Turning eighteen - mourning my girlhood and the radical act of ageing.

As I creep towards my 19th birthday, along with the newfound facade of independence I gained at 18, came a deep, melancholic sense of loss. Loss of youth and childlike optimism, relatability, and ultimately, desirability to others. As absurd as that sounds, I genuinely feel as though I can sense the degradation of allure that comes with growing up. Especially in a society formed as a capitalist patriarchy that aims to sexualise and commodify juvenility and profit off of my insecurities. I want to dissect and tackle these ideas in four main parts, the historic and omnipresent rhetoric of anti-ageing, the anti-ageing industry, the emphasis on adolescence in sexual media, and my understanding of how it feels to age from the feminine perspective. This article will not be able to completely unpack the intricacies of age-based disillusionment with the self or the dysphoria that occurs due to the unavoidable passage of time. Still, I will try to be as comprehensive as possible and provide a bibliography of the sources I used below. I want to credit youtuber Mina Le for exposing me to many of the sources used in this article as well as inspiring me to discuss this topic from my own perspective.

The Historic and omnipresent rhetoric of anti-ageing

The equation of youth to beauty is not a recent phenomenon, nor is it devoid of connections to class, race, and sexuality. Some of the earliest records of the use of cosmetics date back to 2500 BC and 1550 BC in the Indus Valley civilisation. There is evidence of highly advanced ideas of self-beautification and an extensive array of various cosmetic usages, both by men and women, in ancient India, such as the development of powders to improve complexion and herbal remedies to prevent hair loss and greying. Ancient Egypt was similar. Cleopatra is said to have bathed in donkey milk daily to “preserve the vitality and beauty of her skin.” These rituals existed far before the emergence of industrialised society and were exacerbated by the emanation of capitalism. Beauty in the Industrial Revolution was transformed into an easily manufactured set of tools that helped you appear younger, whiter, and more feminine. Women in 1700s France treated their wrinkles with red wine, and it was in the 1800s that factory production of makeup started to emerge. Yet, amongst all of this technological progress came a deep stagnation in the perceived value of women. Companies began to exploit the irrelevant insecurities of women, such as eye bags, wrinkles, stretch marks, and body hair, in order to market solutions to these manufactured problems that were previously unheard of. Corporations continued to construct new reasons for women to be ashamed of their bodies through the rise of social media and magazines, creating a vicious cycle of self-hatred and consumerism.

As we moved into the modern era, society’s emphasis on juvenility evolved. Older women grew to make up many media tropes for women, namely the doting grandmother, the ‘old maid’, and the evil sexless witch. Each archetype relies on the representation of older women as separated from desirability and often pushes them towards repulsiveness, especially in the case of the last two archetypes. Jennifer Richards discusses the representation of women in media, stating, “Ageing female characters have been depicted in largely negative terms, as figures toward whom the audience is expected to be unsympathetic or even fearful.” We have continually conditioned ourselves to respond negatively to ageing female bodies. So when we see characteristics of ageing in ourselves, we attempt to conceal or erase them at any cost and associate them with a sort of moral ineptitude within ourselves, something that must be fixed. The collation of wrinkles, frown lines, inelastic skin, and greying hair with the horror of witches and bitter old women creates the idea that “getting older is itself a kind of body horror” (Roxana Hadidi).

This propagandised image of women doesn’t limit itself to film, Fox News host Geraldo Rivera explained on air that “what a woman brings to a marriage more than anything else is her youth” going on to describe women’s youth as “ a fragile and diminishing resource.” Rivera insists upon the idea that a woman is not a whole person but instead a vessel for childbirth with a body clock that is ticking away as she loses value. A lot of men hold a similar idea of ‘fertility equals desirability’ and therefore you start to slowly lose your appeal the moment that you are able to rear children. The phrase “biological clock is ticking” is a tactic society uses to shame women who aren't settled down into marriage before the age of thirty, as if the moment our last egg leaves us, we become useless. It's these ideas that we have to actively combat in our day-to-day lives, a reductionary idea which diminishes women to simple ‘baby makers’.

While I can understand arguments against the ‘evil’ powers of the media and those who don't believe that it has that much of an impact, I can't help but disagree. Association is one of the most powerful phenomena in human psychology; as a society, we attempt to use deductive reasoning to uncover new ideas or develop pre-existing notions and unspoken cultural rules. In the case of the portrayal of older women in the media, MG Perry emphasises our association between ageing and ugliness, asserting, “By continually depicting ageing as negative, the media creates a society that denies and mistrusts all persons who are past their youth.” The issue of anti-ageing rhetoric is not strictly a media-based occurrence; it permeates all sectors of society and ingrains itself in the language we use day to day. As a society, the beauty ideal is that of someone young, thin, white, and able-bodied, and those key features make up the complete opposite archetype to the ‘evil old hag’ stereotypes we see so often.

