Cosmetic interventions prevent us from understanding older women as attractive
We reject the changing body due to aging and celebrate its plasticity at the hands of technology
Abigail T. Brooks, Director of The Women’s and Gender Studies Program and Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Providence College, Rhode Island, USA and author
Abigail T. Brooks and I are “cultural twins.” Both a few steps away from our 50th birthday, we grew up in different countries, but with the same TV series and daytime soap operas. Once adult, we began to process the content we had been exposed to and we’re trying to make sense of its explicit and implicit messages. Today, she’s director of The Women’s and Gender Studies Program and Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Providence College and our paths have crossed at the intersection between women and aging. As the author of The Ways Women Age: Using and Refusing Cosmetic Intervention, Professor Brooks is a treasure trove of illuminating ideas.
Through her words, I had a chance to reflect on a lot of interesting facts, but three in particular made me stop and think. The first one is related to the visual clues of “successful aging.” Aging as if you haven’t aged at all doesn’t simply expose us to a standardized idea of beauty. It is a narrative that actively prevents us from understanding beauty in forms that do not correspond to the youthful canon. Consequently, the more we chase the Sacred Grail of youth, the more we blackout aging bodies, the less we see them, the less we can appreciate them. Successful aging is training us visually, hence the perceptual dissonance and estrangement we feel in front of images of older people.
Along the same lines, Professor Brooks pointed out that, while we’re aware that an ageless beauty standard applies more to women than to men, we generally fail to recognize one key implication. Gaining and maintaining an ageless look is a ticket that women in politics, media and many professions must pay for in order to have their voices and their ideas heard. Professor Brooks asks if this is really progress and I agree: this diktat should be made explicit in every debate on gender equality.
As much as I feel that the use of cosmetic intervention to sport a younger looking face or body is a 100% individual choice, we all pay a price for the medicalization of our lives. The marketing pressure to “treat” natural phenomena like menopause and erectile “dysfunctions” can rob us of the potential benefits, including new and freeing ways of being and living that natural age-centered changes in the body can offer. Instead of being interpreted as less-than, these steps should be considered a means for something else. It’s not the half full glass, it’s the other side of the coin. The same way we’re not designed to run before we can walk, there must be reasons why our bodies and our minds are wired the way they are. Asking these questions would open up new perspectives, but I don’t want to give away the whole interview and the enthusiasm of Professor Brooks.
Where does your interest for aging come from?
It all started with my long-standing interest in all things film, television, media, and pop culture. When I was in my early elementary and teenage years, I was obsessed with everything from the television series to daytime soap operas. In my teens, twenties, and beyond I was a devoted follower of Hollywood actresses and their films: Michelle Pfeiffer, Gwyneth Paltrow, Nicole Kidman, Julia Roberts.
At the same time, I was also incredibly close to my mother and my grandmothers, who lived into their nineties. I had the honor and pleasure of witnessing my grandmothers grow and evolve into fantastic age brackets, without cosmetic anti-aging interventions of any kind. To me, they became more and more beautiful, with their white hair, and wrinkles, and other age-centered changes in appearance, changes which reflected not only a natural, normal process, but also, more and more complex and beautiful layers, more life lived, emotions felt, thoughts expressed.
In contrast to my grandmothers, my mother, and now, myself, I couldn’t help but notice a different process for the soap opera stars who were already grown up when I was a just a young teenager. The same applied to the screen actresses whom I followed and whom are relatively close to my own age: they were not aging. Or, I should say, they are not exhibiting any age-driven changes in their appearance. They have tight jaw lines, relatively few wrinkles, sags, bags, most have plump lips, very few have gray hair, apart from Jamie Lee Curtis and Helen Mirren, who are now wearing their hair white.
But this is not the only discrepancy you noticed, right?
Exactly. All the media scape is always about accolades about how wonderful these women look. They themselves, often speak about how it is a “new era” in Hollywood wherein there is less ageism, wherein women of older ages are welcomed and centered in key parts and roles, wherein age is a gift, something to be proud of, and honored. Many of these women speak about how they love being older as women, they are more confident, self-assured, they stand up for themselves more, they know themselves better.
