The Ways Women Age

Using and Refusing Cosmetic Intervention

Abigail T. Brooks

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780814725207
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The story of how and why some women choose to use, while others refuse, cosmetic intervention. What is it like to be a woman growing older in a culture where you cannot go to the doctor, open a magazine, watch television, or surf the internet without encountering products and procedures that are designed to make you look younger? What do women have to say about their decision to embrace cosmetic anti-aging procedures? And, alternatively, how do women come to decide to grow older without them? In the United States today, women are the overwhelming consumers of cosmetic anti-aging surgeries and technologies. And while not all women undergo these procedures, their exposure to them is almost inevitable. Set against the backdrop of commercialized medicine in the United States, Abigail T. Brooks investigates the anti-aging craze from the perspective of women themselves, examining the rapidly changing cultural attitudes, pressures, and expectations of female aging. Drawn from in-depth interviews with women in the United States who choose, and refuse, to have cosmetic anti-aging procedures, The Ways Women Age provides a fresh understanding of how today’s women feel about aging. The women’s stories in this book are personal biographies that explore identity and body image and are reflexively shaped by beauty standards, expectations of femininity, and an increasingly normalized climate of cosmetic anti-aging intervention. The Ways Women Age offers a critical perspective on how women respond to 21st century expectations of youth and beauty.

1

“I Wanted to Look Like Me Again”

Aging, Identity, and Cosmetic Intervention

Age-driven changes in appearance can challenge a woman’s fundamental understanding of herself, of who she is. The question of identity permeates each of the women’s stories in this chapter. They draw from a language of the self—self-expression, self-esteem, self-confidence, and self-awareness—to express their feelings about the changes in their physical exteriors, and to speak about their decisions to have and use cosmetic anti-aging procedures. To hear these women’s stories is to be confronted, head-on, with the “growing tightening of the relationship between body and self-identity” in our late-modern era of consumer capitalism.1 However, embedded in these women’s narratives is not only an inextricable link between body and self, but, more specifically, between the self and how the body looks. When the women in this chapter articulate their shared desire to re-create the familiar self through cosmetic anti-aging intervention—“I wanted to look like me again”—and when they frequently and anxiously describe their aging faces and bodies as alien—“That is not me”—they betray a privileging of the exterior of the body as a primary marker for the self. To listen to the women in this chapter talk about their motivations for having cosmetic anti-aging procedures is to begin to understand, firsthand, what it means to live in a culture wherein, to repeat Virginia Blum’s summation, “we cannot help but locate who we are on the surface of our bodies.”2

As the women in this chapter talk about the age-driven changes in their physical appearance, and recount their decisions to have cosmetic anti-aging procedures, a dynamic relationship between body and self emerges. On the one hand, these women experience the changes in their physical appearance as an uncomfortable and alienating loss of self. On the other hand, they identify their bodies as moldable, malleable, and, at least to some extent, controllable. Women’s faces and bodies become their “identity projects” as they shape and mold them to better match up with their conceptions of an authentic self, or to more accurately reflect the new and improved person they feel they have become. For the women in this chapter, cosmetic anti-aging intervention is itself transformative. As women talk about how their cosmetic anti-aging procedures engender new selves, it is hard not to be “convinced that internal feelings and even character can be transformed by interventions on the surface.”3

To take the perspectives and experiences of these women seriously is to confront the reality of a looks-based culture. For some, it is seeing a two-dimensional image of themselves, or considering the prospect of being captured in a two-dimensional image, that inspires the decision to have cosmetic anti-aging intervention. For others, the decision to have the surgery or use the technology reflects a positive age-induced ability for self-awareness and self-knowledge—and for honest admission that looking physically attractive (read: youthful) really matters to them and to society at large. For others, the decision to have cosmetic anti-aging intervention can be inspired by the ageist treatment of others. Looking older means that people are not as interested in interacting with you, and getting to know you, as an individual. Having cosmetic anti-aging intervention means looking less old, suffering less invisibility, and, therefore, successfully reclaiming and expressing individual identity.

The women’s rich and varied stories in this chapter capture a complex and porous relationship between body, self, and the social category “woman.” Individual identity intertwines with sexual desirability and physical attractiveness as women couch the age-driven changes in their physical appearance in a language of invisibility and loss, and as they use narratives of losing and regaining the self to explain their decision to reduce evidence of aging on their faces and bodies via cosmetic intervention. For each of these women, losing and reclaiming the self also means losing and reclaiming the traits that prove her heterosexual femininity, and that continue, at least to some extent, to determine her self and social value. Frequent talk of a fierce commitment to “keeping myself up”—or maintaining a youthful, attractive appearance—and commonly voiced critiques of aging women who “let themselves go” also betray a deeply embedded conflation between a woman’s individual value, self-esteem, and self-respect and her capacity to look physically attractive and pleasing to others.

