I Will Always Be an Aging Female

I live in Los Angeles, and being a woman who ages can feel like a radically defiant act here. Specifically I am a college-educated, unmarried, single white woman in Los Angeles. That I am not lapping up all the male attention I get in hopes of being married is astounding. That I haven’t already dabbled in cosmetic intervention is, too.

I’ve come to see the misogyny of Los Angeles is marketed differently than that of some other places. When I lived in Texas, women were respected in some ways, but broadly were made to submit under the laws of some God, and in the case of the right to control my own damn uterus, laws of the State. Los Angeles' laws may be more progressive but here it’s the culture of beauty that ties you down. God forbid you have a wrinkle. God forbid you have a pore. Your body must look like it is ready for children but has never carried them. Your lips should always appear ready to service genitals.

When I first moved here I waited tables in West Hollywood. Women, and some men, apologized daily for eating potatoes. As if I could absolve them. It began to seem less about calories so much as about a kind of neuroticism being made commonplace. My standby line became “If your biggest substance problem in this town is potatoes, you’re doing very, very well.”

People would drag themselves and their Instagram accounts in on Sunday mornings, coke still under their nails, and I’d have to recite the kitchen’s inventory to them before they’d be satisfied about what was and wasn’t organic. Were the drugs still in their system organic, too? Or did that not matter as much as the pretense of calorie restriction and elitism about breakfast food?

If you’re offended by this point, may I suggest your issue is with the culture, not with an unblinking look at it. Not the least of which includes that someone holding a mirror up to the absurdity should be “more polite” about the insanity others uphold.

Moving on.

There are people I love who have had cosmetic surgery, and them doing what they want with their bodies is their choice. If you realize you really prefer your body be a certain way, and it’s not harming anyone else, go for it. I have your back, truly.

But the crux of the issue is the “not harming anyone else” part. Someone living their fullest expression of themselves is one thing. Someone submitting to shifting ideas of beauty as a byproduct of the domination of our culture, as a plea to be accepted, and as an internalization of the stick used to hit you so that you might get out ahead of the lashings - that is something else. That is not an act which you commit without harming anyone else. When you change your body because you feel the alternative to looking a certain way is that you are irrelevant, you broadcast something to the others around you, whose own bodies have features which may render them irrelevant, too. You tell them, “Change yourself or lose your value.”

Excuse me, but I have something to say: That’s bullshit.

It is a fine line indeed between aging and aging well. It makes sense to take reasonable care of my body, to extend the youthful phases of it because those are the most resilient, and because the consequences of injuries and illness get harder once youth is gone. So no, I’m not trying to burn the candle at both ends - I’m hoping to take great care of what I have for as long as I have it.

Aging well, on the other hand, is something much more complex than just maintenance. Precious little of aging well happens on the outside. My life story is already a rich experience and I am grateful for the portions of it which make their way to the surface, to my face. I am not a porcelain doll because I have not lived on a sheltered shelf. Odds are, neither have you.

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I realized one day it made little sense to look in the mirror and expect to see a long gone, younger version of myself. It was an argument with reality and it contributed to me gauging my appearance now in a narrow, limited way. If my mind’s eye can look backward, it damn well can look forward, too. When I look in the mirror now, I see myself at age eighty. I should hope to be at least that old, to have made a difference, and experience all that would entail.

Things will move on my face because thousands of experiences will have passed through my body and honestly shouldn’t some of them ripple the surface even a little? I imagine how my laughter will fold origami lines on my face. How the arch of my eyebrow as I retort against fascism will leave echoes on my forehead. And how the twinkle called forth in turn by justice and love will always betray my affection for the lion-hearted.

Why would I want to mute these things? So that I can look more fuckable to men who don’t see the whole of my personhood? So that I can pass some loyalty test to a culture I know is fetidly flawed? Tell me: why.

I no longer look in the mirror and see only where I have been. I look to see where I am going. I cannot possibly get to my grave triumphant and hell-raising if I start now, at 35, critiquing the lines in the foundation — which I’ve only just finished pouring. It sometimes matters how we look, but overwhelmingly what matters is how we live. Over my dead body will I succumb to marketing and culture that disavow my one and only face. My horizon is some fifty years ahead, and if I’m going to get there in time I can’t be slowed down by garbage like distaste of aging females. I will always be an aging female.

Phenomenal Photo used with Permission from Keenan Hastings