My War on Skin
1.
My body is a traitor. It has never been as beautiful as I wished it to be. But paradoxically, my body is also far more beautiful than I ever gave it credit for being. Somehow these two truths co-exist, giving each other the lie.
No matter how disconnected from the natural world I may be, there is always the natural fact of my body. I have spent much of my life looking upon it as a strange, alien thing. It has its deep betrayals (hair, skin) and its minor ones (farts, burps, odors). Little wonder there’s a television show called ‘Embarrassing Bodies’. But our bodies are more than just embarrassing. In our hopeless quest for perfection, they are often isolating, stigmatizing. They define our limits, beyond which we are constantly striving. As time goes on, they deteriorate. Age and neglect distorts our bodies beyond recognition, and no amount of tinkering can restore them their previous glory.
2.
It only occurred to me relatively late in my life that I might suffer from a low-level form of body dysmorphia. Until recently, I was always convinced that I was ugly. Ironically, it’s only now that I am slipping into relative ugliness that I can acknowledge that it wasn’t true. I wasn’t ugly when I was young. Now, when I look back on photographs of myself as a young man, it is obvious to me that I was quite handsome. But at the time, it was always astonishing to me when a woman, or indeed a man, found me attractive. Like something out of a Groucho Marx joke, it would reflect poorly on them.
I came across the term ‘body dysmorphia’ accidentally on the web. It wasn’t the first time I’d heard the term, but it was the first time I considered the possibility that it might apply to me. I put two and two together when I read that body dysmorphia tends to be focused on the nose, hair and skin. This opened up a wellspring of memories of my own deeply shameful obsession with my nose, hair and skin. It was shameful because the version of masculinity I was born into asserted that a man isn’t supposed to worry about his appearance. A man should be nonchalant about his appearance—effortlessly good-looking. I still remember, in my childhood, billboards featuring the Marlboro Man, for example. I doubt the Marlboro Man obsessed about his mirror reflection.
3.
Looking back, the causes of my dysmorphia are complex: I was a sensitive child, I had a mother with a vicious temper, and we emigrated when I was very young. On the cusp of adolescence, I suffered some low-level sexual abuse, whose effects were compounded by shame when it came to light. I then spent six years in single-sex schools, including three years in a boarding school with a culture of brutalization.
Because my mother couldn’t cope with four children, my brother and I were sent to board in a school with the kind of institutional culture that might appeal to an anthropologist. There was a self-devised dialect, called ‘sarcasm’, that was incomprehensible to outsiders. Moreover, every boarder—at least in theory—was bestowed with an honorific called a ‘rag’, which was pejorative in nature. I say in theory because there were certain boys so devoid of abnormality that they somehow managed to get by without one.
It didn’t take long for me to be bestowed with not one but three such honorifics: Gonzo Pizza Sock, or GPS for short. Gonzo referred to my large nose, Pizza was a reference to my acne, and—as we all showered communally—Sock was the word given to anyone with an uncircumcised penis. It ought to be remembered that this was a Jesuit boarding school, considered the best in Australia. The prevailing climate was conservative, homophobic and often racist, but, having read Tom Brown’s Schooldays, it was nevertheless a marked improvement on the hell of previous generations of boarding schools. A little brutalization of the spirit was once considered good for a lad, and an indispensable part of his education. No wonder the world is in the state it is in.
4.
Of my triumvirate of afflictions--nose, acne and foreskin--the only one that truly bothered me was my acne. I didn’t mind the fact that the head of my dick was snugly encased in its foreskin. The thought of it being stimulated by every little movement didn’t appeal to me in the slightest, and I certainly didn’t wish to undergo the medical procedure necessary to have it removed. As for my nose, both sides of my family, the French and the Armenian, had a long history of prominent snouts. My Armenian grandmother and aunt had undergone operations to reduce theirs. My aunt was left with a fetching proboscis, but in my grandmother’s case the operation had not gone well. Possibly her nose was beyond the powers of medicine of the time, but in any case she was left, as the centrepiece of her face, an object shaped like some kind of yam or overfed sea slug.
People who really suffer from body dysmorphic disorder, or BDD, will often obsess over conditions like acne when, in fact, they don’t really have acne. Real BDD is delusional. My acne was real, a kind of subterranean acne, not that superficial acne with the tiny pimples crowned by the off-white pinhead (oh what I would have given to have nothing more to worry about than a few whiteheads), but the kind where great welts surged up from deep beneath the surface over a period of days. Throbbing red, they were often too painful to squeeze, but through through eyes clouded with tears I would squeeze them anyway.
