No Country for Young Women
(or Mirror, Mirror)
ONCE THERE WAS A COUNTRY where mirrors were banned for children under the age of sixteen. When first proposed, the legislation provoked great controversy, for such a ban infringed upon personal liberty and supplanted parental custody with state authority. It was enacted only after a militant (detractors would say fearmongering) grassroots campaign that equated mirrors with pornography in sexualizing children and warranting underage restriction.
Due to the expenses and challenges of enforcement, the penalties were severe. The fine for a first violation was 5% of one’s total assets and a month in prison, including one week in solitary confinement to meditate upon one’s criminality and personal failings. Policing tactics were also heavy-handed. Suspicion was cause enough for SWAT teams to raid homes in the depths of night without search warrants, ransacking nurseries and playrooms for contraband mirrors as terrified children abandoned precious stuffies and fled their beds.
All this might seem radical, at least by the standards of a democratic society; indeed, initially there were mass protests, uprisings, even a government shutdown. But once the merits of a mirrorless childhood became apparent, most everyone settled into these benign totalitarian tactics as a necessary cost for this great social experiment.
Even ardent libertarian opponents acknowledged the advantages. Depression waned, self-esteem increased, creativity flourished. Social interactions regained their bygone primacy in shaping a child’s life experience and sense of self. No more were the lives of youth dominated by an incessant self-consciousness, a scrutiny not of Socratic Know-Thyself investigation but of cannibalizing insecurity.
Eliminating the countless hours spent obsessing over appearances made space for youngsters to focus on more imaginative pursuits which—enhanced by the innate potency of a still-crystallizing mind—supercharged their intellectual development. Psychological ailments vanished. Test scores soared. Vampiric pharmaceutical companies went belly up. By all metrics, life was better.
And then, of course, there was the joyous occasion of Sweet 16, when children might unwrap their very own looking glass now that they were old enough to confront their image. For most, the mirror was a mere novelty, another amusing toy, but hardly a gamechanger. Only in a few cases, when compulsive sixteen-year-olds predisposed to body dysmorphia encountered a mirror, did the many years of denial and restriction have the opposite effect. Then the experience was often life-changing.
“Mirror, Mirror, on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?” the prom queen asked.
The vanity mirror groaned. This high school senior had gone zero to sixty in under a year. It had never seen anything like it. September couldn’t come soon enough.
“I said, ‘Mirror, Mirror, on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?’”
The mirror sighed. “You are,” it offered, though it knew this would never pacify her.
“Don’t lie!” the girl snapped. “Maybe at my high school, but not everywhere.” She raised her chin and tried again. “Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?”
“Goddam this relentless bitch,” the mirror muttered to itself inaudibly. “Just my luck to get paired with a prom queen.” Fortunately, there were only a few more months left of indulging her. A full-sized mirror was too unwieldy to take to college. There was no point in arguing over the vanity of her quest. Best to keep playing along.
“Kate Moss.”
The prom queen nodded and departed. She took up chain-smoking, avoided sunlight, deprived herself of sleep, and fasted fastidiously (“nothing tastes as good as skinny feels,” she would murmur to herself for thinspiration). A few weeks later, she returned, legs knobby, dark crescents under her eyes, skin taut over her cheekbones.
“Mirror, mirror, on the wall,” she said, sniffling from a raw, dripping nose, “who’s the fairest of them all?”
The mirror sighed. It had been referencing the present-day, clean-living Kate Moss, not the early 90s ‘heroin chic’ teenager. This poor girl badly needed some meat back on her bones. In a moment of black humor, the mirror almost offered up the busty and genitally emphatic 35,000 year-old headless Venus of Hohle Fels but wisely held back.
“Kim Kardashian,” the mirror declared.
The prom queen nodded dutifully. After a hearty meal, she joined a gym, where she spent hours each day tanning in a booth and sculpting her booty with pulse squats, sumo deadlifts, reverse lunges, hip thrusts, glute bridges, side-lying clams, fire hydrants, grasshoppers, and donkey kicks. Though the results were undeniable, especially when extolled in her new butt-lifting scrunch leggings, they were still not drastic enough for her aspirations. So she took the plunge and got a Brazilian butt lift
“Mirror, mirror, on the wall,” she said, looking over her shoulder to ensure that the mirror could properly appraise the volume and ledge of her thonged cheeks, “who’s the fairest of them all?”
