Just Shut Up and Take Your Clothes Off

A refusal of praise is a desire to be praised twice.

- François de La Rochefoucauld, Maximes, 1665

There is a point at which dislike of oneself becomes egotistical, I think, while browsing online for swimwear. It is a small thought, creeping softly over the surface of my awareness with the spongy lightness of an inching caterpillar. Bad self-esteem can be indistinguishable from raw ego, if you’re enough of an ass about it. Inch-inch-inch.

I’m taking a trip to Bath soon. As a lifelong enthusiast of Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters and every period drama ever made, I love that city. I’ve been in Australia for three years. It’s an awe-inducingly beautiful country but marvelling there is not for manmade things but for nature. In the UK, the architecture is the draw — big, old buildings with hefty doors you need to use the muscles in your legs to pull open. Low ceilings and old beams. Imperious sash windows and cobbled streets.

The last time I was in Bath was shortly after my mother died. It was something to do after the end of my own small world other than looking at the wall. I remember very little about the trip, except leaving my laptop and passport in the hotel safe, and only noticing about an hour into the train journey home. I realised then that I wasn’t quite myself, and made a mental note to return to Bath when I was better placed to appreciate it. The place has a dreamy quality. All buttery limestone and nostalgia without memory, it evokes an era when there was broad agreement on what it meant for something to be beautiful — a celebration of classical conceptions of symmetry, line and proportion.

Bath really is incredibly beautiful, even now. Romantic, I suppose. It’s almost enough to overlook that so very much of that beauty was financed by the transatlantic slave trade. The candied fruit in a famous Bath bun — a stodgy, pleasing yeasted milk bread emerging from a calorie-dense time when everybody wasn’t already routinely overfed — was candied with sugar harvested by enslaved human beings. The silks and satins of sumptuous gowns sighing demurely across mahogany floors were bought with that industry’s proceeds. Bath blossomed and boomed in direct proportion to the suffering its investors and plantation-owners inflicted on their slaves. The city is better experienced with this in mind, so that we understand the cost of all the beauty. So that we impose some memory on all the nostalgia.

This is England, of course — a fondness for the quaintness (which is darling, and so tasteful!) marred by a brute, ferrous aftertaste that lingers on the palette. A sort of ‘Lovely! Except-for-you-know-all-that-stuff-they-did’ feeling. That’s just England. And before any patriotic objectors muscle forth, pint in hand, shoulders beflagged by a polyester union jack made in China, to give me a dressing down — no, Britain’s history is not morally unique. It’s not worse than everyone else’s. It’s just historically dreadful in line with other cultures whose tremendous success in taking other people’s stuff has generated a sort of down-the-leg diarrhoea trail of distaste and villainy that tracks and trickles somewhat humiliatingly into the present. It is ostensibly a pancultural human trait to see one’s own power as evidence of wider superiority. British people are not unique in this respect; only very talented.

But anyway this is and always has been an article about swimwear. Because Bath is known for other things, including the Roman baths. It is a place whose natural springs draw people in swimwear from all over the world, to immerse their weary parts in its tepid, thermal mineral waters and make awkward jokes about whether they might heal an undescended testicle or an inflamed knee. The result is that, having left the only swimwear I own in Australia when I moved back to the UK in the confident presumption that I would never need it again as long as I live, I now have to buy some.

I’ve written about body stuff here before. It’s no more than the usual body stuff most of us nurse, women especially. Disappointingly for me, this sort of writing generally does better engagement-wise than almost anything else I write, which might be why I’ve punished readers this time with a four-paragraph-long diatribe on Bath and slavery before getting to the part where I actually write about body image and insecurity. Because the internet loves a woman who feels bad about her legs. It loves a woman who used to be fat. It loves a woman who looks in the mirror and notices something soft or suboptimal or in contravention of classical conceptions of symmetry, line and proportion and thinks ‘this wouldn’t do in Bath’.

The truth is that too much discomfort in your own skin makes you selfish. It makes you incapable of not centring yourself at all times. If you have to be less attractive or stupider or less important than everyone else in the room, and to signal your awareness of this lest people think for one moment that you don’t know where you stand, then you are indistinguishable from the most arrogant person in that room. You are one person erasing all around you through your incapacity to think about anything apart from yourself.

If someone compliments you and you disagree with them (I am guilty of this), consider what a complete twat you’re being. Not only are you meeting their generosity and the vulnerability of their good faith outreach with ingratitude, you are overruling their view as though it matters less than your own. That is ego. You are making them feel stupid for observing something nice about you and presenting it like a tiny, warm gift in a world made heavy by endless things neither tiny nor warm. You are generating the social equivalent of a fart smell and forcing the other person to inhale richly.

