Holding Out For a Hero

Melania Trump has had a facelift.

Now, I don't actually know this for a fact, nor am I basing this opinion on any whispered confession of a knowing anaesthetist or blurry shot of her in recovery.  No, pettily, I have decided this entirely on having seen a photo this morning of her disembarking from Air Force One in Belgium alongside her odious spouse and wondering for a good 60 seconds who the new staffer was.  It was only her Arctic Shelf of a diamond ring that finally tipped me off.

Inspired to give her the benefit of the doubt - long-haul flights are well-known to neatly cut years from your life like the Six-Fingered Man's Machine - I did some quick ad hoc image searching and there it is still, the next day: the roundness, the flush, the gleam.  She's totally had a facelift.

I should state for the record here that that I fully support an individual's right to modify their bodies as they wish, including undertaking cosmetic surgery to play into society's fanatical obsession that the only good woman is a dewy woman.  I have looked into it myself very very briefly, albeit for lifting and reducing than for youthening, and only decided not to continue down that path when I read they put your nipples on a plate beside you while they work.  HELL NO.

So why do I care about Melania enough to take to my keyboard this morning?

I don't want to like Melania Trump: she has appeared on television advocating for the blatantly-racist "Birther" challenge to Obama's presidency, she dismissed the toxic and dangerous "grab 'em by the pussy" comment as harmless "boy talk," and, as much as I enjoy the subtle theatricality of the hand swats and sour faces, her continued presence by her husband's side supports his ludicrous claim of Alpha Male legitimacy.  He is in part because she is, and for that alone I should condemn her.

But, damn it, reluctantly and guiltily like sneaking a cheeky cigarette around the corner after telling everyone you've quite, I have a soft spot for her.  It started around the time of their wedding, when a reporter asked her flat out,"Would you have married him if he weren't wealthy?" and she focused that feline gaze of hers upon him and replied without a flicker, "If I weren't beautiful, do you think he'd be with me?"  DAMN!, I thought.  Boom!  That cool, calculated, totally-in-control transaction which lifted her high above her station as a struggling model with a temporary visa - I can respect that.  There are no victims here, and I'm sure having her own gilded floor of a penthouse, a son she clearly adores, and by all account a nearly-entirely independent life from her loathsome spouse was, to her, worth the occasional laying back and thinking of [Estonia].

I managed to withstand the concrete evidence of her failings over the years following purely on the basis that, well, I just didn't care that much about either of them so it/they/him/she was relatively easy to ignore. And when the tangerine nightmare somehow won the election in 2016, and I saw her face on the night - a face that read to me as someone who'd just been mightily baited-and-switched - I felt some real sympathy for her.  She wouldn't have her own floor of the White House.  She wouldn't be able to pass the days doing Pilates.  She would now have to be seen with him, to interact with him, to show affection toward him, oh the poor dove.

I have ever since maintained wild hope that she would reveal herself to be a Manchurian feminist icon.  In the absence of any visible movement towards that revelation, I have mused about the possibility of a prenups that would somehow affect her son (she is by all accounts a devoted mother) and/or something altogether far more nefarious involving concrete Jimmy Choos.  I have brandished photos of her at Barbara Bush's funeral, in full smiles alongside the Obamas and the Bushes, as proof she doesn't support this administration's torturous direction but yearns instead to stand on the side of Good.

(Note to Myself in 2002: You will someday describe George W. Bush as "Good."  Sorry about that.)

I want her to file for divorce so badly I would pay for the lawyers myself.  I want her to write a tell-all book that I will probably never actually read so badly that I would launch a publishing company just to facilitate it.  I want her to stand up in front of a crowd paying her hundreds of thousands to speak and be that fearless, brazen, totally-in-control women I made her out to be all those years on the basis of a single quipped reply to an insulting question.

And then she got a facelift.

Does getting a facelift mean she can't reveal herself to be a feminist icon?  God no - hellooooo Jane Fonda!

But that photo has somehow made me relinquish this dubious pipe dream of unexpected feminism at long last.  You see, if she has indeed had a facelift, then it almost certainly happened at the time of her kidney disorder treatment that took way longer than that treatment should have taken, and that - that duplicity, that diminishing of a serious medical condition to preserve the illusion of youth, that continuation of her family's medley of blatant lies - makes her just another Trump.

And even if she hasn't had a facelift and she's just discovered some remarkable new plumping serum made from the souls of migrant children, we are nearly two years into this ordeal and there is no sign of her springboarding from trophy wife to independent woman.  To assume a threatening prenup removes her agency - the very thing I first liked about her - and so the only reasonable path is to assume she continues to choose this.

Damn it, Melania.

You sure are pretty.  I like your dress.  Your hair looks great.