviously, I don’t have the financial resources of Martha Stewart. In most ways I’m not ever going to be living like Martha Stewart.

But good to know… that’s genuinely how I might look in a swimsuit.

Lately my hair looks really good. I’m enjoying it; it hasn’t been this way for most of my life. But why did it take so long for anyone to cut my hair right, tell me the truth about it, tell me things like how often to wash it (way less often than you think!), how often to condition it, how to find a different shampoo if one wasn’t working well, that not all municipal water supplies are created equal? That it wasn’t just me? That my hair and skin weren’t just bad, that solutions existed and you could buy them in drugstores? That things like getting enough sleep and living somewhere with differently treated tap water might help?

Lately I look at myself in the mirror as I brush my hair and get dressed in the morning, and I like the way my hair looks. And I kind of woke up one day to realize I had the bust size of my dreams. A lot of days I feel and look really good in my clothes.

And sometimes I can only think “why now?” Why did it have to take this long? Why couldn’t I have had this when I was young, when everyone else got to enjoy themselves this way?

I feel like Molly in that scene from the Last Unicorn where she asks “How dare you come to me now? When I’m this?”

Like, what is the point? What good could this possibly do me now? How long could I even possibly get to have this for?

I didn’t ever expect to be someone for whom any possible answer gets dropped on the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition one day.

But I saw it and went “….Oh.

“Huh.”

I guess I might still have 40 or 50 years to like how I look in a swimsuit?

I never got to be pretty when I was young. I’m actually not hating the prospect that I might get to be when I’m old. I’m not hating the possibility of it becoming common knowledge that this is a way 80-year-old women can look…purely for the amount of bureaucratic hassle it might save me.

It strikes me also that we know that the bodies of cover models are not, as a general rule, realistic aspirations for most women. I’m not gonna call them inauthentic! But it’s been something generally known, for a long, long time, that maintenance of that body type requires a lot of work and attention in addition to lucky genetics. This is not something that has occasioned remark for quite a while. People with bodies that get on the cover of Sports Illustrated, whether because of their athletic achievement or how they look in a bikini, aren’t common.

As soon as one of them is old, though?

We have to make sure everyone knows that isn’t a real woman’s experience!

So many people just have no idea of other people’s realities, if they lie even slightly outside of their own. And that can calcify itself into essentialism and bigotry really easily. What “real” women’s experiences are and aren’t. What they do or don’t look like. That experiences unfamiliar or invisible to them don’t really exist. They don’t know what to do with us when they encounter us in the real world.

That people with “authentic” women’s experiences of aging don’t look like that when they’re 80.

But I might. And not because I’m insanely privileged, not because of plastic surgery or having a personal trainer or a limitless budget for organic food, but because I have a developmental disability and I work in the dark.

And heck, Martha’s face might still look more like Apo Whang-Od by the time she is, in fact, 106.

I’d be happy still being alive and looking like either of them by that point.

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