But I also think romance has a Zellweger problem.
Time and again, I’ve come across scenes in romance where a character’s purported cosmetic surgery is used as a shorthand for her superficiality, or her “lesser” intelligence, or—this is the worst one—her villainy. Often, such a character is introduced as a romantic rival to the heroine (my feelings on this are another essay entirely), and the messaging in such contexts is clear: this character, with her breasts or her lips described as “fake,” with her skin described as “overly tight” or “pinched,” with her makeup described as “too heavy,” is unworthy because of the way she compares to our “naturally beautiful” heroine, our more “down-to-earth” or “smarter” heroine. Nevermind that Botox is incredibly common, nevermind that there all sorts of reasons people might get all sorts of cosmetic procedures. In these contexts, the character’s body is presented as an object for a judgmental reader gaze. We are invited to become someone who says things like, I like you better without makeup, or I like more natural women. How sad, we might say, if we’re feeling generous. How stupid, we might say, if we’re feeling cruel (such a charge, you might hate to know, was leveled at Zellweger one day while she rode the subway). The character is not person to us. She is flat; she is unreal. We have made what we consider “fake” about her an excuse to make her less than human.
Here’s the truth, no matter that it might be difficult to confront, no matter that as readers and writers we might have embraced these descriptions, at various points, as a convenient code for understanding a character: these types of descriptions produce damaging, harmful caricatures, caricatures that dehumanize women (women who have made choices about their bodies) and elide the very real cultural pressures they confront every day (gosh, she looks so old!; what did she do to her face?). Moreover, these descriptions do nothing to reveal character. A character having had a cosmetic procedure (or many such procedures!) is shorthand for exactly nothing except that the character has had a cosmetic procedure. The information alone, presented wholly in isolation, should add nothing to our understanding of who a character is. It should certainly add nothing to our sense of how worthy they are of the hero’s—or anyone else’s—affections.
I don’t write this essay from a high horse. Indeed, as I have considered and re-considered these issues, I have returned, again and again, to moments from my own books that contribute, however casually, to the tightening of that tightrope. In Best of Luck, the final book of my Chance of a Lifetime series, the heroine, Greer, speaks to her older sister, Ava, in the kitchen of their shared townhouse. Ava, an actress who had to sacrifice some of her big-city, name-in-lights dreams for Greer, spends all of her free time playing parts in a local community theater. She is a loving, supportive sister to Greer. She’s got kind of a lousy boyfriend but she’s also got a lot of heart and kindness to spare. And that morning, when they talk, Greer reflects on Ava’s beauty: “Ava’s four years older than me, but she looks as fresh-faced as a teenager, obsessed with beauty treatments and, I suspect in the last year or so, Botox.”
Was this more than a casual observation about Ava? Ava isn’t a villain, and she’s certainly not a rival, nor is she uncomplicated as a character in this book. But…was it a swipe? Was Greer—a character who feels inexperienced with makeup, a character who sometimes feels plagued by her small, still-youthful appearance—setting herself in subtly superior terms to her sister?
As I said: lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about Botox.
None of this is to say, of course, that the issues surrounding cosmetic procedures—the range of them, the relative safety of them, the way they are packaged, the way they are sold and to whom—are simple, that all we need to do is never mention them again in these damaging, dismissive ways in our books. Of course these aren’t simple matters; they are complex, as are all those tightrope walks women are asked to perform every day. And so I (and, I believe, authors and readers more generally) need to think harder about how casually, how callously, these procedures are mentioned as indicative of a woman’s character or her worth. I need to think harder about where I mention them and where I don’t. I need to think harder about it all.
When I consider what happened to Renée Zellweger in 2014—the pictures splashed everywhere, the articles so full of speculation—what I consider is how easy it was for everyone to comment, for everyone to weigh in on what she looked like. Reading her recent reflections on those pictures and articles and comments now, all I can think of is how hard it must have been for her to see them, to read them, to hear them. All I can think of is how the culture flattened her, made her unreal, made her less than human.
All I can think of is how much more thinking I should be doing.