Would You Still Be Unafraid of Aging if It Involved Looking Old?
It's great to bust stereotypes about aging--but at some point, "accepting aging" has to mean letting go of looking young and hot.
At only thirty-six, I feel a bit silly writing anything about aging at all. I’ve always held the belief that you can’t really know about how you’ll feel about aging until you’re actually old, and despite everyone over thirty reaching certified chopped unc status with the zoomers, we really aren’t that old.
But I see women my age—and younger!—write about “aging tips” as if they had already been through the trenches of menopause, osteoporosis, and season 64 of Criminal Minds. And 99% of the time, these women are not musing on the wisdom and life experiences that come with age, or even ways to stay healthy and live to see great-grandchildren. They’re literally just talking about hotness: currently being “hot for their age,” doing things to remain hot, being hotter than when they were younger (guys, I literally look the same as I did when I was 27, two years ago!) and being unafraid in the face of aging because—you guessed it—they are confident that they will stay hot. And they will stay hot gracefully. Unlike all those ridiculous older women on the red carpet who, for some insane reason, choose to get cosmetic surgery, they will glide into old age looking effortlessly and eternally thirty-eight. Geez, why didn’t I think of that?!
It was Mother’s Day this past weekend, which meant many denizens of the Internet took it upon themselves to post photos of their mothers for all to see, and, you guessed it—several women posted how hot their moms look for their age and how, as a result, they aren’t afraid of aging. INSPIRING: This 28-year-old isn’t scared to get old because her mother still looks forty!
Look, I’m not above vanity. For several years in a row, I kept my waist and hip measurements in a spreadsheet so I could optimize for peak waist-hip ratio. I used to wear a steel-boned corset to the gym, which was…a choice, I suppose. Although I still haven’t opted for any injectables, I have been wearing retinol since I was nineteen. All this to say: I’m not above wanting to look young and hot. But we should be honest with ourselves about that. It’s giving the same cognitive dissonance as, “I don’t pay someone to rip my pubes out for icky men, I do it for my sensory disorder that only applies to pussy hair, so it’s actually feminist and self-actualizing.” I’m aware this makes me the friend who’s too woke and the friend who’s not woke enough, but so be it.
Celebrating the youthful beauty of particularly lucky (or rich) older women is not the same thing as busting any kind of ageism stigma, and it certainly has nothing to do with celebrating aging or being unafraid of it. In order to fully accept aging—something I believe very few young people have actually done—you have to accept eventually not being hot.
