Aesthetica

by Allie Rowbottom

I am on my phone, of course I am.

They lift arms, devices, as if in prayer; they still themselves before the lens, a ritual.

They’re cute, but each one needs a tweak to achieve true beauty. Rhinoplasty, I diagnose when I look at one. Brow lift, I silently suggest for another. Buccal fat pad removal.

When I was young like her, I wanted nothing more than to emerge. Out into the seen world, the world of teenagers I saw on TV, girls I followed on Instagram. Girls who siphoned attention, desire, love, with reckless ease. Girls tweaked into fantasies I thought were real.

touch my skin like I’m checking it’s still there.

My forehead remains, pulled tight as a starched sheet and I want, for a moment, to wrinkle it. I want to become the other woman. A mother, a daughter, a purer version of myself; I want to become them all.

Summer, 2017. Fifteen years in the past, the day I’d say my story starts, the start of a transformation I’m only now completing.

A womanly ritual, the hurting, my ability to stand it. One I might complain about with girlfriends, like period cramps, all of us in on the same unspoken joke, the suffering required by a certain sort of body.

I was harsh but she was clueless. How was she still such a little girl? Why was it my job to explain bikini lines and makeup application, lessons of womanhood her own mother died too young to impart? I learned them from YouTube, Instagram, and though my mother said she wanted instruction too, she never stuck with the rituals I prescribed. Contouring and gua sha massage, retinol and ten-step serum routines, all abandoned, as if she thought learning to care for herself would rob her own mom of the chance to rise from the dead and teach her.

I had only been in Los Angeles two weeks, only been a high school graduate for six. No father cared what I did or didn’t do; mine had always been absent. Rich and old, he’d left by my third birthday. But in a way, he’d given me a gift, freedom, by abandoning me. Because here I was, hustling harder for what I’d lost.

THE AIRBNB WAS a room in a bungalow off Robertson, shared with three other girls—community theater kids turned Hollywood waitstaff, auditioning endlessly, whining about flakey agents and acting coaches. Girls with next to no internet presence, who wanted a different sort of stardom, a different screen. When I suggested they build platforms, use Instagram to get noticed, they thanked me, but laughed a little, snarky, like they thought social media was superficial, uncreative, a crutch. So almost as soon as I moved in, I stopped talking to them. At night, they sat around the communal kitchen table running lines, projecting and enunciating like they were already on stage. To escape them, I walked.

I took photos for my feed, captured the LA light, the Spanish-style mansions, winding wrought iron, ocean on the air, which cooled at night to a deep desert chill I’d never felt before. All of it was so new, so utterly unlike Houston, my mother, the stale and humid library where she worked, the chronic complaints she made about her body—its size and shape and ailments—always searching for something to cure. I turned the camera to my face and spoke as I walked. “Gonna be a big staaaah,” I said and smooched the lens.

I had reason to believe I could touch stardom, and the money that came with it, as a model on Instagram. This is what I’d told my mother, how I’d sold her on my move to LA. Instagram was a business opportunity, a new frontier for entrepreneurial youths like me, youths with initiative. College stifled that sort of thing and I had read online that even rich kids were taking gap years to experience the real world. I had read that student debt was shackling my generation, condemning us to the same hardship I watched my mother weather, month by month, a running list of questions: which bills needed paying, which she could put off, what could she forego. Travel, therapy, dental work. The real world, shrunken by lack. But technology was wide open. It was where the money was. Influencers with one hundred thousand followers earned a thousand dollars a post, easy. Two hundred thousand followers equaled paid vacations to five-star resorts. Almost foolish, to want to do anything else.

I was fourteen when I received a phone of my own, but I already knew how to use it. The first thing I did was save Leah’s number under the contact “BEST FRIEND FOREVER.” My mother’s I saved as “Mommy,” which I still sometimes called her. The second thing I did was start an Instagram account, gather followers with hashtags and...