However, anti-ageing is not strictly a white community concern. The idea that women lose their purpose alongside their beauty as they age infects all facets of society, though it is particularly poignant in Black and Brown communities. Keeks Reid discusses the language surrounding ageing in the black community in her ELLE article ‘'Black Don't Crack' - Why The Language Around Black Women Ageing Needs To Change’. Reid observes, within her own experience, that the pervasiveness of phrases such as ‘Black don't crack’ are putting extreme amounts of pressure on black women to remain youthful in appearance while also shaming the idea of anti-ageing procedures. She denotes, “The reality is that Black - like the skin of all ethnicities - does crack. And that's okay, it’s natural. … and there is no shame in embracing the shift in skin texture and seeing the beauty in maturing, regardless of how light or dark you are.”

Ideally, the cultural attitudes around ageing would shift towards a radical acceptance of all bodies no matter the age, though in the meantime, it seems we should phase out these phrases which add extra pressure onto women and reinforce obsolescent ideals of beauty.

The Anti-Ageing Industry

Since the emergence of capitalism and the industrial revolution, the idea of “Anti-ageing” has transformed into a cultural phenomenon marked by overconsumption and constant competition. The industry of Anti-ageing spans from cosmetics and procedures to social media and magazines, and has even infiltrated our everyday vocabulary. Language like “ageing gracefully” pressures women to age while not ageing at all. We expect women to get older all the while not developing wrinkles, sagging skin, skin texture, or any of the natural biological responses to getting older. And while we hold women to these unattainable standards, we praise and glorify older men, who have grey hair, and we have come to celebrate “dad bods”, a grace we would never allow for women. Famous actress and model Julia Fox expressed frustration on Tiktok at products marketed towards women promoting anti-ageing, declaring, “We deny ourselves these milestones, and for what? … If I see another product that says “anti-ageing” on the label, I’m suing. I’m going to sue because I’m going to age regardless.”

The global anti-aging market was valued at $37 billion in 2021 and is set to grow to $120 billion by 2030. As a millennial trend researcher, Maude Standish wrote in a Huffington Post blog, “The allure of youth has culturally shifted from being about innocence to being about achievement … This deep panic is different from what boomers experienced in their twenties, as many were capable of acquiring the trappings of adulthood early on.” Women were yet to age before they had established themselves as wives and mothers, all before age 35. The pressures to remain youthful did exist in that period, but because women had their entire lives pre-planned, there was not the same pervasive pressure that women today experience. And through this pressure, we separate women into those willing to participate and consume anti-aging products and those who remain unwilling to change themselves. However, this divide is not one of moral character, and no one side is better than the other. It is only those who have fallen victim to the stigmas around growing older.

Amina Mire’s book ‘Wellness in Whiteness’ explores the polarity between these two factions of women in a way that emphatically dismantles the moral competition we often see projected onto young girls. Mire writes, “Coercive anti-ageing consumerism also excludes women who decide not to participate in anti-ageing consumption as morally irresponsible. This makes the anti-ageing industry a site in which race, gender and class-based stigmatisation and exclusion can be enacted through symbolic policing of the boundary between worthy and ageless bodies on the one hand and unworthy and aged bodies on the other hand.” Mire delves into the idea that not only are we marketed items such as botox, retinol, and anti-aging creams, we are actively punished by society if we do not have the means or will to participate and use these items. The intersection of race and class further complicates these ideas, as there are levels of derision and punishment inflicted on women when they don’t participate in coercive anti-ageing, ranging in severity depending on their race and societal position. Wealthy white women who express frustration against this industry, such as Julia Fox, may be praised for taking a stand. However, their position in society may remain unchallenged or challenged just marginally. Women of colour, who do not conform to beauty standards are relentlessly bullied and alienated.

Arab women (like myself) are very well known for pursuing cosmetic surgery, and much of this pressure comes from traumatic experiences of bullying due to their ethnic features, such as their noses. The product of this constant shaming forces them to become either exceptionally insecure, hiding their faces in pictures or concealing their “undesirable” features with extreme editing and filters, or on the other hand, drives them to undergo dangerous surgeries on their faces and bodies as they continually attempt to reach a standard of beauty that is constantly changing. Jessica Defino further explores this idea in her substack article “Erasing Your Wrinkles Is Not Empowerment”, where she states, “Looking more youthful might empower the person who gets botox/filler/face lifts - empower as in, grants them literal power to prevail in a society where beautiful women statistically see more professional, personal, and financial success and beauty is defined, in part, as youth - but it does not empower people as a whole. It disempowers the collective by continuing to perpetuate unrealistic and unachievable standards.” There is a real societal impact on one’s treatment when they undergo cosmetic surgery; they automatically improve their social mobility despite the ‘double-edged sword’ of public perception. The pervasiveness of this is not to be understated. In an interview with “GRAZIA Magazine’ Dr Alia Ahmed explained her surprise regarding the impact of social media on our perception of ourselves. Dr Ahmed comments, “All skin is normal and beautiful, but the expectations driven by social media have distorted reality for many people. {…} Having constant comparators is exhausting for any person.” There is an overarching rhetoric we project onto women: they must fit themselves into a mould no matter how damaging that mould is. In doing so, the cycle is perpetuated again, fueling anti-ageing’s omnipresence.

