Edel Coffey: There's still a very strong ideology of how women should look

Edel Coffey. Photo: Ray Ryan

Last week was a bit of a psychedelic experience. I felt like I had been bounced back to the dark ages of ladette culture, or further still, as there was so much commentary floating around the ether about how women should look.

From labiaplasties on the rise in Ireland to a pregnant Rihanna wearing runners to perform her Super Bowl half-time show to a debate on breakfast television about whether women should glam up for the labour ward (honestly, I’m not making this up), my head was spinning by the end of the week. It reminded me that amid all the body positivity and ‘do you’ memes, there is still a very strong ideology about how women should look.

I thought Rihanna’s performance was spectacular, supercool and sexy and insouciant, but some critics complained it was disappointing, underwhelming and lacked energy. This despite the fact that the singer is quite pregnant with her second child. I remember finding it hard to finish a sentence on radio when I was pregnant because my lungs were so squashed. My performances definitely lacked energy. But hypoxia will do that to a girl. The criticism seemed harsh and my thoughts went to Pamela Anderson’s confession in her Netflix documentary that she had to continue to work in a 17” corset on the set of Barb Wire when she discovered she was pregnant with her first child, which she later miscarried.

On English breakfast television last week, two journalists got into a preposterous spat about whether women should do their make-up and glam up before going into the labour ward. Yes, you read that correctly. One of the women claimed that women who didn’t make the effort to look good during labour were lazy, harking back to that old chestnut coined by Helena Rubinstein, that there are no ugly women, just lazy women. If a woman can’t let her standards drop in the labour ward, where she is literally preoccupied with creating new life, where can she? Is nothing more sacred and cherished than how a woman looks? It would seem not.

Later in the week it was reported that labiaplasties are on the rise in Ireland. One plastic surgeon said that after facelifts, labiaplasties are the fastest-growing procedure in demand at his clinic and the National Maternity Hospital’s paediatric and adolescent gynaecology clinic has also recorded increased requests for the surgery from teenage girls. I’m aware that many labiaplasties are essential for women’s health and wellbeing, while others are carried out for the same reason that a lot of plastic surgery is carried out — because we are dissatisfied with how we look and want to feel better about it. Another reason for the increase is, apparently, that there is more awareness now about what the ‘ideal’ labia looks like, thanks to the internet, porn, and perhaps the omnipresence of the yoga pant in our daily lives.

I think it’s great that women can find surgical solutions to feel better about themselves but I also dislike the fact that we’ve come to a point in our culture where feeling bad about your labia might be a thing. 

If we are worrying about that along with our buccal fat, our eyebrows, our line-free foreheads, our waxing schedule, our ever-more intricate gel nail designs… where are we supposed to find the time and the energy to read a book, go for a walk, have fun with friends, or achieve all of our career goals? 

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to shame anyone here. If you spend ten hours a day on grooming and feel great about yourself, I love that for you. But if you spend ten hours a day on grooming so you can look how you’ve been made to feel you should look, then we have a problem.

I think we could all take a leaf out of Rihanna’s book in this instance. I love that she used her first pregnancy to redefine how pregnant women can look, how sexy they can look and feel, and I love that she is using her second pregnancy to redefine the kind of performance that is expected of pregnant women. She showed up at the Super Bowl in a comfortable-looking red outfit with matching trainers and sang without much dancing or jumping about, no poles, corsets, nipple-slips, costume malfunctions, or changes. I love that she adapted her performance to meet her own personal needs at this moment, instead of forcing herself into an unrealistic paradigm laid down by previous performers. We could all learn something from how accepting she was of herself and her body and her willingness to meet it at the level it was at.

I’m happily in a phase of life where I don’t worry so much about how I look on a day-to-day basis but I do still, like a lot of women, often feel dissatisfied with my body and my looks. But on days like these I try to think of the Roald Dahl quote: “You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.”