"Get bangs or get Botox, girl"
A few more thoughts on aging at this bonkers moment in time
Before we begin, I wanted to offer a content warning that today I’ll be discussing issues related to our culture’s beauty standards, aging, cosmetic procedures, and adjacent topics in an old-fashioned blog style, so if that is upsetting for you in anyway, please feel free to sit this one out, okay? Please take care of you. - S.
Hi friends,
More than a year ago, I wrote a bit about getting older in an essay here called Living Leaves A Mark.
Honestly, you may want to read that essay first before continuing with this one since a lot of my baseline setting of how I am engaging in these thoughts are already there. The most important thing to remember from that particular post is this:
So, assuming you’ve read that, yes, I find I’m still sorting through a million thoughts on this topic of getting older in our actual bodies and I wish more people in a similar stage were talking about it. Hence: today’s rough draft of a post.
Because this is a truly insane moment in history and it feels bonkers to me that, while we are living in the midst of climate change, the rise of fascism, the upending of world orders, the clawing back of progress, major violence, and so much more, we are also demanding that women spend more time and money managing their FACES.
Like, yes, diet culture was very bad and damaging in the 80s and 90s, so please enjoy this fancy, medically-updated version of it with more scrutiny over your face as you get older! Did we mention how brave Sarah Jessica Parker is to have her real face on?
I am in no way qualified to talk about any of this except for the fact that I am living through it in real-time, too.
Case in point
I posted a little update of my grey-blending hair experience on Instagram Stories over the weekend - because I love it! and sometimes it’s nice to just be a person on social media and talk about normal things, you know? - but due to the responses to the picture, it turned into a few more slides on how I’m thinking about aging right now and well, I am still reading through the hundreds and hundreds of messages that poured into my inboxes from women my age.
Basically, we have some thoughts.
Here are just a few replies from you all, sampled from literally hundreds of responses:
I feel this deeply. It is a very strange and perplexing time to age naturally.
I have become enamored lately with some older women I know between 70 and 80. I can’t get enough of them. They are at ease with themselves, enjoying their lives, and pressing in to who they are and have become in such beautiful ways. Their lines and marks of age are evidence of all their lives have held, and I am admiring it.
Yes! It’s just like the young millenial moms are the first with constant social media, our gen is the first with the constant aging…. I realized this as someone who probably will never use fillers, and all these people around me are changing their face and it makes me look so. much. older than others at this point. I realized about a year ago...oh shit! This is going to be “a thing” as I watched people become more social media influenced by both of those things.
Something that I can’t get over is that a whole generation of girls are going to grow up without moms that truly look like them – like what an unintended consequence!
Why are men considered hotter when they go grey and get older and but we are “giving up” and “being brave”?? UGH
I LOVE getting older and looking older - it feels like a beautiful homage to the women in my life who aged, and to whom I didn’t get to see age. Growing older (and looking older) is such a gorgeous gift to me.
If you watch The Golden Bachelor, the faces of the women all look plastic but if you look at their necks, arms, etc you can see their normal aging. It’s disturbing.
My friend recently told me I’m the only 47 year old she knows who doesn’t get fillers of any kind.
I think this is such an important subject to discuss. It’s not just the “managing of aging “, it’s also the complete avoidance of the acceptance that one day this too shall end for us. At least this experience we are in now. And that avoidance of reality is shaping our entire lives in very weird ways. So thank you for speaking about this.
One thing I try to keep at the forefront of my mind in these conversations is that I can be sharply critical of the system that has normalized these procedures/standards while passing absolutely zero judgement on the individual women who choose to partake in them.
THANK YOU! I careen wildly back and forth between “eff the patriarchy who even cares” and “well I don’t want people to think I let myself go…” and I can’t seem to find the equilibrium between those two poles!!!
I feel this deeply at only 37 years old! I am in the minority among friends for not having procedures, and it can feel like I’m not supposed to talk about my experience or interrogate a movement that feels like a net-negative, for us and our daughters. Keep writing, keep sharing!
Amen. Amen. Until I see me with a filter and I’m Like dammmn I look snatched! haha
I, too, find myself bewildered at what women are expected to do to keep up the Sisyphean task of pretending we are not the age we are??? Like when can we just live?
I’m so encouraged and feel supported when other women are embracing aging authentically and gracefully. This is what we want for our children - permission to be themselves and to be loved, seen and honoured for who they are (not who they’re painting or tweaking themselves to be)
I literally said this yesterday! When do we get to tap-out on this stuff? when do we get to actually, finally, look like old ladies?
I’m 35, but it seems like most people my age are botoxed and lip fillered (and no shame to them!) but I am starting to see age on my face, skin, etc and not on others my age- and I’m really intentionally having to remind myself that aging is a beautiful thing and it’s ok to see it on myself.
The ad following your beautiful words was for an anti-aging serum
Thanks for sharing I’m 42 today and have so many friends getting Botox and fillers and I just feel lost wanting to age naturally. My 10 year old daughter already sees the difference in other moms and it’s tough to have those conversations
I look at photos of my mom & aunts in their 50s and I ask if they recalled how they felt and they say that they felt like they were aging because they were supposed to and they felt lucky because not everyone gets the privilege of aging and this is the time when they started losing friends to illness. They say that they feel sorry for us because we don’t get to embrace just aging, we have to do it with grace and style. They laugh about the anti-aging movement. They think it’s all a racket. And it’s yet another thing women have to do. Look young while you are old. It makes no sense. It’s a burden to keep pretending that being pretty is so important when it’s not. Being healthy, being smart, being funny, being wise. Pretty, attractive, age-neutral—should be further down the list than it is.
The content I’m pushed about age prevention for middle stage women even as a 20-something feels utterly mind rotting and brainwashing. Not loving how it’s sold as this amazing fix when it’s really just disillusionment with our natural process via artificial/toxic or invasive methods
And because this is the Internet, there were a lot of both men and women in there who told me I looked so OLD wow, who told me to get bangs or Botox (hence, our title today), to get myself a box of hair dye because I looked “soooooo much older,” or who said good for me but they “weren’t going down like that” and variations thereof. Damned if we do, damned if we don’t, even by each other.
So yes, we are thinking about aging a fair bit right now. How could we not? we are bombarded with constant messages about it. It’s not just in the grocery store tabloid aisle anymore either, it’s in our pockets and constantly in our faces and the narratives around us and the culture we consume.
We think about it way more than we perhaps expected to at this stage and yet… we don’t talk about it a lot. Or at least, not honestly. Not with nuance. Not with confession and contradictions and concerns. We want to love our bodies but we peer into the mirror anxiously and buy the serums; we want to model something better for the generation coming after us but we want to look like ourselves, too. This feels kind of small and silly in the scheme of things and yet we have a hunch it is saying something big and vital about our culture right now, too.
Not one of us knows how to talk about it with our friends, not one of us is finding this as easy as hoped, not one of us is uncritical and unaffected by the discourse and demands. Also: we do look really great with those filters on Instagram, don't we?
We worry about hurting each other’s feelings and never want to be judgemental but God, we also want to acknowledge that the patriarchy is kind of doing a number on us all right now.
I had something different planned for today’s Field Notes but, given the outpouring of response, I figured we could have an old-fashioned blog post about it - which means that your comments will be very important! so please make sure you to chime in - with my own confessions, contradictions, and a further look into that aspect of all this that I can’t stop thinking about right now.
I guess let’s keep talking about it.