When someone compliments you with blatant good will and warmth, the correct response is ‘thank you’ and to shut the fuck up. It is not to ensure they know you bought this top on sale, actually, or that you only speak good French because your mother battered it into you, or that yes you’ve been working out but actually it means nothing because you never got back to running after that last knee injury and your arms need work. Just shut up, maybe. Do not be the sort of person who is handed a flower and crushes it immediately.

All this is to say that I dislike buying swimwear. I grew up in Ireland — ours is a culture that is not casual about nudity and arguably, ontologically-speaking, denies its very existence. Under our jeans are more jeans. On our feet, a matryoshka doll set of socks within socks within socks. I never saw either of my parents without their clothes on and my first thought upon contemplating that even now is “thank goodness”.

I attempt to merge this incredibly small-C conservative relationship to bodies with being very interested in aesthetics, and I often fail. I spent over a decade as a beauty editor for magazines and broadsheet newspapers. I’ve been backstage at fashion week and seen supermodels in their underwear. I know the professionals who augment — surgically and otherwise — the beauty of wealthy and famous people, and how they do this. I think of beauty generally as something to be cultivated in a rich and full life. It is a human need and a self-evident good. It’s everywhere and in most everything, if you’re looking.

I am interested in the philosophy of beauty. I find other people, broadly speaking, routinely beautiful. Quite apart from what is sexually attractive, there is a way in which almost everyone is aesthetically pleasing in some way. I have a colleague at Substack whose eyelashes are so mesmerically lovely that I often think someone should paint them while he’s telling me something I should be paying closer attention to. People can have interesting faces that invite your eye to follow their lines, or a smile that reveals some soft, unknown part of them which is intriguing enough to be completely beautiful. Others take such care with how they present in the world that their attention to detail, and the frictionless holism it creates, is itself a form of beauty.

I look at people’s hands, their shoes, their eyebrows. I admire whatever I can find to admire, and I try to communicate it to them if it’s appropriate to the context and doesn’t sound insane. Tell someone that you like what they’re wearing, or that their makeup looks great. To ask a stranger in a public bathroom what lipstick she’s got on and to tell her it looks lovely will almost always initiate a good conversation. Everyone is beautiful, kind of, including you, probably, and also me, I suppose. To consider yourself an exemption from ‘everyone’ is ego. You can’t be that special. Nobody is.

So I have to buy a bathing suit. I’d rather die, maybe. And also, there’s the confusion. I got serious about my health and fitness more than three years ago now. This means, I suppose, that I now have a body that is closer to the beauty standard in this moment than it was at any point in my teens or twenties. Anyone can wear a bikini, of course, if they can find one to fit and that covers their bits to the legally required degree, but I never have worn one. I think I never would, and yet when I question why that is, I don’t really know the answer.

Discomfort is not a reason. It isn’t an argument. It is only a feeling, no matter how intense. Before, I might have argued that it was because something-or-other about modesty, probably, though that’s largely a synonym for shame, tinged with an unspoken view that how I looked failed broadly to meet the standard of what was considered beautiful. I understood that, therefore my semi-naked, ham-white soft Irish body might draw scornful attention in its failure to be beautiful and this particular kind of scorn, I evidently thought, might be beyond my capacity to manage.

Now? I don’t know. My stomach is more or less flat (unless I’ve just eaten a load of soda bread, which today I have). My upper body has visible muscle tone, which I’ve earned through self-discipline, dedication and suffering (because nothing else builds muscle). This morning at the gym I walked past a completely naked woman in the changing room drying her hair (it’s Equinox, so everyone there is kind of the worst, including me) and I didn’t think twice. No judgement (apart perhaps from the brief thought that she should really maybe put a towel between her raw genitals and the fabric stool she was sitting on). I made a mental note to avoid that stool in future.

I do not think drying your hair in the nude in front of strangers is in any way a bad thing to do, but I would never do it. Why? Maybe for the same reason I find the idea of wearing a bikini incomprehensible — ego. A sort of exceptionalism that makes standard things (though the naked blow-dry may be non-standard) different for me than for others. Worse, or harder, or more frightening, perhaps.

It isn’t really what you look like, is it? It’s a failure to apply the same broadly compassionate, slightly indifferent standard to yourself that you apply to others. And it’s an immature form of thought, to permit this level of reticence in oneself . Nobody is looking at you with the intense level of cruelty and focus that you apply to yourself because you are simply not as interesting or important to anybody as you are to yourself. For them, you are not the centre of anything. You are not an exception.

Self-loathing is ego, so just shut up and take your clothes off, maybe.

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