The sinister emphasis on adolescence in sexual media

This section of my article is going to take a more disturbing route. If you are uncomfortable with the discussion of pornography, especially regarding the sexualisation of children, I understand and ask that you skip to the next section.

Women and girls have historically been sexualised regardless of their age, especially on the internet. There are many examples of this, one example being countdown clocks, a phenomenon where {usually} men on the internet count down for famous stars to turn 18, some examples being Billie Eilish and Emma Watson. These young girls were being perceived in a sexual manner years before they turned 18, and it was so grotesque that in the case of Emma Watson, the day she turned 18, she was leaving her birthday party, and the paparazzi had laid down on the floor hoping to take a photo up her skirt. Those photos were then published on the front of English tabloids.

These experiences are not uncommon, and it only grows more prevalent the deeper you look into the internet. ‘The Verdict Online’ writer Tavisha Sood published an article titled, ‘The Infantilization of Women in Mainstream Media and Society’, taking a deeper look at the perception of beauty for women and its effects on their relationship with power. On the rising trend of the sexualisation of juvenility, she states, “Since the 1970s, there has been a steady increase in women and femininity being tied inextricably to fragility and infantility.” I think one huge contributing factor to this growth is the rise of pornographic content online. The rise of porn has undoubtedly given way to an indulgence in violence and sexual abuse, especially of women. However, I am not under the illusion that it is something that can be removed entirely from today’s society especially considering the rise of legal means of sex work which I feel should be respected (legally, as a real job) while also being held accountable for the harmful ideas it often perpetuates.

Sites like Omegle have been exposing children to sexual content since its inception. Children are going online unattended and being flashed by men behind screens at immeasurable rates. The mother of an eight-year-old girl told BBC News, “These people were saying she was beautiful, hot, sexy. She told them she was only eight years old, and they were OK with that.”, She goes on to describe even worse requests her child received on this platform, and it is only one of the endless stories describing very similar events. Kik, a popular messenger app in the 2010s, became renowned for grooming. People in my own life had told me stories of messaging older men on the app when we were in primary school. It was entirely unmonitored, unregulated, and unsafe. Famous Blog-site and social media platform ‘Tumblr’ had to ban pornographic content due to copious amounts of illegal and underage images, videos, and other pornographic material.

In some cases, no children are involved at all, but older women are being made to dress as a student, or at times even babies, for the entertainment of men. This is commonly referred to as ‘Pedo Bait’. A study from the University of Northern Iowa titled ‘Language as a social reality: The effects of the infantilisation of women’ found “A combined 66% of the 45 X-rated available videos randomly chosen from a list of 121 adult videos, contained verbal aggression, verbal infantilisation, and verbal patronisation.” We are seeing increases in this type of media all over the internet, from porn sites to sites with children on them, such as TikTok, further embedding in these younger generations a sense of sexual maturity that they do not have. It puts pressure on them to grow up at such young ages, and then we punish them for having this inflated sense of maturity while taking no time to be concerned or understand how and what caused that inflation in the first place.

In regards to the overarching idea of this article, this sexual exploitation of children and rising conflation of attractiveness with youthfulness is far more severe and sinister than it is given credit for. Every day countless children are exposed to this form of content, and a myriad of men indulge themselves in it. A University of Wisconsin-La Crosse study by Catherine Carlson, titled ‘Desensitisation of infantilisation’, highlighted, “The issue of objectification isn’t just about individual women’s decisions. It’s about the impact of this kind of representation on society”. And that is what I really want to emphasise: this social and cultural phenomenon is not only impacting fully grown women, children are being victimised as well. This hypersexualised experience of girlhood has created a generation of women who feel that they only have their youth to offer in a relationship and that their youth is tied to their sexuality. Another critical detail Carlson called attention to is that it is not the responsibility of individual women to combat objectification. It is a societal problem, and as with plastic surgery, the choice to take part in the creation of infantilised content should be something that we hold women accountable for while also understanding the conditions which have fostered the creation of that type of content in the first place. In this specific type of situation, the repercussions of creating this type of media are much more significant and should be treated as such.