None, with the exception of Jane Fonda, on occasion, speaks about the fact that they continue to spend inordinate amounts of time, pain, and money on on-going cosmetic anti-aging interventions in order to maintain a youthful appearance. The media make this aspect of these women’s work invisible. When the actor Keanu Reeves recently stepped out with his girlfriend, Alexandra Grant, 46, who has gray hair and bears other traces of aging in her appearance, it stood out to people, in part, just because of how rare it is these days to see any traces of aging on women in the public eye.
Your book is centered on women 35 and older who are having or are planning on having cosmetic interventions. What are the main highlights of their relationship with these procedures?
They express excitement about the continuing surgical and technological innovation and evolution of cosmetic interventions that are progressively less invasive, less time intensive and, in some cases, less expensive. New cosmetic techniques mean more natural-looking results and the possibility for women to engage in maintenance over time, continuously tweaking without having to do major work.
Sometimes called the new “slow aging” movement, this means that women, and in the case of celebrities, their fans and followers, are almost “protected against” having to witness age-centered changes in their appearance. Celebrities in their fifties like Jennifer Lopez, Jennifer Aniston and Nicole Kidman are prime examples of this. Most of the women I interviewed reported feeling “like themselves” over time while also not having to contend with the overly “fake” or “extreme” changes in their looks. For these women, their aging faces and bodies prompt uncomfortable feelings of alienation, feelings of losing control over their faces and bodies. They also explained that having options for cosmetic anti-aging intervention makes them feel better about growing older—for them, it is comforting and reassuring to know that they can “do something,” “take action,” and “fight back against” aging every step of the way.
The majority of my interviewees adhere to the view that “looks matter,” and that “looking young matters more for women than for men.” While this view is often articulated as one of the prime explanations for undergoing procedures, it was also connected up in their desires to continue to be taken seriously and listened to as individuals with skill sets and ideas to contribute in a range of fields and professions.
Many articulated the moral obligation for themselves, and for women more generally, to “not let themselves go.” Within this equation is the gendered assumption that aging women should continue to “do their femininity” in a very rigid sense to achieve a young-looking appearance and that doing so requires compliance with what feminist theorist Sandra Bartky has called the “disciplinary practices of femininity,” or the continued labor of “doing femininity.”
It is also important to note that some of the women I interviewed expressed feelings of exhaustion and increased pressure to continuously have to “keep up” their physical appearances. Some explained these feelings with a tone of wistfulness, along the lines of “I wish I could just age gracefully.”
Have you traced where, historically, our obsessions with wrinkles come from?
No, and while this is not my area, I can speak a bit in terms of the stark gender disparity wherein wrinkles are much more likely to be viewed negatively in women, and either less negatively, or even positively, in men. One might also describe this as what Susan Bordo, Professor of Gender and Women's Studies, Otis A. Singletary Chair in the Humanities at the University of Kentucky, has called the “unbearable weight” of the female body in Western culture. It’s an on-going reality that echoes the Cartesian mind-body dichotomy wherein the mind/reason/rationality was often equated with the male, and the body/emotion/irrationality was often equated with the female.
If women’s value is centered more in the body and men’s value is centered more in the mind, it follows that culture will view women’s wrinkles more negatively than men’s and yet, there is also more related complexity here to unpack. Susan Sontag’s classic piece, “The Double Standard of Aging,” is helpful in that she explains how men’s wrinkles can be viewed favorably, as evidence of him having lived life, having thought thoughts, and done and achieved things in the world, while the opposite is culturally considered true for women. A woman’s face “is prized so far as it remains unchanged (or conceals the traces of) her emotions, her physical risk-taking. Ideally, it is supposed to be a mask—immutable, unmarked.”
Sandra Bartky, the later professor of philosophy and gender studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, made a similar point, and highlighted the disturbing implications, wherein she said that the ideal face for a woman, is an ageless face, “the infantilized face,” a face that “carries the theme of inexperience and never ages or furrows its brow in thought.”
Julia Twigg, a British professor, pointed out how clothes serve different purposes for men and women. I know you talked with women only, but do you feel the same happens for cosmetic procedures?
Yes, I would argue that there are some parallels between Twigg’s illuminations of gender disparities in how clothing is perceived and used among aging women and men and the gender disparities in the use of cosmetic anti-aging procedures. But in the case of cosmetic procedures, there are some additional elements that underline the concepts of femininity and masculinity.
