Bring the Girls: On Allie Rowbottom’s “Aesthetica”
Allie Rowbottom | Aesthetica | Soho Press | 2022 | 264 Pages
Post-surgery, after the bed rest and the pain pills and the bandages and the baptism by antibacterial gel, the woman posts in the forum. Pictures of pain: swollen, reddened flesh and fresh scar tissue. But she also debuts a new shape—a snatched waist where there were once folds, hard angles where there used to be soft curves. Like any body just born, or any body at all, hers is a work-in-progress and as such, begs documentation. Along with the pictures, she writes, “in love with my new silhouette,” the way it looks “natural” despite the nature of its creation, through sculpting scalpels and syringes. Other women comment back, fawningly, hoping she’s happy, asking if she’s in pain, sending heart emojis and healing vibes.
These women are logged on and listening, liking one another’s transformations and downvoting surgeons that leave them dissatisfied, offering advice to their nervous cyber sisters, scrolling their phones and fantasizing about the bodies they might buy and the people they might become in them. The website where they share their Botox injections and breast implants and Brazilian butt lifts is RealSelf.com, a plastic surgery forum, provider directory, and review repository where people, mostly young women—who comprise 92% of the US’s plastic surgery patients—gather virtually to share their surgery stories, commiserate, congratulate, complain, care, and become friends.
In Allie Rowbottom’s latest novel Aesthetica, Anna Wrey, an aspiring Instagram influencer, regularly peruses a fictionalized version of this site, “TrueYou.com.” Raised by a single mother who espouses feminist bromides as often as derogatory comments about her body, Anna hopes to escape a childhood of coupon-cutting and calorie counting by making it big as an influencer. She heads to LA after high school, where she meets her future manager-cum-boyfriend Jake, a man who mixes frat bro and coercive club promoter archetypes into a strong cocktail of money, misogyny, and manipulation. He promises to make her rich and famous, but suggests that doing so will be easier if she lets him buy her a modified body. This is how Anna discovers TrueYou.com, which she stumbles upon while researching the breast implant surgery she plans on getting at Jake’s behest. As her anxiety around the procedure mounts, she questions her conceptions of feminism, beauty, and financial security. She turns to the forum for reassurance and proof of concept.
When Anna first meets Jake, he compliments her “ascetic” when he means her aesthetic, a comedic reprieve that reveals his idiocy as much as it functions as an existential threat: Anna will have to adopt a sort of asceticism, from food restriction to contemporary bloodletting, to become an Instagram icon. This is “the suffering required by a certain sort of body,” Anna knows; suffering that forges a strange sort of solidarity, giving a lonely girl something she “might complain about with girlfriends.” Over a decade later, Anna is alone and about to go back under the knife again at age 35. Disillusioned with influencerdom and done with Jake after a slew of betrayals, she narrates this novel from a motel room, as she awaits her appointment for the novel’s namesake surgery “Aesthetica™”—a dangerous, experimental procedure that promises to undo all her prior incisions and age her naturally.
Recalling her youth as a social media influencer, Anna elegizes the girl she once was as she scrolls the grid that girl got trapped in. In these photos, she is bent over a table, all angles, hollows she remembers whittling with starvation and syringes. She is holding paint brushes and pouting in a selfie, skin rendered poreless porcelain via filters, Facetune, and highlighters. She remembers the meals, too: bloody steaks she only allowed herself a bite of, burgers and fried things she wanted her followers to think she was eating. She drifts into “a familiar fantasy, that I might return to the girl I was and consume what she did not,” feed a ravenous girl who thought she couldn’t satiate her appetite for food and her hunger for attention at the same time. That girl counted and calculated: calories, ccs of botox, incision inches, milligrams of filler, dollars of debt. On RealSelf.com, women tag surgery stories as either “worth it” or “not worth it.” Everything—bites of food, injections of a toxin, ounces of removed fat—is an investment; a bet on your new body and the likes, love, and dollar bills it might attract.