Mildly ashamed over the surgical consequences of its previous response, the mirror hesitated to respond. But the girl kept pressing. What gentler fool’s errand might keep her away for an extended period?
“Gwyneth Paltrow,” the mirror finally proclaimed in a moment of inspired brilliance. Some boho-chic luxury wellness was just what this girl needed.
She nodded and hurried off to book a deluxe cabin on Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop cruise. After nine days of upper-deck meditations, ten-step skin care routines, vitamin cocktails, crystalarium aromatherapies, and a support language healing with the resident astrologist, she returned.
“Mirror, mirror, on the wall,” she said with equanimity between sips of a matcha avocado smoothie, “who’s the fairest of them all?”
The wellness retreat had done her well, no doubt. But the mirror had grown accustomed to the hiatus and just wanted her to shove off again for as long as possible. In a moment of unforgivable malice and cruelty, the mirror replied, “Your Snapchat self.”
The girl stiffened and blanched, recognizing the enormity of the task. Lips pressed tight, she nodded solemnly. This time she was away for the rest of the summer.
By the end of August, her bedroom was spilling over with cosmetics and her body had been altered beyond recognition in pursuit of her digital self. She was tender from the various reductions, augmentations, tucks, fillers, liposuctions, transplantations, and reconstructions, and she was weighted down, if not mummified, in a rich strata of foundation, powders, creams, lipsticks, liners, polishes, shadows, concealers, emulsions, and blushes; nevertheless, by the morning of her departure she felt light and airy, hopeful that now, finally, the title of fairest might be hers.
“Mirror, mirror, on the wall,” the prom queen said tentatively, “who’s the fairest of them all?”
“As you are about to leave me for good,” the mirror replied, “you may now have your answer. It was never for me to tell you, but I can show you. Ask one last time.”
“Leave you for good?” the prom queen retorted with a breezy laugh. “No chance, darling, you’re coming with me!” She then shut her eyes and cocked her head. Puckering her lips in the sultriest pout she could muster, she opened her eyes. “Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?”
The vanity mirror shattered into a million little pieces.
“The mirror! The mirror!” the prom queen cried in a whisper, staring in horror at the piles of shards at her feet. Tears welled and streamed down her cheeks.
There she remained, weeping for the rest of the day and night and into the next day, unable to decipher those chaotic slivers of broken mirror, but also unwilling to leave without closure. The tears dripping off her chin pooled and eventually rose over the scattered glass.
Only then did she get her answer. Reflected upon the surface of the puddle, a skull was grinning up at her, the fairest skull of them all.
The prom queen was smiling too. It was, indeed, her.
AFTERWORD
The best-known version of the myth of Narcissus comes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. When Narcissus was born, his Naiad mother, quite the babe herself, asked the seer Tiresias if her son (whom Ovid weirdly describes as desirable even as an infant) would live to a ripe age. The prophet replied, “Only if he does not discover himself.”
As he grew, everyone—women and men, dryads and nymphs, young and old—wanted a piece of Narcissus. But he scorned all advances, inciting one rejected suitor to curse him that he too might suffer unrequited love.
One day while hunting, sixteen-year-old Narcissus chanced upon a pool of fountain water. As he leaned in to drink, he was seized by desire at the reflected form, one as beautiful as a marble statue, now captivated by the same attributes that had captivated others. His bent his lips to the surface and plunged his hands in for embrace, but to no avail. Blinded by love (and bereft of problem-solving skills) he remained oblivious that he was longing for himself.
Neither hunger nor sleeplessness could divert his gaze. But, at last, he made the profound ontological realization: “What I want, I have. My riches make me poor. O I wish I could leave my own body!” His tears deluged the surface, obscuring the reflection and sending him into a paroxysm of violence. He beat his enflamed chest, consumed by the fire of his passion until, weakened, he lay down and died. When his lamenters arrived to bear his body to the funeral pyre, they found in its place a flower with white petals encircling a yellow heart—a Narcissus.
Love yourself (but not narcissistically) 🌼
“Goddam this relentless bitch,” the mirror muttered to itself inaudibly. ❤️❤️❤️🔥🔥🔥
Wow! Brilliant storytelling! Heavy on the cosmetic vocabulary. Loved this story and how it runs parallel with the Narcissus, yet very modern and accurate. A secondary school recently removed all mirrors rom the toilets and the students complained. Now the school must decide whether to put them back…