Today I am turning 33! So I’m celebrating the only way I know how: the no chill way. By dropping my photoshoot pictures inspired by The Last Supper, through this post I reflect on ageing as a woman, as a performer and content creator in industries that value glamour and youth, and as an early-career academic for whom professional stability seems out of reach.
My Last Supper
According to the lore, Jesus was 33 when he died, and as an Italian, a lover of the supernatural and of religious iconography (and the great-niece of a priest – sorry, uncle! RIP), it was only right that I celebrated my 33rd birthday through a photoshoot recreating The Last Supper by Leonardo Da Vinci… my way.
Shot by pole dancing photographer Ray Marsh, whom you may remember from previous interviews, and featuring some of my hottest, smartest, most talented, spiciest friends, the photoshoot took place at Love Affair Basement in Hackney on the Day of the Dead, November 2nd, with a black chocolate and Maraschino cherry cake by Lily Vanilly and creative direction by the now Dr AJ Bravo, who deserves a mention because they really did do the most in setting up the table like the artist she is.
As someone who grew up in a country where women in particular are taught to fear God, to be modest, make ourselves smaller and do what we’re told, it’s of course very titillating to just… you know… be Jesus for a day. But to me it was deeper than that.
Trigger warning: this post contains mentions to suicide, violence and death. Happy birthday to me!
Ageing as a woman
I feel conflicted about ageing as a woman, as a feminist, as a scholar and as an intimate partner violence and sexual assault survivor.
I have talked about my traumas extensively (including to Cosmo), so I won’t go into detail here – it’s my birthday after all. But as someone who was suicidal a few times in her life, who experienced violence, depression, PTSD, I did not always want to be here. So simply because of that ageing, as a survivor, feels like a blessing.
I survived. I moved past it, and now I do want to be here.
But.
The beauty industry and content around me do incessantly make me wonder if I’m doing ageing wrong. Should I buy more skincare? Should I get preventative botox? And is it really preventative if I already have a judgement wrinkle all over my forehead because I’m so damn expressive?
Women are bombarded with marketing for products, treatments and advice about how to stop ageing. We’re told that when we age, we become irrelevant: no longer desirable in a world that values us only for our desirability, or at the very least our fertility – definitely not for our expertise. Taking care of ourselves is a chore that we must perform not just to remain desirable, but for decorum and professionalism, even though our male colleagues in many a profession are hardly judged on not looking “put together”. Ageing is, for women – and particularly for women who, like me, straddle some form of public persona and performance – a form of death. Death of influence, of desirability, of love, of fertility, of relevance.
Society fetishises women who die too young – Marilyn Monroe, Amy Winehouse, Aaliyah, Janis Joplin, and so many other icons – because it is attracted to the sorrow, talent, and/or excess in their lives… but also because it could not judge them for growing out of that youth, innocence and helplessness. Because in so many ways, our obsession with young women, which translates into excessive attention towards child stars, is also a fetishisation of those who may not know better yet, and who may be controlled.
As someone who’s been ‘manic pixie dream girl-ed’ for a lot of my life, I’m excited of growing out of that kind of man’s attention… but growing out of it does come with baggage.
“Don’t move a muscle. Don’t express. Don’t object. In the 21st century, we still call women hysterical – we just do it by telling them to freeze their faces,” wrote Ellen Atlanta for Dazed Beauty. She added that in the past, “[a]n overt display of emotion or defiance could see a woman locked away for being ‘crazy’ or ‘unstable’. Now, instead of being confined to an asylum, we head to the aesthetics clinic and do the paralysing ourselves. We erase the evidence of emotion from our faces. We stop reacting altogether.”
The flourishing of “face freezing” is, for Atlanta, automatically coding mobility and expression as mess and excess – “the moral failing of a forehead that insists on being a forehead” – and losing women the unspoken language of expression to convey emotion, damning that emotional display altogether. It’s resulting in even teenagers going to beauty clinics asking to remove perfectly normal wrinkles than aren’t wrinkles near their eyes. Smiling, although not too much, seems to be the only movement we should allow our faces to perform.