It was fitting, in a perverse kind of way, that I was French. The French were rather unpopular in the eighties in Australia, where I grew up, on account of the underground tests they conducted in what most Australians regarded as their backyard. My acne was a kind of re-enactment of those underground nuclear tests, a kind of personalized karmic retribution for the sins of my compatriots on the other side of the Pacific. Oh, there were the usual blackheads and whiteheads, of course, which I would dispatch with what, over time, became skilled (one might almost say artisanal) dexterity. They were like hand grenades exploding above ground. Far more worrying—apocalyptic, even--were the mysterious events that were going on below, turning my face into that of a cartoon picnicker whose cheeks have just been attacked by several ferocious wasps at once.
I could not, of course, sit idly by and allow such terrible things to happen without some resistance (being French, I had been brought up to take pride in Sisyphean struggle). I waged a no-tolerance policy against each and every inflammation, no matter how shallow or how deep. And it was a war of attrition. An older, wiser head would have advised me that a pimple is like a peach, and should not be squeezed until it is just about ready to jump off the tree of its own accord. I preferred to squeeze at the first sign of trouble, and squeeze and squeeze and squeeze until the pimple had no choice but to surrender under the constant bombardment of the tips of my two indexes. Finally, the pimple would burst with an explosion that would spatter the mirror in front of me with a streak of yellow pus, sometimes tinged with blood.
To the unititiated, which is to say to those who have always enjoyed unblemished skin, or for whom the merest little whitehead might provoke an adolescent panic attack, let me be perversely frank: there is nothing as satisfying as the eruption of a pimple—a good-sized, deepish welt that has been building up for a few days. It was much like masturbation, another skill I was industriously mastering at the time. There is the gradual inflammation of the organ until it becomes an irritant and then a constant distraction, there is the manipulation of the organ, and there is the deeply satisfying release of the organ’s contents, which very soon leads to the subsiding of the inflamed organ. And like masturbation, there was always the problem, afterwards, of what to do with the excretion.
I have just described the perfect popping of the ideal zit. Unfortunately, in real life it was rarely that neat. Most pimples required several sessions of digital encouragement; some required the kind of extreme massaging that is given to endurance athletes. Often, before they have ripened, these pimples will literally weep, oozing a liquid that is some kind of blend of a watery, slightly jaundiced liquid and/or blood. There is no relief in such an excretion. The inflammation, the throbbing, the humiliation, the despair—all continue to torture the victim. I learned, over the years, that pimples often tended to pop a little easier after a hot shower. Perhaps the heat relaxed the skin and opened up the pores. At any rate, when the end came, there was no mistaking it: the sensation of a blockage removed, and the ejaculation of a whitish substance—the deeper the pimple, the yellower the pus. The relief came instantaneously, like the bursting of a dam. Once the obstacle is removed, the mysterious inner workings of the body can resume their normal course. Sometimes a scar was left behind as a memorial to the battle of attrition that has just taken place. Peace returns, but it is a fragile truce, a temporary reprieve. The perverse logic of acne is such that one knows the next pimple is simply biding its time, regathering its forces, preparing for the next assault.
5.
Thus I spent my adolescence, standing in front of a mirror in the communal bathroom when all the other boys had gone to bed already, squeezing with all my might at some impending volcanic event. I am saddened simply by the memory of it, that poor boy, far more handsome than he would ever realise, neurotic beyond his own comprehension, who would much rather have stayed at home with his family and attended the local high school which had one facility all the Jesuit boarding schools in the world would never have: girls.
Eventually, I persuaded my parents to take me to a dermatologist, who prescribed me a drug called Roaccutane. It was still in its experimental phase at the time, and (the dermatologist warned me) was considered carcinogenic. Cancer seemed an eternity away compared to the daily hell I had to endure. But a full course of the cancer-causing drug wasn’t enough. My acne was a battle-hardened veteran of many campaigns by that stage. I had to have a second course of the drug before the war was finally won, at the tail-end of my adolescence.
6.
My skin is still prone to tantrums. I still occasionally get pimples. There still are parts of my body that, when squeezed, ooze a white substance like microscopic toothpaste squeezed from several tubes at once. I still find the odd blackhead or whitehead – I pounce on them, of course. And on my back, between two moles there is a kind of well of pus, that, though hard to reach, when squeezed just right, releases a most satisfying off-white spurt of cream. Sometimes I will squeeze it between my fingertips and hold the excretion up to my nostrils. I take a deep whiff of it. Its ammoniac scent, as intoxicating as it is repulsive, is a reminder of the abiding, treacherous mysteries of the body, my home, my encasement, my cell, my tomb.