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On websites like Realself.com, in reality and in the novel, women are helping each other, and they’re happy for each other. But they are also competing, and trying to convince themselves that they can make a patriarchal beauty ideal a tool of empowerment rather than a communal self-harm practice. As we are reading a 2017 period piece, Anna is following in Emily Ratajkowski’s footsteps: spouting girlboss-core choice feminism while injecting her way to an Instagram face. The problem is that every surgical success story pushes beauty’s goal posts further into the horizon, turning every surgery bill into a down payment on another woman’s self-hatred: “Social media was causing depression,” Anna’s mother always told her, “suicide. Thousands of girls.” But on the dance floor, making out with the man who will manage her social media, pay for her breast implants, and facilitate her sexual assault by multiple other men, Anna thought, “I was in Jake’s mouth, alive.” Alive, yes, but perhaps endangered where she thought she was empowered—after all, in a man’s mouth, what she’s desiring is her own consumption.
But Anna’s entire adult life has been an exercise in “willful proximity to death” in the service of optimizing her appearance, in turn maximizing her odds at the social media roulette table. Playing the game relies on physical appearance, which, for many women, can feel something like the last chip after a long night in the casino, spent at the craps table despite the cold certainty that the odds are stacked. The house has to let a few gamblers get lucky to keep the naive novices betting. Looking at an Instagram photo of herself in an actual casino in Las Vegas, Anna thinks, of her emaciated body, that “the bones looked beautiful, expensive, like pieces of an antique ship, graceful and worth naming.” This is a worldview that understands women’s bodies as objects to be constructed, deconstructed, upgraded, calculated, and sold.
Anna thought “reducing the essence of something—a story, a meal, a body—to a number,” would unveil “its truest value.” So counting—calories, fat grams, pixels, followers—became an “instinct,” a practice of yearning and discipline, “like hunger itself.” When Anna was younger, her mother kept a Post-It note affixed to their fridge, which read: “Are you really hungry?” Her mother’s confused, contradictory point of view on what it means to be a woman both awes and repulses Anna. She considers her own feminism more “realistic,” if “harsh.” When teen Anna finds out that celebrities edit their pictures before posting, she is at first outraged, and then inspired, wondering, “for women, so often robbed of agency, was there some freedom in controlling how the world saw our bodies, consumed our bodies?” This early inquiry sparks later epiphanies: were the women on TrueYou.com “addicts? Or were they simply empowered, in touch with their desire?” By the time she’s becoming a bona fide influencer, Anna asserts, “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” in the form of followers and dollars. Eventually, she becomes those numbers: “I was 40k hearts, 288 dms.” Her mother asks “can u show your unfiltered face please” in the comments below an edited selfie. Anna blocks her account.
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Jake is the first person to suggest surgery to Anna, but it is Ella, a fellow influencer and Anna’s first friend in LA, who ultimately convinces her via confession of her own. The girls bond at the med spa, when Ella invites Anna along to her regular Botox and filler session. This is girl world: giggles and syringes, a sting and a wink. After injecting Ella, the nurse turns to Anna and asks if she’d like to try it, raising an eyebrow and pointing out some burgeoning wrinkles. This is the corruption and kindness of feminine care: insult as aid—what Anna was trying to do when she told her mother to get a wax, what so many women do when they want to help each other avoid the judgments and curdled glances they’ve received, pillowing the insult, sculpting it into a suggestion.
Heterosexuality, here, is a horror film and a farce—scary, stupid, and simple, terrifying in the chokehold it has on women. But the book’s relationships between women are far more compelling, and far more complicated. The love runs deeper, and loss opens a void more gaping than any this novel’s men can cut open. Men are assholes and liars, but women are friends, role models, mothers, daughters, comrades, and carers, but also cautionary tales, tutors, traitors, estranged sisters, manipulators, and coercers. “It did feel like an accomplishment, to take the attention of other, older women’s men,” Anna muses, but “also, lonely.” When a photo of Anna in a tiny bikini hits Instagram, she receives “seven hundred likes, one hundred comments, and a voicemail from my mom: Where are your girlfriends?”