In the US today, there is some recent encouraging movement towards democratizing the beauty and body canon, particularly when it comes to a diversity of races and cultures and shapes and sizes. Still, in the social media/visual media scape, as well as in many other spheres in the public eye, there are also increasingly stringent beauty/body ideals circulating not just for women, but also for men. The women and men in my sociology and women’s and gender classes, for instance, articulate expected and routine bodywork practices that were not nearly as prevalent in my generation.
Women talk about the pressures to have large breasts (breast implants are among the most popular cosmetic surgery procedures for young women in the US today), and hairless, fat-free, toned bodies. Men talk about the need to have bulked up, jacked up bodies, with large amounts of visible musculature, and little body fat. Social media, particularly among the women in my classes, is often pointed to as a key source of focus on appearance and of anxiety and pressure around how one looks.
Still, it is the women in my college classes, and not the men, who spend the most time, pain, and money worrying about, and working on, their appearance. Indeed, women continue to account for anywhere between 85-90% of the total consumers of cosmetic interventions in the US today. This has been true since the inception of data gathering by several different US cosmetic surgery organizations, including ASAPS, the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery. As related to the analysis made above, there is an imbalance between how much pressure women and men feel to look a certain way, and how much pain, time, and money they spend on their appearance.
When it comes to cosmetic anti-aging procedures, while some men certainly are having and getting surgical procedures and injectables for wrinkles and sags and bags, and other technologically enhanced skin care treatments like lasers and chemical peels, to alleviate age spots, they are not seeking out these procedures at anywhere near the rate that women are. However, for men, there is increasing cultural pressure to fight back against normal bodily changes that happen due to aging. For example, having a receding hair line, or balding, is becoming less and less acceptable, and you see near to no examples of men who embody this normal aspect of aging in the media scape.
As more and more men feel pressured to battle balding, and use procedures to counter it, we lose one aspect of rich diversity in men’s appearance due to aging, an aspect that used to be read as perfectly normal and natural, but is now read as deficient, and in need of fixing, and is being framed that way by profit-industries. Along the same lines, Viagra and all of the Viagra mimics, target a perfectly normal, natural part of aging for many men and re-frame this normal, natural process in men as a deficiency or disease in need of intervention and fixing.
Many have written about and researched, including Meika Loe, Professor of Sociology and Women's Studies and Director of the Women's Studies Program at Colgate University in New York, pointing out that there are many positives and advantages that accompany these changes for men, and for their female partners, changes that enable a democratizing of how to “do masculinity” and that open up new space and avenues for more equal, mutually enjoyable sexual interactions between men and their female partners, that are now being shut down through Viagra and its competitors.
The result is defining masculinity and heterosexual relations in increasingly limited and narrow ways, and re-inscribing traditional understandings of masculinity, and heteronormative, male-centric understandings of sexual relations, inclusive of doing dominance in the bedroom.
In your interviews, you noticed a duplicity in the perception of the aging body. It is both a form of alienation (= it's not me) and an example of plasticity, because women who undergo cosmetic surgery take advantage of the malleability of their body. Can you tell us more?
For many of the women I spoke with, the age-driven changes in their faces and bodies felt alien to them. They expressed their feelings of alienation with sentences like: “I no longer recognized myself” and explained why they decided to proceed with having and using cosmetic interventions with statements like: “I wanted to look like me again.” Many also expressed feelings of fear and discomfort and alienation from their bodies in the sense that their bodies were acting and changing in ways that were beyond their control. Because the changes in their faces and bodies due to the natural aging process were beyond their control, they felt usurped of bodily autonomy.
One of the fascinating ironies here is that age-driven changes in appearance unsettled many of the women I spoke with, and, yet, they were comfortable with giving their bodies over to surgeons and knives, to injectables and chemical treatments, to be changed, molded, and sculpted. The “natural” changes in their bodies resulting from the “natural” processes of aging scared them, but changes at the hands of technology did not. Of course, these women were deciding on what changes they wanted to have and these changes created a younger, and more familiar look, and, to them, a look that reflected their true, authentic selves. But, again, celebrating the plasticity and malleability of the body at the hands of technology on the one hand, but rejecting the constantly changing body due to aging on the other, is a contradiction rife with significance and complexity.
How did the women who decided not to use procedures to counteract the effects of time talk about these changes?