Aging and Identity Struggles

Invisibility

“I am somebody who, in my past, would walk into a room and be noticed.”—Claire

Claire is a personal trainer who is forty-nine years old. She has had several rounds of Botox shots in her forehead and around her eyes and openly discusses the likelihood of facial plastic surgery in the near future. Claire tells me about how she cultivated her physical appearance as a means of positive reinforcement from a young age. Having an attractive physical appearance “has been with me my whole life,” and is “a big part of my life and my identity,” she says. Claire uses words like “avenue,” and “tool,” as she recounts how her physical appearance has helped her with everything from having interesting conversations, to getting jobs, to eliciting much-needed attention she wasn’t receiving from her mother. When I asked Claire about how she feels about growing older, she says:

It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. . . . Mostly I’m talking about my face changing right now. And there has been a gradual change over the last year, but there’s been a remarkable change in the last three to four months. And so it’s something I’ve been fairly obsessive about, let’s say, mostly between me and my mirror. But I’m going to say that the biggest thing that’s coming up for me is a sense of loss. And I am somebody who, in my past, would walk into a room and be noticed.

Claire’s identity—what makes her who she is—is enmeshed in being a woman whom others notice and find physically attractive. Yet, the evidence of aging on Claire’s face brings a diminishing of attention from others and painfully disrupts this identity. As she explains:

Like from walking into a room, knowing that, you know, eyes would at least glance at me, to walking into a room and I’m another middle-aged woman. I’d say that’s the main thing I’m dealing with right now. I know this may sound like a strong word, but there may be, for me, a little bit of a grieving period.

Claire experiences the age-driven changes in her face as a loss of self—a loss of her individuality, what made her, her. At the same time, however, Claire’s fear of becoming just “another middle-aged woman” betrays her awareness of the invisibility and de-valuing she will inevitably encounter when she no longer conforms to the youthful aesthetic that dominates mainstream conceptualizations of heterosexual femininity and female beauty. Claire endures an age-induced “identity stripping” that is at once individual and cultural—her value, as a woman, in her own eyes, and in the eyes of others, erodes.4 She mourns the shift, as she puts it, from “the way I was viewed in the world to now how I will be viewed in the world.”

“Nobody wants to think that they’re being cast aside.”—Caroline

Caroline is a radio producer who is forty-seven years old. Caroline has ongoing Botox shots and collagen injections, and is open to having more invasive surgical procedures in the future. Caroline equates the age-driven changes in her physical appearance with painful feelings and experiences of invisibility and with losing a fundamental part of herself. Like Claire, Caroline’s sense of self-worth and self-value has been caught up in her own understanding of herself as a physically attractive and sexually desirable woman, and in the attention and positive affirmation she has received from others for how she looks. As Caroline deftly articulates, along with the accumulating evidence of aging on her face, she is losing that part of herself by which society measures and values women:

Nobody wants to think that they’re being cast aside. You know, especially if you’ve been an attractive person and you’ve gotten so much. I’m not even saying if it’s important to the woman or not. I think it’s the feedback you’re getting from the outside. That’s always been something that other people have valued. I’m not looked at the same way that somebody half my age is. You realize, you know, you’re losing that whole piece of you. I don’t know if it’s sexuality, desirability, just whatever. There’s just the loss in that, that I think you have to come to grips with.

Caroline’s language of invisibility and loss communicates a tightly bound conflation between a woman’s self-worth, her physical appearance, and how society responds to it. When Caroline and Claire lose their “capacity to draw admiring glances from others,” they also lose what feminist philosopher Sandra Bartky calls “a chief marker of femininity in our culture.”5 Bartky’s description of aging from the female perspective offers a clear explanation of what Claire and Caroline are experiencing: “The loss of an admiring gaze falls disproportionately on women. . . . A woman’s worth, not only in the eyes of others, but in her own eyes as well, depends, to a significant degree, on her appearance.”6