My body is a traitor. It has never been as beautiful as I wished it to be. But paradoxically, my body is also far more beautiful than I ever gave it credit for being. Somehow these two truths co-exist, giving each other the lie.
No matter how disconnected from the natural world I may be, there is always the natural fact of my body. I have spent much of my life looking upon it as a strange, alien thing. It has its deep betrayals (hair, skin) and its minor ones (farts, burps, odors). Little wonder there’s a television show called ‘Embarrassing Bodies’. But our bodies are more than just embarrassing. In our hopeless quest for perfection, they are often isolating, stigmatizing. They define our limits, beyond which we are constantly striving. As time goes on, they deteriorate. Age and neglect distorts our bodies beyond recognition, and no amount of tinkering can restore them their previous glory.
2.
It only occurred to me relatively late in my life that I might suffer from a low-level form of body dysmorphia. Until recently, I was always convinced that I was ugly. Ironically, it’s only now that I am slipping into relative ugliness that I can acknowledge that it wasn’t true. I wasn’t ugly when I was young. Now, when I look back on photographs of myself as a young man, it is obvious to me that I was quite handsome. But at the time, it was always astonishing to me when a woman, or indeed a man, found me attractive. Like something out of a Groucho Marx joke, it would reflect poorly on them.
I came across the term ‘body dysmorphia’ accidentally on the web. It wasn’t the first time I’d heard the term, but it was the first time I considered the possibility that it might apply to me. I put two and two together when I read that body dysmorphia tends to be focused on the nose, hair and skin. This opened up a wellspring of memories of my own deeply shameful obsession with my nose, hair and skin. It was shameful because the version of masculinity I was born into asserted that a man isn’t supposed to worry about his appearance. A man should be nonchalant about his appearance—effortlessly good-looking. I still remember, in my childhood, billboards featuring the Marlboro Man, for example. I doubt the Marlboro Man obsessed about his mirror reflection.
3.
Looking back, the causes of my dysmorphia are complex: I was a sensitive child, I had a mother with a vicious temper, and we emigrated when I was very young. On the cusp of adolescence, I suffered some low-level sexual abuse, whose effects were compounded by shame when it came to light. I then spent six years in single-sex schools, including three years in a boarding school with a culture of brutalization.
Because my mother couldn’t cope with four children, my brother and I were sent to board in a school with the kind of institutional culture that might appeal to an anthropologist. There was a self-devised dialect, called ‘sarcasm’, that was incomprehensible to outsiders. Moreover, every boarder—at least in theory—was bestowed with an honorific called a ‘rag’, which was pejorative in nature. I say in theory because there were certain boys so devoid of abnormality that they somehow managed to get by without one.
It didn’t take long for me to be bestowed with not one but three such honorifics: Gonzo Pizza Sock, or GPS for short. Gonzo referred to my large nose, Pizza was a reference to my acne, and—as we all showered communally—Sock was the word given to anyone with an uncircumcised penis. It ought to be remembered that this was a Jesuit boarding school, considered the best in Australia. The prevailing climate was conservative, homophobic and often racist, but, having read Tom Brown’s Schooldays, it was nevertheless a marked improvement on the hell of previous generations of boarding schools. A little brutalization of the spirit was once considered good for a lad, and an indispensable part of his education. No wonder the world is in the state it is in.
4.
Of my triumvirate of afflictions--nose, acne and foreskin--the only one that truly bothered me was my acne. I didn’t mind the fact that the head of my dick was snugly encased in its foreskin. The thought of it being stimulated by every little movement didn’t appeal to me in the slightest, and I certainly didn’t wish to undergo the medical procedure necessary to have it removed. As for my nose, both sides of my family, the French and the Armenian, had a long history of prominent snouts. My Armenian grandmother and aunt had undergone operations to reduce theirs. My aunt was left with a fetching proboscis, but in my grandmother’s case the operation had not gone well. Possibly her nose was beyond the powers of medicine of the time, but in any case she was left, as the centrepiece of her face, an object shaped like some kind of yam or overfed sea slug.
People who really suffer from body dysmorphic disorder, or BDD, will often obsess over conditions like acne when, in fact, they don’t really have acne. Real BDD is delusional. My acne was real, a kind of subterranean acne, not that superficial acne with the tiny pimples crowned by the off-white pinhead (oh what I would have given to have nothing more to worry about than a few whiteheads), but the kind where great welts surged up from deep beneath the surface over a period of days. Throbbing red, they were often too painful to squeeze, but through through eyes clouded with tears I would squeeze them anyway.
