In Praise of the Mirror

1856:

We live for pleasure and acceptance, young and old. Appearance is important, for young people especially, cock and hen dance that it is. Fashion is important and particularly for women whose shoes have to be right. But for vegan women, there’s often not much to choose from fashion-wise, and that puts them in a very difficult position with footwear. 

On the general matter of shoes, when I look around, downwards, I don’t see many vegan feet. But I do see lots of animal-based shoes. A ‘contents’ label either isn’t on the product or it doesn’t occur to us to look for one. If you’re vegan you certainly do.

There isn’t much fashion in non-leatherwear, since it’s an expensive business designing shoes for profit, relying on footwear made with leather, that will fascinate and sell. Whether it’s hardy hiking boots or fashionwear, it doesn’t cross people’s minds to think about the material used to make shoes. They don’t give a second thought to this product; specifically concerning its abattoir origin. Skin that becomes leather is not something left over from a for-food animal; in many cases, an animal’s hide is more valuable to the shoe industry than the carcass is to the meat industry.

So, it comes to this - we’re more likely to go for attractive or hard-wearing shoes than consider the ethics of leather. Perhaps we’ve stopped eating animal foods for health reasons but haven’t ruled out wearing the skins or wools or silks of animals, because we know the use of these by-products won’t adversely affect our health. We don’t give leather a second thought.

         

Even with health itself we may consider that the eating of junk food is okay because, especially when we’re young, ‘health’ isn’t an issue. Kids are generally fit as fiddles. Their bodies are strong and vibrant enough to build powerful, protective immune systems, to fight off any of the killer diseases. Health might be about looking good to others, but otherwise it’s taken for granted. Which is why such phrases as “Life is for living” and “Live Now” are heard in a lot of advertising commentary.

Life can be exciting for young people. And so it should be, after having waited so long to escape the ‘olds’, and start to live independently and think for themselves. But as we grow up we find our youth fading and we then find that we are putting on body weight. As young people enter the world of excess it allows us to eat whatever we feel like. But there are more surprises in store when we realise another aspect of this dangerous territory – the body having the power to make decisions for us. We pander to the mouth, the senses, the taste buds and the stomach. Something must be satiated but at the cost of obesity and all sorts of other health conditions setting in. But even if we are conscious of fattening foods when we grow up, we only ever tinker with that one danger. We see these ‘foods that fatten us’ only as that. Our concerns are for our mirror image rather than at any good health practice.

Irrepressible teenagers and young people in their twenties are rotten with good health. It’s of less concern our than keeping up appearance. Whatever commodity we consider essential to our lifestyle, whether we are young or old, we try to squeeze what we can from what’s available. We spend big, risk debt, ignore warnings and mainly consider our own interests. We want to live for the moment. Above all we try NOT to become like those sad people (usually older people) who don’t seem to have any real fun at all.

A young person’s instinct will be to paint their life from a brightly coloured palette, to make life more exciting than it is. It’s best not to think about things too deeply. The reason we don’t think about certain things, is that we know NOT to go there. It’s born into us, to protect ourselves, to not bring unnecessary pain to ourselves. Our main aim is to maintain self-confidence.

At a certain age, young people who have been under the control of adults, are suddenly free to experience every possible stimulating experience dreamed about since childhood. And of course, this as-yet unexplored adult world must be something worth indulging in, seeing as how happy the adults can seem to be sometimes. Once the adult world opens up, we adopt a policy of “And why not?”. “We only live once, so live life while you can”.

But then, down come the shutters. Change is forced on us, usually later in life, by which time we’ve lost sight of ‘the fun life’. And we’ve become like everyone else - a victim of vanity. And in all that time, of preening and posing, we’ve maybe never given a second thought to very much at all. Only rarely might we have considered the animals, whose lives have been sacrificed to make our own colourful life possible.