“At what point did I promise to stay 17 for the rest of my life?”
This quote from Britney Spears’ memoir The Woman in Me has stuck with me ever since I read it. I don’t think a sentence could more perfectly sum up the experience of being a woman. With recent headlines about Jennifer Love Hewitt’s aging body plastered all over the internet, it now plays in my head even more.
Why does our society care so intensely about women staying young? Why is it anyone else’s business how our bodies age? And why do we continue to teach men these unrealistic expectations of what a “beautiful” woman is? Our culture teaches girls to strive for these unrealistic standards simply to please men, and it’s disturbing.
When will we stop being afraid of aging?
I work at a cosmetics store. I regularly sell anti-aging products to seven-year-old girls. They buy their serums and their $68 moisturizer, and I wish I could decline their cards and also tell them that we don’t accept cash. But I have to sell these young girls cosmetic products that are marketed to full-grown women. And every time I make a sale to a little girl, I feel like I let her down.
When I look at these girls, I see myself as a young girl. I know the pain that these children feel. I see their desperation to be “just like everyone else,” to be “trendy,” to be “beautiful,” to look “cool.” These girls want to be anyone other than themselves. They try so hard to erase themselves at such a young age. I wish that I could tell them that they can’t fill their emptiness with moisturizer and anti-wrinkle cream.
Believe me — I’ve tried.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve spent at least $1000 per year on beauty products. I’ve applied every lotion, serum, acid, and face mask, and most days, I still don’t see myself as beautiful. I look in the mirror and see an aging woman, which scares me.
On my 25th birthday, one of my best friends told me that now that I was 25, I would start aging. I panicked and started using retinol and anti-aging eye creams. I’ve always said that I won’t age, but now, it’s happening, and I’m so afraid of what happens next. I constantly see articles that make thirty-year-old women sound old, so I’ve become desperate to pass for younger than my thirty-three years.
Leonardo DiCaprio won’t even date women over 25 years old.
He just discards these women and moves on to an even younger woman, even though he’s 50. If he found out that he had to date me, a woman in her early 30s, then he’d probably vomit.
But this attitude towards women isn’t limited to DiCaprio. A man whom I used to date referred to his father as having a child “young” at 33 years old, but a 35-year-old pregnant woman is considered to have a geriatric pregnancy. How is a 33-year-old man young while a 35-year-old woman is “geriatric?” It’s our society imposing impossible standards on women.
Becoming older scares me because I worry others won’t find me desirable anymore. What if I turn 35 and my boyfriend leaves me for a 25-year-old as soon as I turn 35 because 25-year-old women aren’t “geriatric?” What if a man falls in love with how I look now at 33, but I wake up next to him a decade from now, and he feels like he’s looking at a stranger? If I get fillers or Botox to reduce signs of aging, others will judge me for being “vain.” But if I age naturally, people will assume that I “let myself go.” For women, the only safe way to age is to not age at all.
Women lose so much when they start aging.
Society makes women from all backgrounds — including celebrities like Jennifer Love Hewitt — feel like we aren’t beautiful, worthy, talented, and desirable. Sometimes it feels like the world would rather see women die at 30 so that no one has to see our wrinkles, cellulite, and gray hair, and ruin the toxic fantasy of what a woman “should” be.
Jennifer Love Hewitt has a successful career, but all people can see right now is the fact that she doesn’t have the same body that she did when she was 18. Her accomplishments don’t matter. Her talent doesn’t matter. Her happiness doesn’t matter. All that matters is her appearance. And it’s sad that this is the society in which we live.
Is this the world that you want your daughters growing up in? Do you want them to feel fear about aging at just 7 years old and never feel like they’re enough when they become women? This is how our society views aging now, and only we can change it.
Featured Photo by Artur Voznenko on Unsplash.
You’ve raised a deeply important point about how aging is unfairly gendered. The double standards around age and appearance are real, and they harm women in both personal and professional spaces. Instead of asking women to conform, we should be challenging the cultural norms that equate a woman’s worth with youth.