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\nDECEMBER<\/p>\n
The holiday season brings many parties and celebrations of all sorts. And lots of occasions for dressing up and wanting to look our best at any age.<\/p>\n
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\nAre we seriously still judging women for getting plastic surgery?
\n<\/em>By: Frances Dodds<\/a>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\nI was at a party recently, chatting with a group of young ladies. There was a Capri Sun punch bowl, so naturally the topic of \u201990s nostalgia came up. One young woman\u2014glowing with effortless sun-kissed youth\u2014sighed and said, \u201cIt makes me sad, I just can\u2019t take Meg Ryan seriously anymore after everything she\u2019s done to her face.\u201d As murmurs of mournful agreement passed through the group, I felt a lingering annoyance at the comment and it’s off-handed dismissiveness. Admittedly, access to the full repertory of facial movement is extremely helpful for actors. But that sentiment\u2014that an aging woman who decides to amend her body deserves to be taken less \u201cseriously\u201d\u2014is more pervasive, and problematic, than we tend to recognize.<\/p>\n
The attitude was on belligerent display this summer, when, as you\u2019ll likely recall, President Trump, aggrieved by the poor reviews he was getting on MSNBC\u2019s Morning Joe, took to Twitter to attack its hosts<\/a>, Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough. It was almost universally agreed to be a vile blow. People were instinctively horrified for Brzezinski; everyone agreed that calling out an aging woman\u2019s plastic surgery was beyond cruel. But Trump knew what he was doing: In the same breath that he attacked Brzezinski\u2019s IQ, he painted a picture of a woman who was desperately clinging to her youth and beauty. He knew that in this country, intellectual vigor and caring too much about your appearance is still a zero-sum game for women. When facing off with a woman criticizing him on cerebral grounds, he attacked her vanity, and vanity\u2014in women\u2014is synonymous with frivolity, insecurity, and being \u201cfake.\u201d It\u2019s hard to imagine a less intimidating intellectual opponent than one who is frivolous, insecure, and fake.<\/p>\n
These days allegations of \u201cfakeness,\u201d in particular, are not to be taken lightly. We live in a time where authenticity has never been more worshipped\u2014even as it has never been more manufactured. When a woman gets plastic surgery, it\u2019s viewed by many as a kind of capitulation\u2014a giving-in to her insecurities or her failure to eschew the beauty standard. Of course, every woman is expected to make sacrifices for the sake of beauty, but the moment she crosses the line between expected maintenance and obvious interference, she becomes a cautionary tale. Her body becomes inauthentic, and so do her thoughts and feelings.<\/p>\n
In her memoir that came out a few years ago, Diane Keaton brought up the phenomenon of plastic surgery and said something<\/a> that stuck with me. \u201cI\u2019m confused by what \u2018authentic\u2019 is. Am I less authentic because I wear \u2018eccentric\u2019 clothes and hats? No. I look at my contemporaries who have had \u2018good work\u2019 done; are they less authentic? No! And neither are the women who\u2019ve had procedures that went awry.\u201d<\/p>\n
The tricky thing is, it\u2019s not just men making these judgments. As feminists, we worship at the altar of \u201caging gracefully,\u201d maybe because it\u2019s easier to rail against a patriarchy that pressures women into impossible standards of youth and beauty than it is to embrace the choices of women who have \u201csuccumbed\u201d by resisting the matronly oblivion assigned to women past their physical \u201cprime.\u201d Our choices are to rage against the unknowable darkness of aging or go \u201cgracefully\u201d into it, emitting the soft comet\u2019s tail glow of experience behind us. Men\u2019s clich\u00e9 midlife-crisis cars and affairs are seen as embarrassing, febrile grasps for youth, sure\u2014but not as embarrassing as a woman who tries to get her face from 1985 back. No, women must go \u201cgracefully,\u201d and to me, that word says it all. It\u2019s a vestige of the belief that women should be poised, and self-contained, and move through the world with a gentle\u00a0incombustible discretion. \u201cAging gracefully\u201d seems to require a degree of quiet acceptance, and in a culture that so often relegates older women to the ranks of sexually obsolete caretakers, that may not be aspirational for all of us.<\/p>\n
Constantly, we see formidable actresses like Helen Mirren or Meryl Streep hoisted up as shining exemplars of \u201caging gracefully,\u201d but the idea of a role model for how to age physically is bizarre. We talk about \u201caging gracefully\u201d like it\u2019s a goal we can all actually achieve if we just set our mind and diets to the task. Teaching our culture to see perfectly normal wrinkles and cellulite and sagging necks and wobbly biceps as sexy is a much harder sell than promoting a delicious United Colors of Benetton assortment of colors and body types displayed exclusively by young, vivacious women.<\/p>\n
To be clear: The ultimate goal is a shift in social attitudes that would enable all women (and men) to live confidently in the bodies they come in, at all ages. But practically speaking, I\u2019m pessimistic that\u2019s happening anytime soon, and I question whether in the meantime women should be expected to suffer with certain insecurities when there are ways to remedy them\u2014because life as a woman is hard enough. And most importantly, I believe it\u2019s possible to allow for individuals to make decisions for their own happiness that do not take away from the collective cause of more inclusive beauty standards.<\/p>\n
\u2026To be continued Monday, December 11th<\/em><\/p>\n
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Donna Henes is the author of The Queen of My Self: Stepping into Sovereignty in Midlife.<\/a> She offers counseling and upbeat, practical and ceremonial guidance for individual women and groups who want to enjoy the fruits of an enriching, influential, purposeful, passionate, and powerful maturity. Consult the MIDLIFE MIDWIFE\u2122<\/a><\/p>\n