Anna’s relationship to surgery seems to be more about her relationship to other women than it is about her relationship to Jake, the fawning of male followers, or the male surgeon slicing her skin. Anna’s relationship to plastic surgery is about the beauty competition women are taught young that they’ve already unknowingly entered. Ultimately, Aesthetica is a book about the yearning passed between girls like a rumor or a virus; the love between best friends; the craving for the gaze of a girl who gets it, and still isn’t bored of hearing about it. But it is also about betrayal: the moments when a friend chooses a male fantasy of femininity over her feminism or even friendship.
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We’re all in this together, on RealSelf.com and in real life, trying to win a rigged game, and let’s face it: the losing team usually has more camaraderie. In Anna’s memory, the cosmetologist “put a gloved hand on my shoulder and I felt it, the problem of time, the solution; the care of women, the comfort.” Throughout this book, nurses and estheticians are sources of tenderness, the kind of people who call Anna “hon,” and ask her how she’s feeling. (Meanwhile, all the men in her life call her “baby” while treating her like a purchase.) According to Anna, a makeup artist is “gentle with my skin the way I never was. The contouring brush felt like my mom’s touch.” With a kind of tragic tenderness, these women touch Anna softly, while simultaneously implying she needs fixing—touching her like so many of our mothers have touched us, with a nudge towards imagined improvements. The injector suggests twenty units of Botox, Anna nods, and Ella claps: “Boto party!!!” Afterwards, Anna “saw it: instant growth, instant healing, instant transformation,” another woman’s words written into her face, a nurse who squeezed her shoulder, a friend who put an ice pack to her lips after the enhancement. Girls trying to get ahead together, uneasily in competition: when Anna gets home, she realizes Ella lied—she doesn’t look good in the pictures they took that day.
Leah, Anna’s semi-estranged childhood best friend, along with Anna’s mother Naurene, form the pulsing emotional heart of the novel. When the cancer Anna’s mother battled during her childhood returns, her first impulse is to text Leah, despite not having spoken to her in years. She heads home to care for Naurene, quickly followed by Leah. These are the people Anna changes herself to abandon, and changes herself again to rejoin. Too late, she realizes the love strangers exude for her new body can’t replace the love these women channeled towards her old one. Anna edited her Instagram posts, starved herself, and surgically altered her body to “transcend the small lives of the women who came before me,” but by the time she does, and is watching her follower count skyrocket from a hospital waiting room, worrying over her sick mother, she wonders if the love of strangers was worth abandoning her mother: The numbers tick up, the flame emojis roll in, and she “watched them build, bought by the surgical perfection of my body, the failure of my mother’s, as if any love I earned was both a trade and a punishment.”
Anna craves the bad breath and sweat stick of a sleepover with someone who knows everything about her or the quiet-eyed, worried look of a mother who knows what womanhood will do to her. When Leah arrives, “tan and furred, reminiscent of every health class PSA about eating disorders,” her body “like [Anna’s] mother’s, scared” Anna; she wonders how she will “survive her closeness, now that her body was so unlike what I’d expected.” It is Leah and Naurene’s sick bodies, their inability to see themselves as Anna sees them, with compassion and adoration, that inspires a revelation. There might be a reason to keep the body you were born with: it’s the one the people who love you can recognize.