They talked a lot about the work they are doing to accept the age-driven changes in their faces and bodies. They understand them as natural, inevitable, and beyond their control, and recognize that they have to learn, therefore, to defer to them, and accept them, with humility. On the other hand, however, they also experience the changes in their faces and bodies as reflective of growing, changing, and evolving selves over time.
Many of the women I interviewed conceptualize their sense of authentic selves as multi-layered, shifting, growing, and evolving and developing over time. So, in some senses, they are able to understand changes in appearance as reminders and as evidence of a shifting, growing, and evolving self. This process is helpful not only in the adjustment to and acceptance of these changes, but even, ultimately, in their appreciation, as described by the feminist disabilities scholar Susan Wendell, who called out the art of “adjustment, acceptance, and appreciation.”
The richer the personality, the more interesting the person. When it comes to cosmetic procedures, the focus is on two-dimensional images you get from the mirror. What do you make of this paradox?
This contrast between what we value in personality, and in looks, troubles me and makes me sad. In personality, we value richness and depth and layers and multi-faceted aspects, humor, intelligence, kindness, empathy, sarcasm, compassion, good listening skills. In looks, with the normalization of cosmetic surgery, we value a narrower and narrower image reduced to a more stringent and rigid set of aesthetic characteristics.
Professor of English at the University of Kentucky and cosmetic surgery scholar, Virginia Blum, talks very profoundly about the ways in which cosmetic invention strengthens the “lure of the two-dimensional,” particularly in women. This perspective encourages women to value themselves in accordance with a “two-dimensional image” of themselves, as opposed to centering other aspects of their gifts and identities. All this happens at the expense of other identities outside of bodily appearance, but also at the expense of a more reflexive relationship between the body and the self, at the expense of an identity wherein the body is not only valued for how it looks, but also for how it feels, and for how it expresses thoughts and emotions. Basically, at the expense of understanding and valuing the body as reflective and expressive of a complex and multidimensional self.
But there’s more. The women I interviewed who are choosing to grow older without cosmetic anti-aging interventions are more able to understand older women as attractive. They talk about older faces being rich and layered canvases, wherein gray hair and wrinkles and changes in appearance reflect rich and varied lived experiences and wisdoms. Reading age-related changes this way makes them profound and beautiful, interesting and amazing, because of what they communicate, what they represent, what they express.
Yet, again, these more democratized paths to understanding beauty, and to expanding the beauty canon to include characteristics in appearance that signal age and aging, are harder to find and to forge these days in our era of exploding cosmetic surgeries and technologies, and in our era of more and more life lived, and identity constructed, vis a vis the social media realm, the two-dimensional realm, the screen.
Women account for 90% of cosmetic procedures. If the focus is mainly on the look, they enjoy a reduced space for all the other dimensions of the personality. Do you agree?
What is particularly troubling here is that women, more than men, need to conform to a certain youth-beauty aesthetic in order to get their seat at the table, and keep their seat at the table, in order to have their voices heard. No matter how great their ideas and voices and visions are, they need to meet the youth-beauty aesthetic as a shell through which to deliver their ideas, voices, and visions. The normalization and prevalence of cosmetic intervention, and cosmetic anti-aging intervention, reinforces and re-inscribes regressive expectations and attitudes about the importance of looks, and looking young, for women.
We have to ask, is this really progress? If women can be working in congress, and in journalism, but to get and to keep these jobs they need to continue to engage in continuous pain, time, and money—appearance maintenance of their faces and bodies through on-going technological and surgical intervention—is this female empowerment? Is this gender equality?
You pointed out that many natural phenomena are reframed by marketing and advertising as symptoms in need of treatment. Can you elaborate on the implications for our aging process? Does this make us feel fragile? Dependent on authoritative voices?
Our relationships to our bodies, to how we understand our appearance, and health and illness, is increasingly shaped by, and mediated through, direct to consumer medical and pharmaceutical marketing and advertising, particularly in the United States. We start to pathologize and medicalize aspects of our bodies which, until quite recently, and certainly before the commercialization and deregulation of medicine in the US, we would have understood and experienced as simply normal, or natural.
