Helen Zille's holiday revelation that she underwent Botox treatment puts a new spin on my perception of her leadership.
On the one hand, it's pitiable that a woman in Zille's position should still feel pressurised into going to such lengths to look as pretty as she can to keep her relatively irrelevant support base. But on the other, I can’t help but feeling that the world would be a better place if more political leaders followed her example and also had poison injected directly into their faces.I also find myself in the uncomfortable position of now having to think about Zille as a sexual object.
Before I read about her close encounters with Botox, I was quite content to judge her on her negative politics, her ridiculous, hypocritical war on drugs in a nation full of alcoholics and the fact that the people who once supported apartheid will be voting for her in the forthcoming election. But now that she’s outed herself as a victim of her own vanity, I feel compelled to add her frown lines to my list of criteria.
Against my will, I'm now asking myself, is Helen Zille hot? Would I hit that? And why do I suddenly have the desire to curl up into a foetal knot and weep and weep until the bad thoughts go away?
Now I’d like to tell you I’m not the kind of person who enjoys taking cheap shots at people just because I can, but I’d be lying. The fact is, I love it. I consider it one of the perks of this job to have the opportunity to describe an Idols contestant as a fat, ugly mallrat, or Leon Schuster as a bigoted coprophile. But I’d consider it beneath me to call Jacob Zuma a pinheaded oily toad. That would be about as unfair as mocking Danny K on his inability to grasp the complexities of the Zimbabwe crisis. It’s as much Zuma’s job to look like an airbrushed centrefold as it is K’s to have two brain cells to rub together.
As a teenager in the ‘80s, I grew up fully expecting my politicians to be red-nosed, bloated, baldies and my celebrities to be slathered with make-up and riddled with addictions. The fact that the withered Ronald Reagan dyed his hair made news headlines, but only because Mikhail Gorbachev looked like he’d been dragged through a hedge backwards, and Margaret Thatcher apparently threw out all the mirrors in Downing St, along with the garlic, holy water and crucifixes. And it really didn’t matter.
Perhaps someone should remind Zille of the old saying: “Politics is show business for ugly people”. Or maybe give her a hug, and tell her that true beauty comes from within, or whatever it is we’re supposed say to unattractive wrinklies with body issues.
Or maybe we should demand a new law that prevents politicians from ever getting Botox treatments. With half of their face muscles paralysed, how will we ever be able to know when they’re lying?
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