Anna wants to show Leah she cares, so she tells her how to pose, takes her photo in a grocery aisle amid all the food she won’t eat. Anna hates the result, fears for her friend and doesn’t want to show her the pictures—but “what choice did I have?” Anna asks herself, confused and afraid when Leah loves the photos. The scene is reminiscent of an earlier one, when Anna reads a heartbreaking post on TrueYou.com by an Asian woman who was ecstatic with the results of a surgery that altered the “squinty” eyes she’d been teased for. “What kind of woman would I be if I wasn’t thrilled for her?” Anna asked herself then. Leah is proud of her sick body or feels safe from certain gazes in it, like the woman surgically altering her features to survive in a racist society, and Anna’s confusion over what kind of woman to be to these other women is the question at the crux of this book.
Leah insists that her eating disorder is a choice, telling Anna a tale that sounds eerily like Anna’s own defense of her repeated surgeries, focused on success in athletics instead of aesthetics. She needed to be “small to win.” But, in the grocery store, watching her attempt to shop for food, Anna realizes she “truly was sick, that starvation was a compulsion, not a choice the way she’d made it out to be,” and the reader is reminded of Anna’s inquiries as she perused the surgery forum. Were those women addicts, after all? Was she?
The choice at first appears binary, between congratulating another woman on a decision that made her feel better in a bad world, and dismissing or demonizing her for buying into a standard that encourages mass self-harm. But empowering or bullying each other might be the most boring ways women can relate, which might itself be Rowbottom’s point—what if Anna isn’t thrilled for these girls and the bodies they paid and starved for? What if she is worried about them, furious on their behalf, aching to ask how they got here, desperate to dress their wounds? Anna wants her sick friend to know she is beautiful, and she wants her to know she would be beautiful bigger too. She edits the photo that scared her too look at, “develops” Leah’s girl hips into a woman’s and posts the image on Instagram. She is trying to give Leah the love of her own followers: “It wasn’t the care she needed, it wasn’t a cure. But it was something.”
When Anna was a teenager, berated by a pediatrician for “disordered eating habits,” she was told she could die of anorexia, and felt her “brain go static” with terror undercut by resignation. By the time she is telling us all this, she’s “in a fast dance with death,” preparing to undergo Aesthetica™, which is famously life-threatening—however, not much more deadly than anorexia, which kills up to 20% of its sufferers, or Brazilian Butt Lifts, which have the highest death rate of any plastic surgery. Rowbottom’s depiction of disordered eating includes Anna’s casual, depressingly normalized symptoms (mentioning that she’s never been an “effective purger,” restricting her daily intake) and Leah’s more severe, textbook anorexia symptoms. Anna averts her eyes from the physical harm she’s doing to her own body while attempting to reframe it as a path to profit and in turn, freedom, but Rowbottom’s book demonstrates the alarming futility of that effort, as well as how disturbingly widespread it has become. Placing plastic surgery and eating disorders on parallel tracks, Rowbottom casts both as coping mechanisms and self-harm tactics, grasps for control in a chaotic world, where for women, appearance has for too long felt tied to financial security. These are all addictions, shitty choices made under duress: Anna remembers her first bikini wax as her first act of “self-care,” but also her first act of “self-directed violence.”
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Ahead of Aesthetica™, Anna, by now a well-seasoned traveler through medical spas and hospital halls alike, reflects on the best part of any plastic surgery. It is “the in-between time, before results are final… a time where I can be sick, but not truly,” when she can be imperfect but not on a Sisyphean search for a fix. Recovery is an era for performing a feminized kind of pain, a self-hatred that usually corrodes invisibly, but post-surgery comes with proof, scars, stitches. This artificial sickness—as potentiality, as pain channeled towards transformation, as endurance test and enforced rest—is a feminized purgatory that entraps and entrances, freeing its denizens from both the real world, which is cruel, and the promised land, which doesn’t exist. The recovery suite becomes the ultimate VIP room, and you have to show skin to get in.