Since childhood, I have always been both fascinated by and deeply resentful of the things that the women around me did to look womanly and that, by extension, I felt I should perform.
For years I dressed in men’s band t-shirts because I didn’t want my body and my womanliness to be perceived, touched or viewed as a weakness. I wanted to be perceived for my mind and not my body, and as someone who experienced unwanted attention from boys and men from a young age I guess wanted to keep myself safe.
This didn’t make me better than other women. I didn’t realise, back then, that I was committing the deadly sin of thinking that women who cared about their appearance or who wanted to be perceived for it were somehow less clever.
Luckily, I now know a lot better than that.
I’m fully aware that body modification through surgery or treatments can be part of an aesthetic that, like tattoos or piercings, women may still just like. When this is pursued out of personal taste, and not out of guilt tripping, I have no problem with it.
But I still deeply resent the things that I have to do to feel like I like myself, like I’m performing a version of femininity and self-presentation that aligns with how I want others to perceive me on the basis of growing up when I did (the early 2000s), and existing in the circles I exist in. It is that resentment, and in some way laziness towards spending hours learning how to present myself and putting that into practice, that stopped me from dyeing my hair bright red as I wanted, or from turning myself into the pin up or rockabilly girl I wanted to be in my later teens. I guess, partly, that’s also why to this day the women I’m attracted to are overtly femme, out of sheer admiration for the patience and skill that I lack.
Still, if as a teen my laziness in terms of beauty regimes could be disguised as a form of protest, now, as an adult who likes glamour, I can’t justify it anymore.
I can still resent it though.
“It’s very expensive to be me,” said iconic model, sex worker and celebrity Anna Nicole Smith in a court statement when trying to make the case to inherit her late husband’s fortune. “It’s terrible the things I have to do to be me.”
And while Anna Nicole Smith was subjected to the cruelty of the 2000s’ public eye and celebrity culture more than many of us ever will, and had more plastic surgery that I would ever be able to contemplate, I deeply resent how expensive and boring being a woman can be sometimes. In the book named after Smith’s famous court quote, Philippa Snow writes:
“I can tell you that, many times […], I have found myself performing some ritual or other for the sake of self-improvement – dieting, depilation, dyeing, dermatological enhancement, whatever – and her words have come unbidden into my mind: It’s expensive to be me! It’s terrible the things I have to do to be me! Funny though – I still end up doing them regardless.”
Philippa Snow
So yes, I deeply resent having to drop a sizeable amount of my hard-earned money on skincare to prevent acne and ageing. I deeply resent the money and time I have already spent on laser hair removal – something that has plagued me since my early teens because I gave myself folliculitis all over in an attempt to eradicate the body hair of a young, hormonal Sardinian girl. I deeply resent having to sit for hours at a nail salon to have an expensive BIAB manicure to prevent myself from biting my nails to the bone.
I can barely sit still most of the time, and I often have to work multiple jobs. Imagine what better use I could make of that time if those things miraculously happened, or if I just didn’t feel I had to do them.
No one is forcing me to perform all this “self-improvement”, but I feel I have to present a form of gender and persona that coincides with the women I like, and with the woman I want to be. And ageing, it seems, is now incompatible with that presentation – but I truly can’t be bothered to become a slave to yet another treatment for the sake of still mattering when I have wrinkles.
So what better way to celebrate ageing than by recreating one of the most iconic paintings and cultural moments – macabre and blasphemous as it might be?
Ageing as a pole dancer: strength, glamour and performance
I feel like these reflections on ageing would be way less conflicting if my life itself wasn’t so split into different aesthetics, narratives and characters.
As a pole dancer, I perform an art and a sport that was created and popularised by strippers. Strippers, showgirls, sex workers often discuss how glamour in their profession is both a blessing and a curse: as written by Stacey Clare in The Ethical Stripper and by many a writer in the Sex on Stage: Performing The Body Politic Bloomsbury collection I’m part of, the glamour of sequins, tiny outfits and heels is titillating and can feel empowering, but the precarity of the job and the stigma attached to it are not. This means that while dressing and performing in a certain way can feel exciting, it is also an expensive requirement and can be a stick to beat workers with when they are not as young as a client may want, or when they have a physical appearance or background that may not conform to customers’ idea of attractiveness.
