In Defense of Witches by Mona Chollet

Author:Mona Chollet
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

An Eternal Freeze-Frame?

The American series Broad City portrays the adventures of two young, broke New Yorkers, Ilana and Abbi. At the start of one episode first broadcast in October 2017, Ilana spots Abbi’s first gray hair and trumpets her envy: “You are becoming a witch: a dope and powerful fucking witch!” Abbi does not share her excitement. Later in the day, as if privileged with a new aura, she does indeed seem to meet a witch, but she also bumps into her ex-boyfriend out walking with his partner and their child. Depressed, she cracks and goes to a dermatologist to get Botox injections. (Meanwhile, Ilana is consulting a high priestess of sex therapy because she has not been able to reach orgasm since Trump’s election.) The dermatologist is fifty-one, but looks twenty years younger. She cheerfully explains, “It’s hard to be beautiful these days. It is my full-time job, but, for most other women, it’s their second full-time job, where you’re losing money.” Alarmed by the rather extreme before-and-after photos of women that adorn the surgery walls, Abbi begins to regret going there. Before making her escape, she tells the dermatologist, “I think you’re really beautiful, and I think you would be even if you didn’t do all this crazy shit to your face.” At this, the dermatologist bursts out laughing, before stopping short, in horror: “Oh no. I laughed…” and patting her face anxiously. (The episode ends with a great sabbath meeting in the middle of Central Park, bringing together Ilana, the sex therapist and other witches. Abbi brings the dermatologist along too.)48

In an attempt to spare themselves the sad fate of the abandoned and humiliated ex-partner, and more generally the opprobrium associated with age, women who can afford it do indeed work hard to keep their appearance as unchanged as possible. They are accepting an absurd challenge. They must pretend time is not passing, and therefore look the only way society dictates it is acceptable for a woman over thirty to look: like a young woman who has been pickled alive. The greatest ambition we may foster is to be “well preserved.” Of course, celebrities feel the pressure more than most. At more than sixty years old, Inès de la Fressange has maintained her lean body, her smooth-skinned face and the helmet of chestnut hair she had when she first trod the catwalk for Chanel, forty years ago. The top models of the 1990s may genuinely spend their entire lives (and a good portion of their fortunes) making sure that, every time they appear in public, the world says “Wow! She hasn’t changed!” This must have been the intention behind the Versace show of September 2017, in which Carla Bruni, Claudia Schiffer, Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford and Helena Christensen came together once more, all dressed in the same design of a super-skintight gold dress, revealing their figures to be just as slender and their legs as chiseled as ever. Donatella Versace explained that she took her inspiration for this show from a 1994 campaign in which Crawford had posed with her peers in exactly that dress.

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