Apart from being a profitable practice, the medicalization of normal, everyday, bodily aspects and processes has significant implications for our understandings and experiences of aging. Many of the women I interviewed for my book, including not only those who are choosing to refuse intervention, but also some who are having and using interventions, express feeling worse about the age-centered changes in their appearance, more insecure about them, more shameful and even guilty about them, in our current era. For the women who are choosing to grow older without intervention, being constantly bombarded with marketing that tells them they should “do something” about their age-related changes in their faces and bodies makes them feel badly and ashamed, both about the age-related changes themselves and how they look, but also, about not doing something to “fix” them.
Among the women who are choosing to have and use cosmetic anti-aging interventions, these same messages certainly made them feel worse about age-driven changes in appearance in some respects, and more anxiety and pressure to constantly keep themselves up and “not let themselves go.” On the other hand, for many of these same women, as stated several times already, the marketing and availability of cosmetic anti-aging products and procedures offer them positive feelings of reassurance along the lines of, “I can do something about this.”
In your research, you analyzed the marketing strategy of the Botox campaigns. What similarities do you find with the medicalization of menopause?
My new research trajectory includes an analysis of the new swath of medical marketing campaigns and advertisements for several different pharmaceutical products to “treat” menopause. Like those for Botox and other cosmetic injectables, the marketing and advertising campaigns for these products brilliantly draw from liberal feminist concepts of individual choice and freedom of expression and radical feminist concepts of female-to-female consciousness raising, solidarity, and empowerment to ironically, contradictorily, and effectively communicate a narrow blueprint for how to “do femininity” at an older age. This blueprint includes equations between women’s worth and young-looking, youthfully performing bodies and often centers female sexuality and desirability in a male-pleasure centered, heteronormative, frame.
In ad campaigns that encourage women to have, use, and purchase these products, procedures, and interventions the liberal feminist trope of self-determination, of individual agency is prevalent, but also a kind of moral responsibility to take charge, to do something about those signs of aging. Ads encourage women, or command women, to take charge, to fight back against age-centered changes, to re-gain individual agency and control over these changes in their bodies, and through controlling them/fixing them with intervention. Furthermore, recent ads center the radical feminist trope of woman-to-woman knowledge sharing and solidarity building, women as the source of knowledge for other women about why these interventions are important to say “yes” to.
Menopause can signal a wonderful time of growth and exploration for women who are in sexual partnerships with men, but these marketing messages mandate women to seek out menopause medication so that they can continue to have heterosexual sex with their male partners without pain. All the different and enjoyable benefits to aging and to menopause that may open up new ways of being intimate with your partner - ways that are not necessarily centered on penetrative intercourse, but perhaps on other ways of pleasuring each other physically - as well as other avenues for physical and emotional intimacy are closed off and shut out.
We lack a philosophy of aging. Is the obsession with the signs of aging preventing us from developing one?
To have and use cosmetic anti-aging interventions is to mute and erase the changes in one’s appearance. These changes are literal reminders of time passing, growth, and evolution over time. The “successful aging” frame that dominates in the US and much of the West not only teaches the importance of fighting aging every step of the way, but also may make it harder to adjust to, and to accept, aging and growing older, or moving towards later life stages, and even towards the end of life. As it emerged from the conversations I had, living in such a prevalent anti-aging culture, and being aggressively marketed with anti-aging options, makes it hard to be growing older, and looking older, as a woman, and feel ok about it.
Susan Wendell’s call to practice the “demanding arts of adjustment, acceptance, and appreciation” in the face of disability, and in the face of aging, really offers a very constructive philosophy of aging. I have actually been writing an article on this very topic, inspired by the voices of the women I interviewed who are growing older “naturally” and also by the work of feminist gerontologists and the concept of the “crone” to attempt a more fully fleshed out feminist approach, or feminist philosophy, of aging. Without denying the injustices of ageism that women face, aging can be an empowering process for women in particular, characterized by growth, evolution and exciting new freedoms.
Democratizing the beauty canon to include age-driven changes in appearance is not only a way for women to be liberated and to move beyond appearance as a predominate marker of their individual and cultural value and identities, but also a way to find more space and room to discover, nurture, and cultivate aspects of themselves that may have been neglected, or repressed, or ignored, in their younger years.
To download the chapter “Opting In or Opting Out? North American Women Share Strategies for Aging Successfully with (and without) Cosmetic Intervention” by Professor Brooks published in “Successful Aging as a Contemporary Obsession,” please click here
