Many years from now, our grandchildren will ask us what we did during the pandemic.
What will we answer?
At least those of us that survived the plague, approximately 99.96 % of the world’s current population of 7.9 billion people. Eight million people & counting died from Covid if the official global statistics are credible.
Covid however has a long tail with a sting at the end of it. Most of us are suffering from some or other form of PTSD, stress and mental fatigue. Many others suffer from a host of cardiac and pulmonary ailments attributed to long Covid. While some of us have developed social anxiety. Some people found God, while others lost him and their faith in humanity.
People started veggie gardens, many took up baking bread, cakes and biscuits at home. Others made pickles and jam. Most married couples managed to stay married during hard lockdowns while enduring soft beds and hard battles at home while others parted company. Many passing friendships of convenience lapsed into disuse. Some of us got drunk and tried to stay drunk while binge-watching Netflix & reruns of The Sopranos and Breaking Bad. The best among us started feeding the poor and the hungry.
In short we were forced to isolate and cocoon by government diktat. The term ‘cocooning’ was first coined in the 1990’s by Faith Popcorn, a trend forecaster and marketing consultant. But long before her in 1988, Li Edelkoort, the Dutch trend forecaster and style guru spoke about pyjamas & blankets. She spoke about, “The need for the warmth, the comfort, the time for oneself, for ones surrounding. To be occupied with one’s home.”
Gymn memberships declined and brothels closed down. The sale of underpants dropped as many men discovered the unbridled freedom of going commando in their rugby shorts or tracksuit pants. The sale of home beer-brewing kits went up as did the sale of spices. Home deliveries of everything from fast food, groceries, raw meat, toilet paper, sex toys and electronic gadgets went up.
In this age of disruption & destruction, with conspiracy theorists and the peddlers of fear occupying centre-stage, people and countries resorted to strange measures to survive. While the UAE considered hosting an Oktoberfest to boost flagging tourism others wanted to lift their sagging bottoms!
The American Society of Plastic Surgeons reported that most cosmetic surgery procedures saw a marked decline. Hair transplants decreased by 60 % while breast implant removals increased. No need for hair or plastic boobs if your’re not going out anymore. Nose jobs curiously experienced the smallest decline perhaps because they are marginally less expensive than more invasive procedures.
The one surprising area where demand increased however was for butt-implants! Butt-implants are not to be confused with their poorer cousin the Brazilian butt-lift. Unlike breast implants which use fluid-filled sacs, butt-implants are performed by injecting or grafting fat suctioned from other parts of the body & augmented with solid but soft silcone pads. Aesthetic considerations aside, an entirely subjective matter, given the nature of the daily work they perform, these implants have to be designed for extra durability. Once inserted they provide that desired extra volume in the rear for that pear-shaped Kardashian or full-rounded Beyoncè bouncy butt.
Butt-lifts in contrast merely turn a floppy or sagging pancake bottom into a bum with toned buttocks. And a butt-buff is a low-level non-invasive procedure performed by beauticians. Favoured by Hollywood stars before the Emmy Awards or Oscars. This involves minor surface filling of the butt to hide any unsightly indentations & blemishes followed by buffing and polishing similar to panel-beating of the boot of a car. This is performed just in case their designer ball gown on gratis loan, with the plunging exposed back, reveals a tantalising glimpse of the top of their bottoms!
The reason for the unprecedented butt-boom is two-fold. Firstly the power of Instagram and secondly a condition that afflicts some women called secretary spread. In plain language this is the flattening of the bum from too much sitting not to be confused with getting arse-faced and falling down on ones bum from drinking too much tequila.
The USA is usually almost always the country where these trends and fads in pursuit of vanity grip the imagination of an easily influenced & impressionable public. Kim Kardashian started the butt mania or obsession years ago. When she featured her now famous derriere online she broke the internet. Thousands of young women have since those halcyon days followed her example with posts on Instagram of their backsides. And when the followers, devotees, views and likes of your butt reach the magical one million mark you become an Instagram social media megastar!
In 2020 women in the USA were spending thousands of dollars to artificially swell, inflate, renovate, uplift & increase the volume of an area of their anatomy that only others can see notwithstanding the old Greek proverb borrowed from the Arabs which says that the camel does not see its own hump!
The men and women who lived and died during World War Two are often called the special generation. And for good reason. A Dutch grandmother could at least look back on her life and say in her later years, I hid a Jewish family in my attic from the Nazis. A French granny could shrug her shoulders with supreme Gallic indifference and declare, I hid a British paratrooper in my barn, fed him cheese, made love to him in the haystack and made a silk blouse from his parachute. A Greek grandmother could say we survived the Nazi imposed famine by harvesting scallops from the sea, hunting hares abd eating wild mountain greens.
The British grandmother could say I worked in a factory assembling tanks & aeroplanes. I drive an ambulanxe and put out fires during the Blitz. I flew new fighter planes & bombers from the factory assembly line to the waiting airmen at their bases.
Many years from now young millennial & generation Z women will look back on their Instagram journey bordering on obsession. What will they say?
We live in an age where everything is blatantly transactional and even intimacy has been monetised. Some of us may pause to reflect about the ephemeral nature of life and the even more fleeting lifespan of a social influencer. Will they wonder and look back with pride about the global reach of their posts about the shape, size and curve of their bottoms? What legacy will they leave behind? Was it a good life, lived well with dignity and grace? Was it self-seeking or concerned with the welfare of others? And what does it say about the millions of followers who liked and viewed their posts all the way from Kentucky to Kiev.
When AI-guided robots dig up our remains in a 200 years from now and discover these strange looking silicone mounds lying side by side beneath our skeletal remains, the human detritus they unearth, preserved forever like archaeological debris, will reveal a curious glimpse into the typical life of a mid-century American woman. The socio-cultural anthropologists will justifiably conclude that this was a time when a “civilisation” if we use the term loosely, during the worst pandemic to plague humanity in over a century, during a highly politicised, manufactured and manipulated existential tragedy and global health crisis unleashing death, illness, mental & economic hardship, some women chose above all things to enhance their backsides.