This no-make up selfie thing has been bothering me for a while and I've been struggling to work out why. It doesn't make sense for someone who only wears make up very occasionally to be worried by it. No one has actually nominated me, probably because they know how I look without make up but I know that if I was nominated I wouldn't want to do it.
I wear make up if I'm feeling particularly rough, if the person who looks back from the mirror doesn't look like me, if I'm going somewhere special or think that someone might take a photo of me. I don't like photos. I think they fail to capture the life, intelligence and inner beauty of any person. Out of 10 photos you might get one that really reflects the person and selfies are even worse. To take a good selfie you probably have to be a very confident person and have a perfectly symetrical face and no bags under the eys. Without a symetrical face, selfies always look wrong because they are reversed and eye bags are always highlighted by a short arm induced camera angle.
I don't like the pressure element, either. People who refuse are judged. People who take part are judged. I don't like that people feel they have to be 'brave' to go without make up. I don't like the fact that it divides men and women and highlights differences between them. Men are now doing make-up selfies, where their make up is overdone and ridiculous, rather than something that accentuates their good features, hides their bad and makes them took a little younger. Make up helps lots of women to find a voice, as Oscar Wilde said, "Give a man a mask and he will tell you the truth."
One of the big reasons it bothers me is going to be a difficult confession to make. It's the charity thing. Cancer Research UK didn't start the campaign, although they are not upset about the extra cash they are getting. Why would they be? They are a huge charity that raised £460million from fundraising last year and they are big business, with a chief executive that earns about £220k a year and a further 165 of their employees earning over £60k. I have a bit of a problem with this charity's message. Last year I walked the Race for Life, wearing a T-shirt that said "Cancer we're coming to get you," all the time thinking, "No. Absolutely not. No Cancer I'm not coming to get you." I would rather the charity focused on stopping cancer coming to get me, but they do very little research on preventing cancer. Their funds are all used for research to smash, blast, destroy cancer (and the bit of the person that it has grown in), to put people who have grown a cancer into clinical trials and to grow cancer in animals. Personally, I'd rather fund a smaller charity that works to make the lives of people who have a problem (whether it be cancer or anything else) a little bit better. I think that probably makes me not very forward thinking.
The Archers is also bothering me. Ruth has been tired and snappy and then Jill (her mother-in-law who is staying with them) tells her she's pregnant and doesn't get slapped and then David and Ruth are delighted. She's had breast cancer too, so it really is an unlikely pregnancy. Not once has either of them said, "My God, what are we going to do? We're too old for this. We can't do this. What's the number of the local abortion clinic?" I just didn't believe it, which I wrote on Twitter and was told to stop listening by someone who spells Ruth as Roof and Brian as Brine.
Talking of Brian, his wife Jennifer wants a new kitchen and has approached the whole thing in a way that no woman today would. In a scene from the 1970s Jennifer goes on strike and stops cooking for him, leaving him wandering around the kitchen in a state of panic, getting hungrier and hungrier and finally stealing a chocolate bar from his son (who is in his 40s, so it's not as bad as it sounds) before giving in. This wouldn't work. Brian would go to the pub, ring for a pizza delivery or get on the internet to have sandwiches delivered from the local artisan bakery/deli. There aren't many men who can't rustle up a bacon sandwich these days. The Jennifers of the world, who want new kitchens can't go on strike any more. Instead, she would have dropped hints, left plans around, asked him to measure things, sought his opinion and eventually he would have ordered the kitchen she wanted because he would have thought it was his idea.
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