Reflections on Gendered Ageism & Beauty

Gendered ageism[1] has been weighing on my mind a lot as of late.

It might have to do with the global pandemic adding to a pre-existing sense of impermanence. It might have to do with ageism being a matter of collective concern that also affects us all on a deep, personal level. The young-old polarization, like the male-female polarization, imprisons people, as Susan Sontag points out in Susan Sontag: The Complete Rolling Stone Interview. Aging, a natural, degenerative process, is difficult to go through all the more so because of aging stereotypes that lead us to believe old age equates to inferiority equates to embarrassment: “Old people have a terrific sense of inferiority. They’re embarrassed to be old.”[2]

It might have to do with how terrifying I find the passing of time. For those of us who wish the days were twice as long, navigating them is not unlike trying to make one’s way across a room holding a cup full to overflowing with hot tea trying not to spill its contents.

And then there’s the fact that we’re mortal beings. That this beautiful, albeit bumpy, journey called life, will claim our lives. That we don’t know what awaits us at the end. That, none of us real folks being Benjamin Button, we don’t reverse-age – not that this is a good idea: Benjamin Button died an old man trapped in an infant’s body. Yet the conflict between chronology and physicality is an interesting one.

Death is one of my biggest fears. It’s not like, say, a fear of spiders that can eventually go away through gradual exposure to the feared animal. You can’t dip a toe in the murky waters of death and practice till you’re ready to jump in. The way I cope with my fear is silly, and that’s precisely my point.

In a sense, I’m younger now than I was before. As I get older, I’m aging backwards, regressing, if you will. Rather than worry about transient beauty, I seek to cultivate qualities, such as curiosity and joy, which make me feel how I imagine a dog feels when she sticks her head out of the car window and takes it all in. It’s as if I’m trying to make up for all the time spent being too serious by relearning to be childlike. Endearingly innocent and far behind in some areas, I was a mini adult in others. I used to want to fast track time. Now I want to slow it down or even stop time. “It takes a very long time to become young,” Picasso said.

There’s strange power in knowing you can beautify or alter your less pretty parts, wear a certain face in public one day and present another curated self the very next day. Still, this power becomes dangerous when you don’t quite know how to use it. We’re encouraged to embrace our uniqueness. At the same time, we’re taught to grow dissatisfied with our looks – with some magazines or web-articles telling us how to style our hair so it gives the illusion we have a different face shape, or how to curl our hair if it’s straight or straighten it if it’s curly. As a walking contradiction, I find it fun to dress up, or try out a new outfit, makeup look, or hairstyle on occasion.  But I realize that’s all it is: pretend play. A game. A world of make-believe I have a part in.

In her essay “Dogs, Cats, and Dancers: Thoughts about Beauty”, the late author Ursula K. Le Guin addresses how destructive the beauty game can be: “I resent the beauty game when I see it controlled by people who grab fortunes from it and don’t care who they hurt[,] […] when I see it making people so self-dissatisfied that they starve and deform and poison themselves. Most of the time I just play the game myself in a very small way, buying a new lipstick, feeling happy about a pretty new silk shirt.” Le Guin also discusses the association between youthfulness and beauty and how, for the elderly, beauty has to do with the person’s essence shining through:

One rule of the game, in most times and places, is that it’s the young who are beautiful. The beauty ideal is always a youthful one. […] And yet I look at men and women my age and older, and their scalps and knuckles and spots and bulges, […], don’t affect what I think of them. Some of these people I consider to be very beautiful, […]. For old people, […] [beauty] has to do with who the person is[,] […] with what shines through those gnarly faces and bodies.[3]

We can’t relive the past. Unmake mistakes. Rewind the film of our lives and seize that golden opportunity we missed. Coming to terms with this reality might not be the hard part though. Perhaps the hard part is facing with grace the maddening uncertainty of what’s yet to come. The future itself, the additional years, I don’t mind. It’s the not knowing I mind: Will I have a serious illness? How bad will it be? Will I still love and be loved back?

It’s not so much that we dream of a perfect life, I reckon, but that we wish for a full, kaleidoscopic, values-aligned, love-filled life. I spent my childhood, adolescence, and emerging adulthood, building a turtle shell of sorts. Now I wonder what lies beneath this shell: The parts of me I wish away, where do they go? I can learn to love my changing face and body, but can someone else?

I’ve found wrinkles and scars attractive for as long as I can remember. They tell stories. The delicate laugh lines around a person’s eyes reveal that they managed to find joy and a coping mechanism despite the pain and hardships endured. The worry lines hint at their caring about important questions. A changing face is a living face, a face that’s alive. Why would you want an unmoving face, a face impervious not only to gravity but also to emotion?

Still, there’s a split between what interests me in others and what I think of and am willing to accept in myself. We live in a gerontophobic society, or so it seems. I read about women feeling invisible after a certain age, as if beauty, value even, had an expiration date. Numerous threads, articles, and videos, are dedicated to young women who hate being called madam or ma’am because it makes them feel old. Even some teens consider undergoing anti-aging cosmetic procedures.

