In an interview at Hay Festival in Wales last weekend, Katie Piper has compared the process of ageing to a bereavement: shocking, but not surprising.
The Loose Women panelist recently debuted her new glass eye. She suffered facial injuries after an acid attack in 2008. Since then, she has undergone over 250 operations in order to reconstruct her facial anatomy and reduce skin contraction.
The star – back with her Katie Piper’s Weekend Escape today (June 8) – spent a lot of time thinking she should have taken revenge on her attacker. Now, however, she’s thinking more about what it is like to grow older.
Katie Piper compares ageing to a bereavement
The process of ageing has been somewhat different for Katie Piper, who has had hundreds of surgical procedures to repair damage to her face and eyesight since 2008.
Her ex-boyfriend had ordered an acid attack on her when she was just 24 years old. Now 41, she’s been writing about the relationship between age and beauty in her new book Still Beautiful. Piper has been reflecting on what it was like to be “ripped” from the male gaze, the moment she was attacked.
“I was ripped from the male gaze at 24,” Piper told an audience at the Hay Festival in Wales over the weekend, per the BBC. “I didn’t just become invisible – I became a target for people saying derogatory things.”
The concept of the male gaze views and represents women as sexual objects for the pleasure of masculine, heterosexual subjects. In Katie’s case, the acid attack made her immediately less interesting to that part of society that viewed her as a sexual being. But normally, she said, women gradually become less interesting to the male gaze, as they get older.
‘Ageing can be compared to a bereavement’
She told the festival: “Ageing can be compared to a bereavement. Sometimes we know we’re losing somebody or something, and it’s slow, it’s gradual, and when it’s ageing, we look down at our hands, we see they look different. We catch ourselves in the shop window, and everything’s changed.
“It was shocking, but not surprising. This was because I had been reminded at such a young age the currency and the power a woman holds when she is considered either beautiful or young, and now here I was going through the second phase of youth slipping away and feeling, once again, society’s judgement and the label that they were going to put on to me.”
Her book, therefore, is an attempt to explain what it is like to be told that you are losing your power as a result of waving goodbye to youth. But it’s also an effort to change tack.
Ageing is a ‘magic key’ to letting go of other people’s expectations
Society glamourises youth, says Katie Piper. There is a lot of pressure on 20-year-olds to have the best time of their lives. But many people are financially insecure during their younger years. And, without much experience of the world, it’s actually the time in a person’s life when they’re most likely to make mistakes.
She wants to reframe ageing as a “magic key” to letting go of other people’s expectations. Rather than a time to grieve our younger selves, we can see it as an invitation to take control.
Once you stop trying to hold onto something – ie, youth – you free yourself from the strictures of a capitalist economy that is constantly trying to make money from your insecurities, she argues.
“I’m going to be 42 in October. I’m still incredibly young to many, and old and past it to some. You realise, I know who I am. I have a strong sense of self and identity. This is the heyday. This is the time of my life. So I can only imagine what’s on [for the] 50s and 60s and the decades beyond. I feel excited by that second chapter,” she shared.
‘True evil in mankind’
At the moment of her attack, Katie saw “true evil in mankind”. But her work has exposed her to the vastly larger good side in humanity.
One message she would deliver to her younger self, if she could?
“If you’ve ever felt less than… you’ve hated yourself or felt ashamed, it was never you. It was society, consumerism and capitalism. It was beneficial to someone, somewhere, to hold you down.”
Katie Piper’s Weekend Escape airs on Sunday at 8:25am, on ITV1.
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