Wearing a mask is easy – and I finally have the chance to show off my smize
Will the fact masks are now obligatory in shops in England finally – please God – mark the end of the mask culture wars? Will this spark a political and public commitment to sane and effective public health policies? Well, yes and no. On the one hand, it’s a relief that the government has finally listened to what the World Health Organization has been saying in increasingly desperate tones since early spring. On the other, complementary goggles seem to be required to make your way through this murky mire of regulation, social codes and libertarian posturing.
People in England are now required to wear masks when collecting food from cafes and takeaways. Other countries haven’t needed to legislate, perhaps because they had higher levels of trust in their governments. We are also being encouraged to “eat out to help out” (it’s fitting that the Tories, never a party famed for their generosity, didn’t seem to grasp the sexual connotations of this slogan), but no restaurant or pub staff appear to be wearing masks, because they “don’t have to”. Supermarkets are saying that they won’t be enforcing the law. Workers are being encouraged back into offices – remember them? – but without any clear maskwearing policy, even though anyone who has tried to do a spreadsheet to the dulcet tones of a colleague’s hacking cough knows that offices are hotbeds of disease. All of these places are indoors, but only some are regulated. By legislating for some, you imply it’s OK to go without in others.
I popped down to my local when it opened and had a glance inside, but it was a mask-free zone, so I didn’t go in. It’s such a simple thing, putting on a mask. It says: “I care about your welfare, as well as my own, and do not want to infect you.” It is, ultimately, an act of kindness and generosity, underpinned – and I have to keep stressing this – by science. Developed by scientists, to whom we used to defer, back when we lived in the old, lucid world.
The first time, I didn’t put my mask on properly. Like a member of the population of any country that doesn’t have an established culture of mask-wearing, my experience with face coverings was limited. I have never taken part in an Eyes Wide Shut-esque orgy, or been a black bloc anarchist, or held up a bank. No one has ever invited me to a masquerade ball or asked me to perform abdominal surgery, and I don’t own a house so have never sanded any floorboards. And yet, after that initial fumble, I somehow managed. It’s incredible what people can achieve, when they put their minds to it.
Wearing a mask is easy, but it does require new forms of social etiquette. I have found myself becoming very expressive with my eyes, as though everyone with whom I now converse is a newborn baby, or a kitten. After wasting my teenage years bingeing on America’s Next Top Model, I finally have the opportunity to show off my “smize”. Time spent living in Italy has increased my repertoire of hand gestures, though I haven’t quite been brave enough to imitate a pal from Calabria’s favoured move, which was to mime rubbing his crotch while rolling his eyes at the merest irritation. It is no longer easy to make bitchy asides to one’s friends, and so passive aggressiveness has taken a big hit. So have impromptu conversations with strangers on trains, finally bringing the north into line with the miserable south.
There’s a certain kind of person who refuses to wear a mask, and I hate to say it, but they are usually male (I’m joking, I’m an angry feminist, I love to say it). Don’t blame me, blame this study, which found that men were less inclined to wear them due to their being “shameful, not cool and a sign of weakness”, which is strange, because from the looks of these mask-denying types being cool never seemed to preoccupy them much before.Wearing a mask as a “chin guard” isn’t quite the sexy rebelwithout-a-cause vibe you think it is, either. Weirdly, being a total baby isn’t all that alluring.
The writer Andrew Male perhaps said it best when he wrote: “Men complaining about masks because they ‘feel unnatural/uncomfortable’, ‘ruin the experience’ (of social interaction) ‘probably don’t work anyway’ and ‘have taken the fun out of it’ (going to the shops). Just seems strangely familiar is all.” Doesn’t it just? Maybe what we really need is another Johnny Condom song, though the lyrics to this 90s awareness campaign ring true: “I protect you from the viruses, so why not try me on?” The skewed logic of those wearing masks in supermarkets but not in pubs is also familiar to those of us who believed the playground rumour that you couldn’t get pregnant standing up.
And then there is fashion. I love fashion, but like any true acolyte, I also recognise that fashion is utterly ridiculous. Do I want this $45 Dolce & Gabbana face mask? Yes I do, more than I can fully articulate (and not as much as I want this one that has The Scream by Edvard Munch – himself no stranger to feelings of paralysing terror, or respiratory diseases). But I am also disturbed by the way that late-stage capitalism has so fully embraced pandemic chic. I have always been a catastrophist, but I never envisaged my future Ballardian nightmare involving the marketing of luxury silk plague masks on Instagram. Even my anxious little prepper amygdala failed to make that jump.
There’s something strangely dislocating about the Daily Mail’s sidebar of shame at the moment – it was never a landing pad for the well-adjusted, but now it’s reached the next level of barmy. “Leonardo DiCaprio, 45, is joined by glamorous girlfriend Camila Morrone, 23, as the couple enjoy a romantic al fresco dinner in LA” we are informed. The particulars of Morrone’s outfit are then described in great detail, with the exception of the matching mask that she is wearing in all the paparazzi photos. The pandemic, incidentally, provides women my age with an excellent opportunity to attempt to convince DiCaprio that we are under his apparent dating age threshold of 25, though we may require sunglasses as well as a mask. And probably a hat, as well.
It’s a brave new world, this 2020 planet, and wearing a mask (sorry, “muzzle”) is really the least you can do for your fellow human beings. I’m a latent hippy and so would say that, of course – my mask is from Etsy and made from paisley fabric. But that doesn’t mean that the whole thing isn’t stressful, and sad, and above all deeply, deeply weird. Perhaps that’s why photographs of Ben Affleck smoking a cigarette under his own mask resonated with me so much. It’s a mood.
• Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist