The Body Holds the Resistence

This neck of mine carries my brain.
It turns toward people I care about.
It holds tension when I’m holding space.
It has survived hour long phone calls, when you could still cradle a handset.

Leila Ainge

It’s survived the many uncomfortable positions I’ve fallen asleep in, on sofa’s, trains, planes, and yet… This is not how my neck should be thought about, according to the 30 targeted collagen ads a day. ’ve found myself resisting, and looking at it, not critically which is the point of those ads, but curiously.

Noticing the way it tilts when I’m listening. The way it locks when I’m holding back. The way it carries, quietly and consistently, the weight of thinking, planning, wondering, becoming. It deserves more than an algorithm telling it to be smoother or tighter. It deserves respect.

This Is Not a New Obsession

The female neck has long been an object of fascination.
In Renaissance portraiture, it was framed by elaborate lace collars, symbols of status and self-control. In the 18th century, it was exposed by low-cut bodices and then re-covered by the fichu, (a fabric triangle layered across the chest and throat). In Victorian England, chokers whispered of refinement, or concealed what society didn’t want seen. Adornment and erasure have often gone hand in hand.
The neck, slender and upright, came to represent grace. Submission. Femininity. Sometimes nobility. Always visibility.

We have always asked women’s necks to tell a story.
Now, in the digital age, the story continues, filtered, branded, magnified.
We are asked to keep it smooth. Keep it lifted. Keep it in frame.

Collagen as Capital

The language has changed, but the power dynamics haven’t, today, the ideal is no longer lace-trimmed or jewel-studded, it’s tight, glowy, “naturally youthful.” Effortful effortlessness. We’re told to bank collagen. As if youth were an investment vehicle. As if stillness and suspension were the ultimate goals. Beauty journalist Jessica DeFino critiques this with clinical precision: collagen obsession, she writes, is about pseudoscience, and beauty capital. Is it about care, or is it control?

The philospher Foucault helps us understand how power works through everyday life, not just through rules or laws, but through how we watch ourselves and others. When it comes to appearance, especially for women, this means beauty becomes a form of self-surveillance. This constant self-monitoring isn't just personal, it's social. For those who can afford the time, tools, and treatments, beauty becomes a kind of social currency: a quiet signal of discipline, access, and belonging.

Psychologoists Elias & Gill (2018) explore how beauty apps add to this, and create a "regulatory gaze", not quite Big Brother, but more like Big Sister, where women are invited (or expected) to edit and perfect themselves. These tools may look empowering, but they also quietly enforce a narrow idea of what’s acceptable.

Anne Helen Petersen calls this beauty hustle culture, the invisible labour of looking appropriate, polished, ageless.

It’s not that we perform beauty work instead of other forms of work. It’s that we are asked to perform both, simultaneously, without sweat.

As Gill & Orgad (2018) point out, we women are required to bounce back in an elastic way and middle-class women with access to resources are idealised as the “perfect” resilient subjects, while others are pushed aside and made to feel disposable. Resilience is for the mindset what collagen is to the skin, but what is the real cost? What happens when being seen as 'enough' depends on constant editing, spending, and self-surveillance and ability to bounce back?

Embodiment, Perception, and Performance

In psychological terms, embodiment is not just the fact of having a body, but the act of being in it. A body that feels, responds, signals. That tightens before the mind can form language. That stores memory in muscle and tension in tissue.

Bessel van der Kolk, famously wrote “the body keeps the score”, he saw the body as a store of traumatic memories and stress. But I believe, this score is a neccesary resistance, against perfection, performance, and the relentless demand to appear effortlessly fine.

We are not all fine. Why pretend? My neck has lines that underscore a journey of body and mind
The neck stiffens under scrutiny. It holds the weight of being watched, evaluated, expected to be both soft and unbreakable.

Digital Flesh

Feminist scholar Hyungjoo Yoon (2021) speaks of digital flesh, how bodies are reconstructed in cyberspace, manipulated and optimised for viewership. The self becomes visual. Curated. Disembodied, and the Journalist Mikala Jamison calls it “beauty standard brain rot.”

In the scroll of faces and feeds, we lose track of what’s normal.
Even baseline beautiful starts to look plain.

Meanwhile, the neck, this small, steady bridge between head and heart, becomes another site of scrutiny. Of digital disconnection.

But real bodies don’t stay the same.
And perhaps that’s the point.

The Neck as Record

Looking back, the history of the neck tells us more than we might expect.
It tells us that appearance has always been political. That visibility is never neutral. That adornment, concealment, correction, they all shape how a woman is received.

But the neck isn’t just symbolic.
It’s instrumental.

It houses the larynx, home to the vocal cords that allow us to speak, literally, to voice ourselves.
It supports breath, posture, and projection.
Tension here isn’t just physical; it can muffle what wants to be said.

A stiff neck can restrict airflow. A collapsed posture can diminish presence.
The vagus nerve, running down from the brain through the neck, plays a role in vocal tone and emotional regulation.
It helps us signal safety, connection, authenticity.
So when the neck tightens, under pressure, under scrutiny, our voice may retreat with it.

We talk about finding our voice.
But maybe first, we have to listen to the body that carries it.

And perhaps we can learn something from history, too.

From the layered collars and chokers and the fabric drawn high or lowered for fashion, virtue, power, the neck has always been asked to bear a story. Maybe the question now is: what story do we choose to tell back?

Because what if an aged neck is not something to conceal, but something to trust? A sign of years spent turning toward others and of words spoken in love, in fury, in truth. And holding up one’s head again and again, even in uncertainty.

Not a flaw, but a record of effort and living. This neck carries my brain, my voice, my choices. It doesn’t need to be lifted, or elastic.
It dares to be the resistence.

References

Van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.

Elias, A. S., & Gill, R. (2018). Beauty surveillance: The digital self-monitoring cultures of neoliberalism. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 21(1), 59–77. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549417705604​

Gill, R. (2007). Postfeminist media culture: Elements of a sensibility. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 10(2), 147–166. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549407075898​

Gill, R., & Orgad, S. (2018). The amazing bounce-backable woman: Resilience and the psychological turn in neoliberalism. Sociological Research Online, 23(2), 477–495. https://doi.org/10.1177/1360780418769673

Yoon, H. (2021). Digital flesh: A feminist approach to the body in cyberspace. Gender and Education, 33(5), 578–593. https://doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2020.1802408