Reflections on ageing

I think it is one of the many paradoxes in human nature to dread the future and fondly reflect on the past. We simultaneously reject the excitement and experiences we will obviously have as we age, while holding close to us those same experiences once they have passed. While I don’t think this is a uniquely feminine phenomenon, however, the fear and dread towards ageing is something innate to feminine childhoods in a way that men have never experienced. As women, we should not punish ourselves for falling victim to the predatory standard of beauty we have grown up with. Instead, we must be sympathetic to ourselves, a seemingly impossible task that men have never struggled with. We need to give ourselves the grace to make mistakes while also holding ourselves accountable and learning from our actions.

As women, we can know and understand what the ‘correct feminist’ approach to ageing may be while also falling victim to the copious amounts of anti-ageing propaganda unleashed against us. Each woman’s relationship with herself is very complicated. Still, our choices do not exist in a vacuum, and while we may not be responsible for the existence of these ideals, we can be the ones perpetuating this culture amongst ourselves.

It’s also important to understand the complex perception of beauty in society. It is often treated as a sort of double-edged sword, you lose just as much as you gain when everyone finds you attractive, but this tends to be an incredibly privileged position to take. It is a common argument amongst white women grappling with the fact that while they might be considered attractive by society, they are still women and will therefore face some sort of gender-based violence or oppression. On the other hand, women of colour (WOC) understand the complex intersectionality of privilege and how the privilege of being ugly or ‘ugly privilege’ is only really afforded to white women. WOC who do not conform to the beauty standard or who do not take part in beauty regiments are alienated and discriminated against in a much more brutal fashion compared to white women.

Asian-American musician ‘Mitski’, describes the experience of growing up obsessing over her appearance on the ‘In Sight Out’ podcast. She explained, “I spent all my teenage years being obsessed with beauty. I’m very resentful about it, and I’m very angry. I had so much intelligence and energy and drive, and instead of using that to study more, instead of pursuing something, instead of going out and learning about the world, changing the world, I directed all that fire inward and burnt myself up and tried to make myself beautiful and perfect..” The amount of emphasis we put on young girls with their dolls, their movies, and comments about their physical appearances, we teach them that they have no worth if they are not beautiful and the standard of beauty that they have to conform to throughout their entire lives is one designed to be entirely unattainable. Marian Woodman describes a similar experience in her book ‘Coming Home to Myself: Reflections for Nurturing a Woman’s Body & Soul’ where she says, “As long as I can remember, I’ve had to perform. When I tried to be myself, I was told ‘That’s not what you think, that’s not what you ought to do.’ So, just like my mother and her mother, I put on a false face. My life became a lie. That’s deep rage.”

Both Mitski and Woodman resent the limits imposed on them by society and their delay in breaking down those limits and liberating themselves from the boundaries they have been forced to adhere to. I have a deep and unending frustration towards these limits; I want to be a human aside from my womanhood, as with womanhood comes a host of challenges I refuse to have to face. Mohadesa Najumi wrote, “The woman who does not require validation from anyone is the most feared individual on the planet.” We cannot belittle and shame each other for how we help ourselves survive in a system that commodifies our existence; I cannot, in good faith, look at a woman who has had plastic surgery and say, “YOU are the problem” because they aren’t, though an issue emerges when we start romanticising conforming to this standard as an act of self-empowerment because it is not. It is merely an act of self-preservation and should be treated as such.

Margaret Lyons argued, “The most dangerous thing a woman can possess is self-worth. Liking her own body, trusting her own instincts, valuing her own time and company, thinking she’s interesting and special, entering business and personal relationships based only on mutual benefit and respect. Sometimes this leads to advertisers having no idea how to corner us. If we don’t hate ourselves, how will we know what to buy? Sometimes self-worth leads to violence against us. Sometimes, though, self-worth sets us free.”, A revolutionary act of defiance will be met with ranging consequences. As I said before, WOC who chose to defy oppressive standards of beauty are met in a completely different way to white women. In saying that, it becomes particularly apparent that we cannot punish women for choosing to conform, especially women of colour. We can only make sure to hold them accountable when that choice to conform becomes shaming other women who decided not to do the same.

There are countless examples of women speaking out against the oppressive image of beauty to look to:

Lizzo - “Self love is survival”

Hannah Gadsby - “Do you understand what self deprecation means when it comes from somebody who already exists in the margins? It’s not humility, It’s humiliation”

Mitski - “I used to rebel by destroying myself, but realised that's awfully convenient to the world. For some of us, our best revolt is self preservation”

Audre Lorde - “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare”

And the throughline in all of this is that we, as women, have to give ourselves the grace to just be. We will age, our weight will fluctuate, our hair might fall a different way, our skin may display the evidence of a long and fulfilling life, and we should allow ourselves to love these things and to appreciate every memory and experience which has contributed to making them happen.

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