It’s the glamour that the fashion, entertainment and even pole dancing industries latch onto, without the challenges of having to face precarity in the same way.
People who, like me, don’t have lived experience of sex work cannot even begin to understand what that means for your self-esteem, confidence, earnings or wellbeing. But it’s fair to say that a lot of pole dancing has been about taking and (wrongly) sanitising stripping’s glamour, gentrifying the practice. So we are most likely not affected by the worst parts of precarity, discrimination and challenging workplaces, but we still have an idea in our head about what we should look like, and what we should be able to do.
A lot of the time, that’s young, thin, glamorous, confident and visible, although I’m lucky enough to have met performers in their 50s and 60s who are absolutely gorgeous and give me hope of an alternative.
This also intersects with the imagined strength, flow, fitness and flexibility that are necessary to “look the part,” and that may dwindle with age, injury, different life milestones and sheer lack of time.
At present, I’m very fit. I’m the strongest and most flexible I’ve ever been, although I was sad to have to agree with one of my first instructors, Sophie, who said: “You just can’t drop into a split without warming up anymore after 30.” After 30, my recovery time became longer – I learnt it the hard way when I split dropped at a wedding without warming up – and even sleeping in an awkward position may make me feel injured.
I am scared of how I will feel when my body, my strength, my flexibility – maybe because of work commitments, maybe because of injury – will change. I am scared of how I will feel when the power that comes from doing what I do, from performing it on a stage, will decrease as it’s meant to do with age. My periods already ruin my life and my performance as a pole dancer every month, because I feel pain more intensely when I’m on, so I’m terrified of how I will feel during perimenopause.
And I don’t have the answer about what I will do by then, how I will present myself, or if I will present myself at all.
Ageing online
Discussions and content around ageing online took, for me, a familiar trajectory to how I feel about social media. While when these platforms were launched they presented a way for all of us to witness alternative types of beauty across size, race, ability and age being celebrated and taking up space in a new form of entertainment, now they are increasingly becoming standardised, not just in terms of the “influencer look,” but also in terms of how we discuss ageing.
I guess that’s partly where the resentment comes from: instead of broadening what I wish to see, there are still too few examples of women considered attractive in entertainment, performance and media who have not had to ‘stop’ ageing.
Because algorithms push and reward selling and are not particularly tolerating of difference, all it takes is for me to open a social media app to be told which products to buy (usually, retinol) for a more youthful complexion, and to see an advert for filler, botox or something else sprinkled in between every other post.
This is combined with “just a girl” memes that I do really enjoy – because, at heart, I really am 16 – and a performance of messiness that, however, is strictly policed by audiences: “mess” only looks cute when you’re young enough to be messy. But you have to look youthful, fun and available, because nobody loves a downer, and user7467463684 will have an opinion about whether you’re performing the right version of womanhood for your age.
Platforms are becoming another way to surveil not just influencers, celebrities and friends, but ourselves and our changing faces, bodies and appearances through their storing of our data, lives, memories and fears, which are then regurgitated to us in the form of ads that play on those same aesthetics to make us feel like we are diverging from the norm… and we should really buy something to fix that, shouldn’t we?
However, one positive thing that I am feeling about social media because of ageing is that I don’t have to do and be everything. It’s ok if I don’t jump on that trend. It’s ok if I don’t collab with that brand, if doing so stresses me out. Both the pole and content industries want you to always be teaching, always post to stay relevant and therefore make money, but I’ve decided not to spread myself thin anymore doing things I don’t always enjoy.
Ageing in the academy
Ageing in the academy isn’t any less forgiving.
What I used to really like back when I went back to academia at 24 was that people did Masters and PhDs at any age. There was a (very opinionated and annoying) 74-year-old judge in my Criminology MA in Sydney who did not refrain from proudly reminding us he was a late-bloomer. When I started my PhD, too, a lot of folks seemed to come to it later in life than straight from an MA as I did. As someone who took a break between BA and MA, that felt heartening: it’s never too late to do what you loved, I told myself, like one of those memes saying that Prince Vlad (aka Dracula) only started impaling people in his 40s.