“People didn’t want to talk to me.”—Janet

Janet is a retired airline ticket agent who is sixty-eight years old. Janet has had upper and lower eyelift surgeries and is open to having more cosmetic anti-aging surgeries in the future. Janet told me about how she noticed a decline in attention and interest from others when she started to look older. Janet clearly attributes this lack of attention and interest from others to her older-looking appearance: “People didn’t want to talk to me because I was starting to look old.” At work, Janet explained to me, customers saw her as “just a grandmother”—they paid less attention to her, and sought out her expertise less often, compared to her younger co-workers. Like Claire and Caroline, Janet equates the evidence of aging on her face with invisibility in the eyes of others. And yet, Janet’s experience is less about diminished attention and positive feedback for how she looks, and more about a diminished capacity to be respected, recognized, and listened to as an individual and a professional with unique skills and expertise. Janet’s story illustrates not only the necessary criterion of youthfulness for a woman to draw recognition and attention for having a physically attractive appearance, but also the reality that, for a woman, not looking young (i.e., physically attractive) can mean that she is scarcely recognized as a person with any value at all. In Janet’s experience, looking old discouraged people from interacting with her and getting to know her as an individual. More bluntly put, for Janet, not being perceived as a young and attractive woman meant that people did not see her at all.

Janet’s story, like the stories of Claire and Caroline, offers sobering evidence of Sandra Bartky’s assertion that a physically attractive (read: youthful) appearance continues to serve as a key measure of a woman’s self and social value in the United States today. However, Janet’s encounters with intersecting ageism and sexism also lend new weight to aging as a story of “identity stripping” and “losing what we had.”7 Similar to Claire and Caroline, Janet equates the age-driven changes in her physical appearance with losing her identity as a physically attractive woman. Yet, for Janet, these same age-driven changes also lessened her capacity to be recognized, and to express herself, as a unique individual in ways outside of the realm of physical appearance. Janet’s wisdom, experience, and professional expertise are not recognized or valued—she is made invisible at worst, and, at best, she is perceived as a grandmotherly figure who may be sweet, kind, and nurturing, but who does not possess the skills needed to do her professional job well.

Alien Faces and Bodies

As we’ve seen thus far in this chapter, the evidence of aging on a woman’s face and body can provoke feelings and experiences of invisibility and loss. Age-driven changes in physical appearance—and the subsequent lessening of attention and interest from others—can challenge a woman’s understanding of herself and her identity as a physically attractive woman. These changes, and the likely reality that others will be less inclined to interact with her and take the time to get to know her because of them, can also limit a woman’s opportunities to express herself, and to be known and recognized, as an individual. One way or another, age-driven changes in appearance mean losing defining aspects of one’s sense of self and social worth. Anne, who appears later in this chapter, sums up the experience of many women when she says, simply, that looking older means being “dismissed.”

Changes in physical appearance and the accompanying shift in self-perception, and in the perception and treatment of others, can be unsettling. Women can feel alienated and disconnected from their faces and bodies as the evidence of aging appears. These feelings are well-captured by what aging studies scholars call the “mask of aging,” or a gap between “Look-Age” and “Feel-Age.”8 My interviewees frequently spoke about aging in terms of a widening gap (or mask) between the exterior of their bodies and their inner selves, between how they looked on the outside and felt on the inside. Age-driven changes in physical appearance are encountered as distortions of “my true self,” or as barriers that stifle the expression of the “real me.” Evidence of aging can provoke uncomfortable unfamiliarity with the “face I’ve always known” and even prevent the communication of inner feelings. Women’s feelings of disconnection from their age-marked faces and bodies reflect a complex and deeply intertwined relationship between the body and the self, and offer a stark reminder of the instrumental role that the physical exterior plays in their understanding of themselves as individuals.

“I don’t want to look tired if I’m not feeling tired.”—Caroline

We have already learned that Caroline, who is forty-seven, is struggling with what she perceives and experiences as an age-driven loss of physical attractiveness and the resulting loss of attention from others. For Caroline, losing her youthful physical appearance—“losing that whole piece of you,” she says—is about losing her identity as a sexually desirable woman. Yet, Caroline’s aging face betrays her sense of who she is fundamentally, as a person, in other ways too. She says about her aging face: “It feels like it’s not me. All of a sudden, my face is really hollow, and that isn’t me.” Caroline explains to me, with frustration, how the age-driven changes in her face can misrepresent her inner feelings and can send false signals about her physical energy level:

I think some of the aging that we get makes us look tired. . . . Because I don’t want to look tired if I’m not feeling tired. . . . I look tired and I don’t feel tired. Or I look tense and I’m not feeling tense at this moment.

Caroline is distraught about the fact that the age-driven changes in her face, like its increasing hollowness or its tendency to look tense or tired, literally engender a miscommunication of her inner feelings. Lisa’s experi...