The societal pressure to look like you’re 25 when you’re actually 50 is ridiculous. As if we are supposed to perform acts of self-aggression just to feel worthy. I have been watching women around me do this for years, and doing some of it myself, and the longer I watch the stranger it looks.
The double standard has a name
Susan Sontag named it in 1972, in an essay called The Double Standard of Ageing, and half a century later it reads like reporting. Men, she observed, are permitted to age into distinction; the same years that make a man look weathered make a woman look like she has failed at something. Ageing, for women, is treated less as a phase of life than as a lapse in discipline. It simply gets enforced, daily, by a thousand small verdicts, and by now most of the enforcement is internal.
The war economy
Notice the language the beauty industry reaches for: fight the signs of ageing, defy your age, turn back the clock. It is the vocabulary of war, and wars are profitable for exactly one side. The industry manufactures the fear, then sells the armistice, cream by cream, and the arrangement only works if you can be made to see your own face as the enemy. Meanwhile the faces we compare ourselves against have been retouched into physical impossibility. You know it and I know it, and the comparison wounds anyway.
The costs are not only financial. The maintenance of an impossible face and body runs through punishing diets, compulsive exercise, procedures. Self-inflicted, all of it, and each round reinforces the premise underneath: that ageing is a catastrophe to be delayed rather than a life continuing to happen.
The story gets into the body
Here is where it stops being a matter of taste. In 2002, Becca Levy and colleagues at Yale published a study following 660 adults over as much as 23 years. The people who held more positive perceptions of their own ageing lived, on average, 7.5 years longer than those who held negative ones, and the gap held after accounting for age, health, loneliness and income. It is one study, though its direction echoes across the field. Sit with the inversion it suggests. The industry says fight ageing in order to live well. The evidence, inconveniently, points the other way: the fight itself may be the corrosive part.
Counting differently
Anaïs Nin wrote in her diaries that we do not grow chronologically at all, but unevenly, in one dimension and not another, ripening in patches. That has always struck me as the honest description. A face records the same uneven growing. The lines mark where a life actually happened, which seems a strange thing to spend money erasing.
Questions like these, what a woman’s age is actually for, what gets possible once the performance stops, are the territory Unmade, the women’s retreat, explores.
