A Gentle Reminder That Aging is a Privilege
There is something deeply unsettling about the way women are taught to speak about aging. They are not taught to accept or even embrace it, but instead taught to fear it. There is fear instilled into a woman’s mind when she looks in the mirror and sees evidence of laughter etched across her face. There are industries worth billions of dollars that thrive off convincing women that the natural look and course of their bodies is taboo. Men grow older and become “distinguished”. Women grow older and become “past their prime”. A good-looking older man is a “silver fox”, while a good-looking older woman “looks good… for her age”. Why?
The fear of aging does not appear out of nowhere. It’s built and reinforced constantly through media, celebrity culture, and beauty industries that profit off female insecurity. Everywhere women look, youth is treated as the ultimate marker of value. The promotion of smooth skin, thin bodies, “anti-aging” routines, and preventative Botox before wrinkles even appear all sends the same message: your worth is tied to how young you can appear and for as long as possible.
But not everyone gets the privilege of growing older. Not everyone gets to watch themselves evolve through different versions of life. There are people who never make it to thirty, forty, or seventy. There are people who would give anything to experience one more milestone, one more laugh, one more year. To age is to continue existing in a world that is not always kind and power right through.
Patriarchal beauty standards leave very little room for women to see beauty in themselves outside of youth. A woman can be intelligent, accomplished, compassionate, funny, and experienced, but society will still judge her on whether she “looks good for her age”. It is never enough for women to simply exist. They must stay desirable.
Image from thesocietypages.org
The pressure begins early too. Young girls are introduced to skincare routines meant for adults before they even understand what aging is. Social media floods them with impossible expectations, edited faces, and products marketed as “preventative.”
There is freedom in aging that society rarely discusses. The older a woman gets, the less interested she will become in forcing herself into a mold imposed on her by society. That confidence threatens systems built on female self-consciousness which may explain why aging in women is treated with such hostility in the first place. Industries profiting off female insecurity is threatened by a single thing: women learning to accept themselves.
The issue is not self-expression; applying makeup, taking care of your skin and body, or undergoing cosmetic procedures. The issue is the expectation that women owe youth to the world in order to be treated with the same respect as their male counterparts.
Aging should not be treated like a tragedy. It is evidence that someone has lived, and what is a life if it’s not lived? In a culture obsessed with youth, perhaps the most radical thing a woman can do is allow herself to grow older unapologetically.
Image from thesocietypages.org