Me contemplating my wardrobe.
I promise I will be getting to Important Blogging Matters sometime soon—there’s so much to choose from in the daily burndown of all rationality in the world, it’s so overwhelming to pick—but I have to ease back in. That is always the downfall of trying to take a break from something. Will I ever be able to do it again? Ever? Or, when I take a day or a week or a month off, will the unicorn of my own brilliance ever come back to me?
Case in point—this…I mean, maybe you don’t want to click the link because some of the pictures are very inappropriate. If you do click, don’t scroll all the way down. If you scroll down, you might as well go watch Cardi B and you shouldn’t do that. This is the moment, if ever there was one, for some self-control. If you don’t want to click the link (which you shouldn’t really, as I said) I’ll try to ‘splain…no, that’s too hard, I will sum up.
Apparently a young—I don’t know what counts as young actually, and I don’t want to age shame anyone so let us just say—lady…no wait, that doesn’t seem like the right word either, shall we go with Person? Let’s start again. Apparently a Person with an Instagram account by the name of Aubrey O’Day was recently seen walking her dog. I know! Shocking, right? Here are the screaming headlines of the Daily Telegraph:
Danity Kane’s Aubrey O’Day was pictured looking unrecognizable on Sunday while in Palm Springs, CA
The 5′ 4″ star appeared noticeably different to a slew of bikini snaps posted to her social media recently
Last week, Aubrey, 36, advertised the Flat Tummy App on her Instagram account
She admitted last year she knows ‘all the tricks’ when it comes to changing your appearance
The Celebrity Apprentice contestant had an alleged affair with Donald Trump Jr. in 2012
If you were to click the link, you would see a picture of an ordinary American woman out with her strangely dyed tiny little dog. Then you could click away and that would be fine. You could just know that all the other pictures of Ms. O’Day are lots more in the Cardi B line, than in the middle-aged potentially “Karen” line.
The article (is that what this sort of thing is?) says this:
Fans have speculated about her changing looks over the years, but in an interview Aubrey admitted that she knows ‘all the tricks’ when it comes to making your appearance seem different. ‘I’ve had lip fillers and Botox. I put a lot of filters,’ she told UsWeekly just last year, adding: ‘I know all the tricks and I use them.’
Why should I care, I can hear you muttering across all the Intertubes, there is so much wrong with the world, this is totes stupid. To which I reply, Oh Yeah. None of us should care. But we all do, especially since this is also true.
For realsies, only a few people read a book every year. So that’s massively depressing, and also not really pertinent to anything either. Except to point out that if you’re scrolling through Instagram and wondering about the likes of Ms. O’Day, you don’t have time to read interesting books. I, being a special unicorn, am able to do both. I am reading…oh never mind, I know no one cares.
So anyway, like the ever widening gap between rich and poor, right and left, justice and mercy, there is stretching out a wide gulf between what “famous” people actually look like and what they think they should look like, or wish they could look like, and I think that is very depressing. That Ms. O’Day would want to subject herself to lip fillers and Botox and have to use a lot of filters to make herself fancy enough for all her fans, so that she can go on being famous and getting all the likes and clicks, is a terrible indictment on human taste, reason, and sanity. Ms. O’Day should have had people in her life who showed her more interesting things to think about and desire. Unhappily, she has an “image” to keep up—the same one that every single “adored” “celebrity” must maintain, lest Americans stop plunking down their money and clicks for all the delights on offer. “They” wouldn’t have to do it, if “we” didn’t want them to. And then “we” want to be like “them” and so we buy all the stuff, which makes them offer more of it, and after a while, in this immense circle of hell, everyone is unhappy.
The problem for me, which is my most pressing concern, is that I don’t want to be seen looking like Ms. O’Day as she is on Instagram, nor as she is walking her dog In Real Life. There ought to be, as so many Anglicans like to say, a Via Media, a way to be both charmingly dressed and real at the same time.
The full, pouting lips and enormous bosoms uncomfortably poured like chunky lentil soup into jeggings is demoralizing, obviously, so that after a while, you may keep pouring yourself in because that’s all there is in your closet, but you don’t any longer bother with all the other parts of the ghastly endeavor, and so go slouching unhappily down the street with a colorfully dyed pooch.
Covid, as I keep telling myself, hasn’t been good for anyone. Here am I, trying to lose just enough weight to pour myself back into the clothes I wore last fall, learning to recalibrate my whole bodily existence with the fact that I am probably going to be truly, as they say, “menopausal,” a decade before everyone else my age, and yet still wandering around online seeing that some people would expect me to wear clothes that are suitable for literally no one in the entire universe.
Don’t worry, I know I’ve already said this in at least twenty other blog posts. Didn’t see that coming, Did You (that’s a terrible joke). Before you accuse me of being Bouji, let me suggest that the whole business is unkind. Ms. O’Day shouldn’t be shamed for being too hot (that must be why she would wear so little in public, and I KNOW HOW SHE FEELS), but shouldn’t have to feel like she needs to Be Hot either. And neither should I. And neither should you. When everyone has given up on trying to solve America’s intractable race and economic problems without reason and without God, let us then turn our attention to making clothes wearable again, and the female body—of every shape and size—acceptable again. I’ll make some signs. We can light some jeggings on fire. It’ll be great.
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