The night before Aesthetica™, Anna stares her scarred body down in the motel mirror and gives herself “a conspiratorial look, the kind you give a friend who asks how you are when obviously you’re shitty.” The moment is heartrending. Anna’s reckless pursuit of beauty, which she embarked on in pursuit of power, yes, but also peers, sisters, has left her lonely, cracking jokes about her broken bones, her heartbreak, with herself. Anna’s crisis of faith—in feminism, femininity, and whether it is possible to embody the latter’s ideals without abandoning the former—is one sparked by the very real rise of ribless waists amid ambient extortions to self-love, and empowerment rhetoric amid ever more impossible beauty standards. It’s one that I, like Rowbottom, have found myself facing. Other women’s voices on TrueYou soothe Anna, with their insistence that they’ve become their truest selves artificially, their re-christening of surgeries as achievements, their cost-benefit analyses, “wish lists and lines of credit.” Numbers hold an allure of certainty for Anna, a girl growing up in an era of social media illusions: unreliable narrators, angled mirrors, and filtered photos.
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After her reunion with Leah and Naurene, Anna starts wanting women to see themselves through other women’s eyes, instead of glass and screens. She remembers wandering Jake’s house, pacing from his “bathroom mirror to his bedroom mirror, trying to see what the truth was.” She looks different to herself in every mirror, is unable to parse what she’s imagining from how her skin actually droops or dimples, an experience that is alarmingly common post-surgery, and one Rowbottom has described experiencing herself. After a few years of lip fillers, the chemical migrated and changed her face: “I no longer looked like myself. Or did I? What did I look like? I didn’t know and realized I never could.” In a sense, Aesthetica™ might be wish fulfillment for Rowbottom, and a gift to all the girls like her, who wish they could meet the woman they might have become if they hadn’t expended so much time, money, and effort avoiding her.
In the end, Anna realizes the only reflection she wants is one she can no longer access: “the one my mother offered, a vision of myself through her eyes.” But she can’t have that, so she brings a photo of her mother to the Aesthetica™ surgeon, showing him what she might have looked like had she let herself age naturally. She remembers that first Botox injection, when she gave up her “grandmother’s mouth” for a pout she thought might empower her. (Expressing a chillingly similar sentiment, a recent New York Magazine article about the craze for injectable weight loss drugs quoted a plastic surgeon promising to excise any trace of your ancestors: “No matter how skinny you get, you may still have your mother’s outer thighs. That’s where I come into play.”)
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Aesthetica ends with Anna returning to a fairy-tale themed amusement park she once visited with her own mother, where she watches another mother-daughter pair navigate the glittery perils of girlhood. They order caramel apples, dripping with “calories” and “‘poison’” (rendered in remarkably touching scare quotes, as if Anna has finally realized those numbers mean nourishment), and Anna does too. She is overcome by a desire to protect the young girl, help her avoid the fate Anna’s own fairy tale ended in. “Not my child, but I can still act in the service of her future. I can share a story to make the boundaries between reality and illusion easier for her to consider and choose,” she thinks, deciding to do something terrifying, and honest, and in the ambiguous, earnestly agonized mode of this novel, contradictory: rebrand.
The branding for Aesthetica’s release was just as contradictory, involving a fake @annawrey Instagram account that called out celebrities for lying about surgeries and editing Instagrams, as well as a book release party that offered pay-as-you-want Botox injections. The party received a feature in The Cut titled “Allie Rowbottom is No Botox Moralist.” When asked why she would offer her partygoers the very substance that sent Anna down her dark surgical spiral, Rowbottom replied that this was no party favor, but part of the performance—of the book, of femininity, of social media: “surgery, photoshop, fillers, injectables,” she said, “choose them or don’t choose them. But either way, there’s a cost.”
In 1961, the artist Niki de St Phalle explained the use of guns in her work by saying “only a woman could use these destructive contraptions that man has imagined for a constructive end… And that’s beautiful.” Botulinum neurotoxin, the chemical compound used in cosmetic Botox procedures, was originally concentrated and crystallized as a bioweapon by two men at Fort Detrick during World War I. Perhaps it’s performance art, maybe it’s Maybelline. Pick your poison, but there is always a price.