It was a source of pride for my mom, to have produced a child to carry on the legacy of her own mom’s bright smile. But she was wrong. I was prettier than my grandmother ever was. I was special, destined to transcend the small lives of the women who came before me; I was deserving of DMs from Instagram scouts, brand offers to “collab.”

some scout plucked me off Instagram and said I had a “trademark smile,” all teeth. I was seventeen, barely licensed. But I drove my mother’s car the whole way, I-10 to I-71, three hours through wildflower fields to a loft downtown, a photographer named Eric, his nameless assistant, who was a girl my age. They rearranged my body like furniture, both frustrated that I was so unpracticed.

They didn’t care about my asshole, just my ass itself, just the outside. “You’ve got a butt,” Eric told me when he finished shooting. “But you’ve got a gut, too.” He said nothing of my smile. “I’m keto and I love it,” his assistant said. She was friendlier once the work was done. And yet I left alone and hungry, just the photographer’s voice in my head, the word gut, repeating.

So easy, the number of dollars in my account, the number of people at my fingertips, all of them wanting, waiting for solutions I might offer, products I might sell, power I might promise. When I hit 20,000 I screamed and jumped and took a selfie, trademark smiling, proving to myself how happy I was. But really, I was thinking of what more I could make for myself, what more I could make for my mother, now that I was backed by a number that would continue to grow if I worked at it, leveraged my number for a bigger, better number.

Leverage was how empires were built, the walls of a well-made house high and thick and every bill paid on time, everyone inside healthy and safe.

I subscribed to Business Insider, spent hours reading beyond their paywall. I learned that persistence is an essential qu...

Gut, I thought when I took selfies. Keto, I whispered when I...

I turned on every lamp in my room, set up my ring light and tripod, which was cheap and plastic. I arranged its spider legs tenderly, like a girl with a doll, then took off all my clothes and experimented with angles that suggested, but did not show, my naked body. Gut. Keto. Facetune.

At the time, it sort of outraged me, how people were Photo-shopping their content in secret. So even as I learned to alter my images, I told myself I’d use my power carefully. The class progressed, and I got into searching for Instagram versus reality accounts that placed celebrities’ and influencers’ untouched photos and unpaid paparazzi candids next to the edited images they posted on their accounts: realistic waists and jaws slimmed down and snatched, cellulite painted over, passed off as real. Yes, it outraged me to see how they’d lied. It entranced me, what they truly looked like versus what they shared.

“There should be a law against this,” I said at first, sitting on my mom’s couch, hunched, scrolling. She stood over my shoulder, hands shoved into the pouch of her giant hoodie, and squinted at the screen. “Absolutely,” she said, then something about teen depression, on the rise since Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat started promoting impossible ideals. “Texas State has a good law program,” she said and wandered into the kitchen. I heard cabinets open, close. She wanted me to do a year at Houston Community College, then transfer. “Maybe you’ll grow up and write that law.” Maybe. But the longer I looked, the more I wondered if image alteration might actually be empowering.

For women, so often robbed of agency, was there some freedom in controlling how the world saw our...

My final project for that Photoshop course was my own image, edited every which way. A smile where there’d been a frown. Smooth skin where there’d been acne scars. Absence where there’d been fat and flesh. Fat and flesh where there’d been abse...

I added footage of my nightly walk to an edited version of my body—legs angled to hide my hairless bush, arms shaved down and wrapped around myself, showing a small side of breast; my face glossed and contoured and just a glint of brighter, whiter teeth—and tagged the post “Hollywood,” and shared it. And slept.

Yes, I would love to meet a star like him. Yes, I used the word love. I used the word star.

Inside, I turn every lock, catch my breath, taste mildew. Even the mold is air conditioned, the whole room so cold the carpet’s damp, or feels like it. The furnishings are ornately carved, like a princess’s, the way I remember Fairy Tale Land, everything medieval, but also plastic, worlds like pages out of a child’s bath-time book, whimsical and water-resistant.

glance at the mirror, always startled by what I see. Dimples, ripples, reminders of masks and knives and wrist ties. A certain willful proximity to death itself.

I came prepared. My wine bottle, my vape pen, nineteen bars of Xanax, thirteen Ambien, fifty Vicodin. And six gel caps, prefilled with magic mushrooms, a drug I’ve never tried. My dealer threw them in with my last order. “Nature’s medicine,” he said. I think he’s worried about me.