Fast-forward a few years, and I’m not so sure.
It’s not that you are ever too old to learn.
But I do feel too old to work precarious, temporary jobs that don’t lead to a permanent position.
An “early-career” researcher is, in academia, someone who has a PhD and is either not in a permanent position or has been in one for a short time. Usually, you are early-career until it’s been five or eight years since you earned your PhD. For me it’s just been four years, so I’m relatively green, but even though colleagues and collaborators act surprised when I call myself an ECR, I can’t help but feel like I am missing the boat on the stability and accomplishment that would come from a permanent position.
As someone coming from months of struggle on the grim academic job market, having faced about 30 rejections from the very few and far between open academic positions out there this year, I look at all my friends outside the academy and see people with a high salary, a stable(ish) job and an idea of what they can spend money on in the following months. On the flip side, when I started drafting this post, I felt I couldn’t book a holiday or even a speaking engagement because I didn’t know where I would be or what my budget would be in six months. I have now secured a (GREAT) job, but still a temporary one – and even though I’m so proud and relieved about it, it is bittersweet to know I will find myself in the same position in three years’ time, and that I still haven’t secured the stability I crave.
Although amongst my freelance performer or creative friends I see a life that is less stable, their experiences also seem quite creatively fulfilling. I, on the other hand, find myself in an awkward limbo, stuck between a form of creative fulfilment and professional success that aren’t giving me stability. I could do what I did in my early 20s – drop everything and do lots of jobs at once towards the next goal – but I don’t want to. I stopped teaching pole dance regularly because I wanted training and performing to be rewarding for me. And I embraced the life of a pole dancing academic because I need both things to feel rewarded.
Maybe what I’m feeling is that tiredness in putting yourself out there, and need for a stable life, love and job that is typical of your thirties, an age when one feels they should have a semblance of stability. And don’t get me wrong: I have more of that than some of my peers, with a house I own (not out of my own merit), an extensive list of publications and collaborations on my CV I could have only dreamt of in the year post-PhD, and sort of an idea of what I want to do in life.
But while the past year has been the most emotionally rewarding of my life, a life that was before characterised by professional success and romantic dismay or even fear, now it’s the opposite: my work prospects seem like too much of a blur for someone my age, but my love life is great. It seems sad that I can’t have both, and I somehow feel like I’m performing a more typical and ‘trad’ gender role than I’d like to feel personally, professionally and creatively fulfilled at my age.
I still don’t know how I feel about getting old
As you can probably tell, I have a lot of feelings about getting old, and not many of them are coherent. A lot of them are, however, informed by my current professional precarity and by the industries I literally straddle.
What I know so far is that I am in love, that I am proud of who I am and what I have achieved, and that even though I really enjoy being a woman, and I’m very happy to be alive, the pressures of both these things are confusing, and I navigate them with plenty a contradiction.
I know that my wrinkles come from loving to spend months in the Sardinian sun that feels like home, from being so expressive that you can immediately tell I’m judging you, from laughing a lot and from being lazy and stingy with skincare. I know that they are a part of me, like my stretch marks, my anxiety and my thick eyebrows.
And I don’t think I want to change that, for now.
I’m extremely grateful to pole dancers, sex workers, performers, creators, scholars who are ageing and showing us that they are, because I think I will still want to be naked in public when I let my hair go grey and when I have more than one judgement wrinkle without having to hide that a woman who isn’t 20 can also express herself sexually.
And I know I may even change my mind, and that will be ok, because choosing to age visibly doesn’t make me better, smarter, or cooler than women who don’t.
For now, I know I am extremely grateful to my twelve apostles who gathered to celebrate my Last Supper, and who made me feel loved, cared for and pampered at a time when throwing a party was just not the vibe I was after. A one-hour shoot followed by beers at the Marksman was just what I needed.
And she took a cup, and when she had given thanks she gave it to them, saying: “Drink of it, all of you.”
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