Picture This
I have an old friend who is exquisitely beautiful. She is petite and fit and clearly puts effort into maintaining her fabulous figure and radiant skin. In her fifties, she works as an actress and model. She frequently posts pictures of herself, demonstrating just how gorgeous a woman “of a certain age” can be. Sometimes, in the ugly world of social media, she has been the target of ire, perhaps driven by jealousy, in which people have elected to point out her flaws. But mostly, she is flooded with deserved praise for her beauty. Over and over again people declare that she couldn’t possibly be in her 50s! More likely she’s in her 40s or even her 30s, they say.
Instead, I wish that people could look at her and acknowledge that this is what a woman in her 50s looks like. Why do we have some preconceived notion of how a woman is supposed to age? If I hosted a gathering of my 50-something women friends, we would present a wide range of appearances. Some would be gray, others not. Some would be heavy, some would be quite thin, most would fall somewhere in between. Some have sun damaged skin, with crow’s feet and smile lines; others have smooth foreheads and dewy cheeks. Some could bench press their husband’s weight; others might get winded on a light jog. We’d have ladies who have opted for the simplicity of comfortable clothing, while others have that flair for accessorizing, that I never could quite manage, myself. All of them are what 50+ really looks like.
I have another friend who is newly a woman. At 18 years old, she is preparing to make her foray into the grown-up world, taking on all kinds of new responsibilities and forming her adult identity. But this recent high-school graduate, who is a tiny person, with the peaches and cream complexion we associate with little girls, is often still mistaken for a much younger child. She will be underestimated and infantilized as she travels through life, not because of how she acts, but simply because we are fixated on a specific image of what a grown woman looks like.
This is not just about how we respond to women who look young. We also need to look closely at how we respond to someone who is showing the signs of age that we seem so determined to reverse and hide. There is such an emphasis on youth that it is an act of bravery for our female celebrities to appear on camera without make-up. Films that depict middle aged women as sexual beings are considered bold statements. Decades after Thelma & Louise, it is still a news event when an older leading lady is paired with a younger romantic partner. And while we have made progress in accepting that women are allowed to age, we often focus on how great it is that those women look “young for their age.” Wouldn’t it be lovely if, instead, we embraced the idea that looking “old” for one’s age was acceptable too?
We should separate our imagery from the numbers entirely. Can’t we see that there is a wide spectrum of what any particular age looks like? We understand this reality for children. Standing at the entrance to my son’s school the other day, I was struck by the fact that there were deep voiced, bearded, 6-foot-tall boys horsing around with my scrawny, baby-faced sixth grader. The girls, too, seemed to cover a wide range in appearances — from young Marilyn Monroe to Ramona Quimby. This variance does not stop after the puberty years. We all know someone in their 20s who is totally gray or men who are bald by 35. They co-exist alongside the still dark-haired matron or the grizzled old man with the full head of hair. We can sometimes attribute the difference among us to smoking or eating habits, cosmetic choices or time spent in the sun, but the reality is, that the primary driver of these differences, is genetics. I am confident that I could easily locate two 60-year-olds, place them side-by-side and manage to fool onlookers that one was 70 and the other 50.
For years I have told my mother, whom most people believe looks younger than her 78 years, that she should walk around in a T-shirt proclaiming her age. Frankly, all of us should. Perhaps if we did it for long enough, we would completely dispel the notion that how we look is tied to how old we are. They say age is just a number, so let’s celebrate the life experience that comes with that number, regardless of whether our appearance betrays or hides the ravages of time.
Originally published at http://rebeccafullerdotblog.wordpress.com on June 15, 2022.