Polly Vernon has her say
I WAS SUPPOSED to be getting my brows done today. After five untended months; after my forehead fully grew itself a pair of little hair shelves (/privet hedges)… My brows were to be tamed! Along with my ’tache, which I don’t talk about much because embarrassing, so, hoorah, huzzah, hu… Ah. The Government just changed its mind on relaxing the ban on facial treatments in beauty salons, and now: my brows do grow on.
Boris has promised he’ll rethink my brow* situation over forthcoming weeks – it might have even happened by the time you read this – which is terribly good of him, except huge damage has already been done. I don’t just mean to the once-gracious sweep of my eyebrows. I mean: to the beauty industry. While all around them pubs reopened, hairdressers reopened and men got their beards trimmed, beauty salons stayed closed, or at least, closed in any meaningful sense: closed to those seeking treatments between neck and hairline. Women’s faces were simultaneously branded deathly dangerous and too unimportant to qualify as anything other than piffling afterthoughts in crisis survival plans. If that changes – if, in fact, you’re reading this in a salon reception, awaiting a brow shaping, facial, laser resurfacing, whatever – you know damned well face treatments will be the first things to get re-locked-down-again, should policy reversals be required.
Governing these decisions is a heady combo of sexism underpinned by misogyny. The sexism is borne of ignorance and denial: that we women do this stuff at all, that we do it as much as we do, that it matters to us as much as it does… And that the people delivering these services are almost invariably other women, working in businesses run by women, a femaleorientated economy that generates £28.4 billion under normal circs, only these are not normal circs, and oopsie! Two salons in my closest neighbourhood alone closed for good in the last fortnight, taking livelihoods from some 23 women, by my calculations.
As for the misogyny: that’s the consequence of women being eternally sneered at for our ‘vanity’. For the absurd lengths we go to, to prettify ourselves, to deceive the world our genetic make-up is better than it actually is, with tricks, paint, wax, unguents! A recent pro-salon news segment went to great pains to show how (currently banned) semi-permanent brow make-up is used on chemo patients – all good and true except this editorial treatment bore more than a faint hint of: it’s not just about the narcissism of silly ladies, you see! It’s about ill people!
Oh, there is a nasty strain of ladypunishing buried in this, I tell ya. I can smell it. Ironically enough, it’s the same spirit that only values women for how pretty we are. If I’ve lost count of the losers in this particular lose-lose (lose) situation – I do know, we’re all women.
’tache