I have great respect and affection for Tori Amos, and so witnessing her aesthetic evolution over the years has made me think about why people do these things to themselves. Tori was a sex symbol to a lot of guys and girls in the 90s, even though her features taken one by one were not conventionally ‘hot’: she has very small eyes, a pretty big nose with a hump, a “funny lips shape” as she sings in one song, and a mouthful of jagged, uneven teeth. Yet she was cute and sexy to many, many people, in great part because of her talents and her boldness. In the 2000s, her song styles became adult-contemporary, and she had alarmingly noticeable surgeries: first, nose lost its hump and its bulb, her teeth became Hollywood-“perfect” one day, and then she had that eyelid surgery that makes people look like constantly surprised psychopaths. She filled her face with goo. She wore highly unconvincing wigs.
Her fans turned on her because they perceived her music to be about empowering women, rejecting the patriarchy, etc. So why might she have had this stuff done?
She has always complained about terribly painful TMJ, and supposedly the teeth are fake now because she had to have major jaw surgeries that affected her whole mouth. That may be true. Everything else obviously was to compensate for aging (and she has sung honestly for many years about accepting becoming older). She’s complained since around age 40 that the music industry basically smiles and dismisses most women over 40, telling them to be happy for their youthful success and to enjoy the pasture. She makes her money touring, and there are tons of photos of her playing piano under harsh stage lighting, and I imagine it could be agonizing to see yourself as an old person with every facial flaw in HD under harsh lighting. And her hair has always been thin, disguised a bit in her youth by its waviness, but it became thinner and thinner as she aged. Her mother has very thin hair and a high hairline, and so does she. I imagine neither she nor her fans would want to watch a balding woman in her 50s attack a piano and wail, and so I think she probably feels in a bind like Joan Rivers did. Imagine a 70 year old woman who looks like a 70 year old woman telling the jokes Rivers told and talking about fashion and starlets. It’s kind of a cognitive dissonance. Even if Joan looked like a Muppet, that somehow is an easier pairing with what she did for a living than a naturally aged 70 year old face. It’s easy to take these women down for what they do, but Joni Mitchell and other women who did age naturally disappeared completely from the public eye, their careers relegated to tiny local theatres.
I am very self-conscious and I have had six laser resurfacing treatments, one ablative, as well as fillers one time for my significant acne scarring. My heritage is mostly British and by British-stereotype standards my teeth look great but by US standards they look like I couldn’t afford braces or tooth whitening or veneers. My nose is biggish and crooked because of a very deviated septum—and yes, I have considered getting surgery to improve my breathing and to use that surgery as an excuse to get a cosmetic rhinoplasty at the same time. My ears stick out.
But here’s the thing I learned primarily from witnessing Tori’s self-effacing over the years: every one of her imperfections from the frankly bizarre teeth to the nose hump and bulb to the little squinty eyes really were unique, defining “quirks” that made her who she was. It kind of broke my heart to see her erasing these “flaws” to look like a “prettier,” indistinct version of herself. Since I respect her musicianship and her words so much, that would never change because of appearances, but it made me feel like she didn’t love herself every time she changed another thing. And feeling that way taught me that people who care about me would feel the same way. If I “fixed” my teeth and my nose and my ears, I wouldn’t look like me anymore. I’d look, best case scenario, like a more fuckable me...