It was fitting, in a perverse kind of way, that I was French. The French were rather unpopular in the eighties in Australia, where I grew up, on account of the underground tests they conducted in what most Australians regarded as their backyard. My acne was a kind of re-enactment of those underground nuclear tests, a kind of personalized karmic retribution for the sins of my compatriots on the other side of the Pacific. Oh, there were the usual blackheads and whiteheads, of course, which I would dispatch with what, over time, became skilled (one might almost say artisanal) dexterity. They were like hand grenades exploding above ground. Far more worrying—apocalyptic, even--were the mysterious events that were going on below, turning my face into that of a cartoon picnicker whose cheeks have just been attacked by several ferocious wasps at once.
I could not, of course, sit idly by and allow such terrible things to happen without some resistance (being French, I had been brought up to take pride in Sisyphean struggle). I waged a no-tolerance policy against each and every inflammation, no matter how shallow or how deep. And it was a war of attrition. An older, wiser head would have advised me that a pimple is like a peach, and should not be squeezed until it is just about ready to jump off the tree of its own accord. I preferred to squeeze at the first sign of trouble, and squeeze and squeeze and squeeze until the pimple had no choice but to surrender under the constant bombardment of the tips of my two indexes. Finally, the pimple would burst with an explosion that would spatter the mirror in front of me with a streak of yellow pus, sometimes tinged with blood.
To the unititiated, which is to say to those who have always enjoyed unblemished skin, or for whom the merest little whitehead might provoke an adolescent panic attack, let me be perversely frank: there is nothing as satisfying as the eruption of a pimple—a good-sized, deepish welt that has been building up for a few days. It was much like masturbation, another skill I was industriously mastering at the time. There is the gradual inflammation of the organ until it becomes an irritant and then a constant distraction, there is the manipulation of the organ, and there is the deeply satisfying release of the organ’s contents, which very soon leads to the subsiding of the inflamed organ. And like masturbation, there was always the problem, afterwards, of what to do with the excretion.
I have just described the perfect popping of the ideal zit. Unfortunately, in real life it was rarely that neat. Most pimples required several sessions of digital encouragement; some required the kind of extreme massaging that is given to endurance athletes. Often, before they have ripened, these pimples will literally weep, oozing a liquid that is some kind of blend of a watery, slightly jaundiced liquid and/or blood. There is no relief in such an excretion. The inflammation, the throbbing, the humiliation, the despair—all continue to torture the victim. I learned, over the years, that pimples often tended to pop a little easier after a hot shower. Perhaps the heat relaxed the skin and opened up the pores. At any rate, when the end came, there was no mistaking it: the sensation of a blockage removed, and the ejaculation of a whitish substance—the deeper the pimple, the yellower the pus. The relief came instantaneously, like the bursting of a dam. Once the obstacle is removed, the mysterious inner workings of the body can resume their normal course. Sometimes a scar was left behind as a memorial to the battle of attrition that has just taken place. Peace returns, but it is a fragile truce, a temporary reprieve. The perverse logic of acne is such that one knows the next pimple is simply biding its time, regathering its forces, preparing for the next assault.
5.
Thus I spent my adolescence, standing in front of a mirror in the communal bathroom when all the other boys had gone to bed already, squeezing with all my might at some impending volcanic event. I am saddened simply by the memory of it, that poor boy, far more handsome than he would ever realise, neurotic beyond his own comprehension, who would much rather have stayed at home with his family and attended the local high school which had one facility all the Jesuit boarding schools in the world would never have: girls.
Eventually, I persuaded my parents to take me to a dermatologist, who prescribed me a drug called Roaccutane. It was still in its experimental phase at the time, and (the dermatologist warned me) was considered carcinogenic. Cancer seemed an eternity away compared to the daily hell I had to endure. But a full course of the cancer-causing drug wasn’t enough. My acne was a battle-hardened veteran of many campaigns by that stage. I had to have a second course of the drug before the war was finally won, at the tail-end of my adolescence.
6.
My skin is still prone to tantrums. I still occasionally get pimples. There still are parts of my body that, when squeezed, ooze a white substance like microscopic toothpaste squeezed from several tubes at once. I still find the odd blackhead or whitehead – I pounce on them, of course. And on my back, between two moles there is a kind of well of pus, that, though hard to reach, when squeezed just right, releases a most satisfying off-white spurt of cream. Sometimes I will squeeze it between my fingertips and hold the excretion up to my nostrils. I take a deep whiff of it. Its ammoniac scent, as intoxicating as it is repulsive, is a reminder of the abiding, treacherous mysteries of the body, my home, my encasement, my cell, my tomb.