Greatest enemy of well-being is believing false images

By Colette NiReamonn Ioannidou

I always enjoy the articles in Sunday’s Living. Those related to women’s health give interesting and diverse opinions on what’s good and bad for us. A piece on wellness by two women on March 13, explained how the manipulation of wellness as a product gives the impression the world belongs to young, thin, white, middle-class, able-bodied creatures. If we don’t fit into that socket, we are apparently lesser beings. Not everybody, they wrote, can afford or have time to engage with many wellness activities or costly treatments attached to them.

Bugged in the past by an article on screen beauties managing to look wonderful in body and face as they age, I wrote: ‘These Alpha females are given too much credibility when the writers know that these women are mostly public presences whose rich lives bear scant resemblance to our own. Ordinary women have to balance what life throws at them without the back-up famous women have.’

You know the photo opportunity, star balancing baby on hip blathering about how she successfully navigates career and home/family. We know when her door closes, she has servants to help her out. She’s not coming home knackered, having to roll up sleeves, deal with extracting obstreperous teens from their phones to do homework or a bawling toddler picked up from nursery. If unlucky, having a hubby who doesn’t muck in. And let’s not even dwell on the trials of the single parent!

Good men are a gift; their opposites can be a stress element depending on upbringing and attitudes. It’s useful to get genuine, well-intended male input, but men often perceive women in ways other women don’t.

Living (February 27) featured an article by a male writer about movie stars and top models, who look great as they age, starting with Nicole Kidman, 54, Hallie Berry, 55, through to Helen Mirren, 76, and I’m a fan of all three. Why, one might sensibly enquire, wouldn’t these highly successful women, able to demand huge salaries and who have every available beauty/body advantage most of us don’t to stay looking their best as it’s their stock in trade, not pretend time has stood still? Only the honest own up to Botox, fillers, personal trainers, obsessive dieting and admit to damage control.

Female fear of looking old is understandably rife in those immensely competitive professions. Yet some stake out highly successful careers on sheer merit unconnected with age-defying looks. Judy Dench for whom decades, plumpness and wrinkles have proved no obstacle to her popularity, battles failing eyesight to continue with work in which reading is so vital. She’s a real role model of a woman ageing with dignity as life has sketched her changes and can still light up a screen with her smile and expressive eyes.

She was not amongst the above luminous luminaries. Red Nose Day saw her in place to offer her class value to charity. Ageism, one might think, has excluded her from that supposed list of wondrous women because she belongs to a group of seniors, confident of their skills, unafraid to look their age. They don’t get the same flattering press because they let the flaws show, their wellness not dependent on body image but on their worth.

Why do some beauty writers praise remarkable ‘beauty’ knowing it’s often cosmetically acquired and thus supporting the myth that some do not age as drastically as the rest? Young people too are made to feel inferior when comparisons to their own high maintenance idols are heaped on them. Being well, wellbeing, wellness, call it what you wish, depends on what life has thrown at ordinary us and how we have dealt with the hits. There are mental/physical traumas that temporarily impede some women who can tough it out, others will need support to aid battered self-esteem.

The strong woman isn’t an advert for bodybuilding; she’s made up of life’s lessons that have made her more understanding, more compassionate, increased her spit-the-bitch/bogite-out ability when others hurt her or her children. She’s an instinctive diviner of the jealousy/spite tongue-lashing of low mentalities, giving them neither time nor attention. She’s there for friends in need, takes time to talk to them and listen to their miseries even when her day is being ambushed by her own.

When she looks at rich, gorgeous women she doesn’t flinch at her own inadequacies. Nature’s gifts didn’t miraculously favour them, money did. The well-woman will get depressed, be afraid, be lonely, but her strength comes from being able to appreciate her ability to adapt, knowing nothing lasts forever, problems included.

The greatest enemy to her state of well-being is to allow false images to dictate how she should look or who she ought to be.