The Patriarchy Who Cried "Pillowface!"

And dealing with the consequences of our own actions

Halina Reijn’s Babygirl came out a few months ago and despite the mixed reviews, audiences seem to have one shared opinion: Nicole Kidman is experiencing a bad case of pillowface. If this is your first time hearing about this phenomenon, let me enlighten you. “A woman who has had so much filler injected into her face that it begins to resemble a pillow. They do this because they think that full lips and cheeks make them look younger, but in reality they look like bloated alcoholics,” is how Shelley from Urban Dictionary so politely defines the term.

Isn’t it ironic? We push women into getting Botox and filler then point our fingers and laugh when the effects of it — “it” being a chemical injected into your skin — manifest in a negative way. How fucking ironic.

Fiona Legesse, courtesy of The Cougar

The newest plastic surgery trend is upper eyelid or upper blepharoplasty. This surgery is one of those phenomena that makes you clutch your pearls and say, “Dear God, how did we get to this point?” Funnily enough, that feeling seems to extend to all facets of life, not just the plastic surgery realm. We are exposed to the craziness of the world every minute of every day, and it takes a toll on a person to be in a constant state of shock. The plastic surgery business is taking full advantage of that. Learning about another insecurity you’ll soon have to remedy is a shock to the system. It hits you quick and fast, yet lingers there. Every time you look in the mirror, you’ll think about that one thing, that one thing that could easily be fixed by a little filler, even if it’s just a passing thought. The hypothetical filler and plastic surgery will plague you every time you look at yourself, eating away at your sense of self, slowly but surely — and isn’t that exhausting?

Yet now, the tides are turning… sort of. People are now confidently calling out the aftermath of plastic surgery, but stop short at the real questions. Why do we feel a godly righteousness as we point our fingers at women who overdid it on the plastic surgery and Botox? Why do we have a problem with the effect and not the cause?

In recent years, plastic surgery and Botox have undergone a rebranding, making the invasive procedures seem as normal as brushing your teeth. Influencers vlog their days and mention getting procedures such as a lip filler, preventative Botox, and more. By talking about these surgeries and injections so casually, people will treat them as just that: casual.

But they’re not. According to the Mayo Clinic, possible side effects from Botox include pain, headaches, flu-like symptoms, and infections. In rare cases when the chemical spreads to unintended parts of the body, breathing problems, muscle weakness, and allergic reactions can occur. Similarly, filler is known to spread over time, giving us the phenomenon of “pillowface.” If Botox has so many negative side effects, how has it rebranded itself into an “empowering” and “preventative” procedure, and why?

The patriarchy gets off on punishing women, and Botox is the patriarchy's prescribed solution for a problem they created. The problem? Aging, growing visibly older, no longer looking like your 16-year-old self. A misogynistic system like the patriarchy malevolently pushes women into thinking there is no other choice — get Botox, plastic surgery, and filler or face the wrath of misogyny. That is the punishment for aging. At this point, what do we expect from such a system? Do we expect them to have our best interest at heart? The truth is, a “best interest” was never even near the equation. The framework is based on the idea that the younger a woman looks, the better. The skinnier, the better. The whiter, the better. We are set up to fail under this system — why do we try?

We try because we have to. Because it feels as if there is no other option, go under the needle or else. So, if there is no other option, yet we recognize our choice is flawed — coerced, even — what are we left with? Pillowface is what we’re left with — the consequences of the patriarchy’s own influence. Surprise, surprise. A system destined to collapse in on itself, well, collapses. And women are, yet again, the victims.

We have a problem with the effect of plastic surgery and not the cause because the effect is something we are able to gain pleasure from, we get to point our fingers and jeer at women with overly-filled cheeks and smile a happy smile. We see the pillowface in a celebrity but not the years of tabloid gossip and bullying they had to endure, pushing them to get filler in the first place. People are lazy and casual misogyny is easy — it is far more convenient to point to a woman who overdid it and say "this is her fault" than to look at the big picture and realize that it is not the fault of the woman, but of the society that pushed her to do it in the first place. The cause? It’s rather simple, our society loves to hate women for whatever reason they can find or manufacture. And, men are not the only ones guilty of this; everyone is — I mean, look at Shelley from Urban Dictionary. “Undoing” the cause takes deep critical thinking and a desire to dismantle the misogyny we all hold inside our psyches, but pillowface is easy to laugh at. A few thousand Instagram likes on a post poking fun at a random female celebrity? That’s a strong hit of self-righteousness. Societal reconfiguration and self-introspection don’t have the same kick.