Bodily Autonomy

For reasons out of my grasp, I ended up watch '10 years younger' and found myself disgusted by the attitudes on it! For those who haven't had the misfortune of watching it, a woman (it's almost always a woman) who looks her age is taken out into public, where people give their opinions of how old they think she is.

The average is taken, and it's always older than her actual age, and this is terrible! You wouldn't want people to know that you have lived your life, that you have experiences and memories and a personality! All that matters is that people see you as a blonde, twenty-something person with a very stretched, poisoned forehead with no working facial muscles.

The woman, having been told she looks older than she is and that this is terrible, is told that she needs surgery, a hair cut, younger looking clothes, more makeup to hide her face, and if she has grey hairs and is actually aging normally?! Dye it, quickly, before anyone realises that you're not 25 anymore!

Because god forbid that people realise that you're human and therefore not immortal or in possession of eternal youth. What is it with the obsession of covering one's grey hairs? What happened to growing old gracefully? Obviously that's still a possibility for men, what with the 'silver fox' image, and articles like this letting us know that women 'just look older' with grey hair, while men can look 'hunky'. *sigh*

The woman I watched, having had her face sliced and diced, was told that she needed a new haircut. She had long hair. She asked for it to be kept long, but just restyled, or trimmed. The hairdresser put his hand where he was about to cut, and said 'how's that?'. She said 'no, I'd like it about here please', putting her hand a little lower down.  He nodded, and proceeded to cut where he wanted to, then showed it to her. 'How's that?' he said. She looked horrified, and said 'No, put it back!' slightly jokingly, because obviously she realised that that was impossible, but - she said no! She specifically said that she didn't want this to be done to her, and he went ahead and did it anyway. Because y'know, he knows best, he's the hairdresser, she's just an old, unfashionable woman!

Which gets me on to this. Women's bodies are seen as public property. If society doesn't like something about you - your fashion sense, your haircut, your face - they will change it for you. Because you don't get a say about your own body. I've seen women brought onto things like the Jeremy Kyle show who'd been growing their hair all of their lives. It was long and it was their pride and joy. Their families didn't like it, they said it 'got in the way', or 'made them look older', and they cut it. On live TV. While the women cried their eyes out, protested and told them to stop. But their families didn't like it, and it's only hair, so what were they making such a big fuss about?

If this is the sort of attitude that society has towards women's bodies, then it's no wonder that things like rape are so often dismissed, trivialised, given other names. 'Grey rape', as a term, shouldn't even exist. And it's because our bodies aren't our own, so why would people even need our consent?