There’s a scene in Sunset Boulevard in which Norma Desmond, the former silent film star, is watching a movie in her Hollywood mansion. It’s one of her own movies, of course — they’re all she ever watches — because in …
The male baldness industrial complex
Shakespeare had it wrong: uneasy is the head that wears no crown. Because from Samson onwards, men have feared losing their hair. It’s something to do with ageing perhaps, a sense of retreat or fading virility — though for decades …
Fat positivity is a fantasy
If societal mores are designed for the comfort and prosperity of human beings, they are also necessarily designed to restrict the movement of human bodies. Some of these constraints seem only fair, and even intuitive: don’t step on people’s toes, …
Why our cities should be sacred
At some unknown moment in around 9,500 BC, hunter-gatherers in what is now south-east Turkey, and was then lush grasslands rich with pistachio and almond forests, and abundant with sheep and goats, did something for the first time in human …
The problem with beautiful women
A group of little girls sit in a circle and play a game called “Honestly”. It’s a sort of crowdsourced truth-or-dare, except it’s only “truth”, and there’s only one question: Am I beautiful?
The asker closes her eyes, and the …
Forgive my male gaze
Lost in thought again, I pace the humming street with my eyes down. They get into less trouble that way. If the pavements weren’t so cluttered with abandoned rented bicycles and e-scooters, I’d try walking backwards.
I am brooding over …
The beauty of Botox
One of my closest friends is allergic to Botox, which was exactly as terrible a discovery as you might expect. It started while she was still at the doctor’s office, with a burning sensation at the injection site. (“That’s just …
Is it racist to like big butts?
The human butt has long been the object of all manner of obsessions. We worry over it: its size, its shape, whether or not it has cellulite on it, how it looks in a pair of jeans. But now, a …
Beauty has become our enemy
I was walking through the chaos of Times Square recently when, in search of some minor relief, I reflexively raised my head and focused on a space in the middle distance where I have been conditioned to expect the calming …
Selfies have made you ugly
Modern man, wrote the social psychologist Erich Fromm in 1956, “has been transformed into a commodity”. Scroll through social media, and you will see this transformation is absolute. On one side, we are asked to rate glamorous, increasingly similar-looking people …
The problem with being hot
The late Rush Limbaugh once said that feminism was created to “allow ugly women access to society” — a comment all the crueller because it was true. A central tenet of feminism is that a woman’s social value should be …
Kingsley Amis vs God
Close to my home stand two glorious late-Victorian monuments to what the preachers of the age would have called the beauty of holiness. A few minutes’ walk in one direction takes me to St Augustine’s, Kilburn, decorated with exquisite murals …
Women can’t be beautiful
I don’t care that much about my appearance. I don’t waste time chasing after arbitrary beauty standards. I get my hair done, though, and I’ve started to have it coloured since I turned 40, but that’s very low maintenance: four …