The screw cap snaps. The bottle pours. My glass is paper, made for coffee.

Twenty-four-hour news, the same story that’s been told for days. A powerful man, his desire, his violence, the world’s permissiveness.

I’ve waited months to be here, on the verge of the appointment I just confirmed. That I would cancel now, that I even could, plucks a dreaded cord behind my sternum. Because I have to go through with it. This is my chance. I won’t have another one.

I close the phone, put it face down on my chest and find the remote, pump the volume to drown out my thoughts. One episode ends, a new one begins.

“Put your tongue behind your teeth when you smile,” I told her. “And one leg in front of the other.” We posed. The camera flashed.

I dream, as I often do, of meals I didn’t mean to eat, drugs I didn’t mean to swallow, faceless men I didn’t want to fuck. Even in sleep, I open my mouth, and scream.

I folded one arm over my chest and scrolled my phone, considering how to appear casual, chill, considering what TV show, movie, Instagram feed I could draw from to appear casual, chill. Anything but awkward or worse, anxious; anxiety, to me, was my mother’s purview.

“You simply can’t stand that I’m not like you,” I told her, my voice matter of fact, cold.

Most daughters realize as they grow up they turn into their mothers. Hers seems like a constant rebellion, an anxious denial projected.

He was hot in a manufactured way. Soon I would be too. But always, I wanted to see him without a filter; for our entire time together, I would wonder what he looked like completely naked.

Like something from a movie, something I hadn’t believed existed in real life. But I had wanted it to be real, had surrendered my self-limiting beliefs, and now here it was, real. Girls on Instagram called this manifestation. Entrepreneurial gurus like Tony Robbins and Pat Flynn called it creating one’s own reality.

Mine was, “the fickle power of teenage girlhood,” a temporary currency, according to my mother. Objectifying myself could never make me happy, she said, though she was wrong.

Her version of feminism was outdated, too rigid to work in the real, digital world where I was in control of my body, my content, and smart to leverage the short blush of my youth for what was permanent and sure: power like Jake’s, his power to sign and promote me, his power not to.

His was a power shored up by money and other men’s power. His was the power of choice, the power to leave and not be left. Which was what I wanted. To transcend my mother’s fate, and mine. To make more of our abandonment, my father’s leaving. I wanted to turn the story ...

I wanted the power that came with certainty, what was real, what was illusion. I wasn’t sure there was a differen...

I was humoring him when I nodded, smiled, told him he was right. I was playing a part to get to his power, measuring every move I made against moves I’d seen other desirable women—girls—make: the way Daul Kim leaned forward for the camera, swan-necked and skinny-armed; the way Kendall Jenner touched her fingers to the tip of her shoulders, turned a cheek, and glowered. My body was the result of those other women’s bodies, and now the club itself, which had closed around me and altered what power meant to me, what it looked like, and who I was willing to become, to make power my own. This was experience, adulting, trying on roles, creating my own reality.

I was the best, most beautiful, sweet and pretty, astonishing and iconic. A victory, that I could be all these things when my mother could not. And a sign of how clueless she was about where power truly lived. Social media was causing depression, she always said, suicide. Thousands of girls. Yet I was in Jake’s mouth, alive.

I crossed the threshold ahead of him, thinking as I did about childhood lessons: never get into a stranger’s car, never go into their house, never give it up for a guy you don’t love. But I wasn’t a child. I wasn’t a virgin. I already knew things. Womanly things, like love is overrated and pleasure is a right.

She chose only grown-up books, books she felt she needed—The Bloody Chamber, Feminist Fairy Tales, Women Who Run with the Wolves. We girls were too young for them, probably. They scared us, taught us. Through them we learned that although women are culturally conditioned to be nice, we are actually fierce. Prince Charming is an archetype, not a literal prince; he is alive within us, and so is true love’s kiss, sacred intuition, instinct. Our task is to reclaim our power, not bury it in the service of some man.

But after, when the books were closed and the light was shut, we heard the crunch of gravel, the front door open for this boyfriend, or that one, men she met in doctors’ offices and NA meetings, recovering addicts all.