As Sheri Levy Ph.D. explains, “women face ageism at an earlier age than men do. When men’s hair starts to gray, they are often described as ‘distinguished’ and ‘wise’ while society generally encourages women to cover their grays and fight the signs of aging.” Dr Levy suggests doing “away with the emphasis and praise on women looking younger than their actual age.”[4] This has me reflect on another way many of us participate in the beauty game: by thanking someone who praises us for looking younger than our age – as though there was an archetypical 30-, 45- or 60-year-old –, are we reinforcing the connection between youthfulness and beauty? And does that push us to keep living up to this ideal?

That’s not to say we shouldn’t take care of our skin, drink plenty of water, eat healthy food, get enough sleep, and exercise. By all means, let’s keep up good habits. However, when we make the fight against aging our sole motivation, aren’t we missing the point somehow? Why not strive to keep fit just because it is important health-wise and because it feels good? It’s not so simple. Again, the way I see it, we’re afraid that, once we lose our looks, once physical decline becomes undeniable, our dear ones will stop loving us.

Yet still, I want to believe it’s possible to find a person – more than one person – who’ll love the wayfaring soul in you: “When you are old and grey and full of sleep,/ […] /[…] dream of the soft look / Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep; / How many loved your moments of glad grace, / And loved your beauty with love false or true, / But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, / And loved the sorrows of your changing face[.]” If Yeats doesn’t convince you, maybe sculptor and painter Alberto Giacometti – whose wife Annette Arm was his main female model since their marriage up until his death – will: “the adventure, the big adventure, is to watch every day something unknown emerge from the same face – that’s worth more than all the journeys round the world.” Life can give us a lot of tough love, but let’s remember to appreciate life’s sweet nothings, however scarce they may be, and its different seasons.

Perhaps in its truest form, beauty isn’t something you’re born with (in Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s words, “The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen”). Rather, it’s something you earn. In The Poet and the Donkey, May Sarton writes, “Do not deprive me of my age. I have earned it.” Several years later, in Journal of a Solitude, she maintains, “we make our faces as we go along.”

There’s no denying the change the elderly go through is challenging. When you’re 60 or 70, Ursula K. Le Guin notes in “Dogs, Cats, and Dancers”, you go through a change as tremendous as the one you experienced as a teen, a change that makes you wonder who you are now, body and identity being inseparable. Yet a kind of permanence remains. Le Guin suggests finding within you the person who is more than what s/he appears, and getting to know them:

Who I am is certainly part of how I look and vice versa. I want to know where I begin and end, what size I am, and what suits me… I am not “in” this body, I am this body. […] But all the same, there’s something about me that doesn’t change, hasn’t changed, through all the remarkable, exciting, alarming, and disappointing transformations my body has gone through. There is a person there who isn’t only what she looks like, and to find her and know her I have to look through, look in, look deep. Not only in space, but in time.

According to Le Guin, there are three types of ideal beauty: the ideal beauty of youth and health, the ideal beauty of movie stars and advertising models, and “an ideal beauty that […] occurs […] where the body and the spirit meet and define each other.” Le Guin’s mother died with an enlarged spleen because of cancer and, though the image of her deformed body stayed, it was but one memory among 50 years of memories of her mother:

behind it is a deeper, complex, ever-changing image, made from imagination, hearsay, photographs, memories. I see a little red-haired child in the mountains of Colorado, a sad-faced, delicate college girl, a kind, smiling young mother, a brilliantly intellectual woman, a peerless flirt, a serious artist, a splendid cook—I see her rocking, weeding, writing, laughing — I see the turquoise bracelets on her delicate, freckled arm — I see, for a moment, all that at once, I glimpse what no mirror can reflect, the spirit flashing out across the years, beautiful.

That must be what the great artists see and paint. That must be why the tired, aged faces in Rembrandt’s portraits give us such delight: they show us beauty not skin-deep but life-deep.

Show us your beauty life-deep and, if someone doesn’t see it, go on your way, journeyer, for this life is fleeting and miraculous.

[1] When I started writing about the intersection between aging and sexism, I came across Tara Brach’s two-part talk, “Fear of Aging: Finding Freedom in this Impermanent World”, in which she explores refuge in the present moment, love, and awareness, as the pathways to freedom from fear of aging. You might want to give it a listen.

[2] Cited in Maria Popova, “Young vs. Old, Male vs. Female, Intuition vs. Intellect: Susan Sontag on How the Stereotypes and Polarities of Culture Imprison Us.” Brain Pickings. https://www.brainpickings.org/2013/12/03/susan-sontag-stereotypes-polarities/ (accessed April 12, 2021).

[3] Cited in Maria Popova, “Ursula K. Le Guin on Growing Older and What Beauty Really Means.” Brain Pickings. https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/10/21/ursula-le-guin-dogs-cats-dancers-beauty/ (accessed April 12, 2021).

[4] Sheri Levy, “Ma’am: Polite or Putdown?” Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/taking-ageism-seriously/202002/ma-am-polite-or-putdown (accessed April 12, 2021).