Photo by Maggie Wilson /The Phoenix News
Hollywood demands women defy biology and time by staying young and beautiful—but this same anxiety creeps into every woman’s psyche.
The year after I graduated high school, two of my best friends and I had one of our regular sleep-overs. Yes, we dedicated time to watching bad horror movies and eating too much greasy pizza. But we also knew that many of the hours we spent together would be owned by beautification: hair removal (including hair on our toes, because God forbid someone see that), expensive face masks that did little more than dehydrate our skin, and messy, unsuccessful hair remedies involving a smelly blend of mayonnaise, egg, and avocado. We hunched over the kitchen and bathroom counters like mad scientists, looking for a remedy to stop time.
S, my closest friend, looked in the mirror that night and burst into tears.
“I have a wrinkle,” she blubbered, pointing to her smooth forehead. We spent the next 30 minutes inspecting our faces in all the different lightings we could find in my basement, holding make-up mirrors millimetres away from our eyes to examine just how deep our laugh lines were. We were all in various states of disarray. We were eighteen.
Of course, we were being ridiculous. Some of those things are rewarding and made us feel pretty. At the same time, our fear was very real. A timely example of our fear realized is in the treatment of Carrie Fisher. She reprised her role as Princess Leia in 2015’s “Star Wars: The Force Awakens”. People everywhere were outraged that she was no longer thin and nineteen. It seems her very presence on screen, as an older woman who looks her age, is insulting to people’s eyes. She was harassed to the point that she spoke up over Twitter, expressing her hurt. “My body,” she contended, “has not aged as well as my mind.”
Harrison Ford received no such criticism.
Are we really surprised?
Magazines are full of beautiful, Photoshopped women, clinging to one desperate idea of youth, beauty, and worth. A recent US Weekly magazine published a very flattering photo of Jennifer Lopez, who would have looked fantastic without some moron using the blur tool over the entirety of her face. So if someone as physically stunning as Jennifer Lopez isn’t deemed good enough by the media, who is?
This, of course, speaks to a larger issue: are women worth more than their looks? Answering this question might seem obvious on paper. But while this question might be answered overtly and positively among us, the implied answer that stems from experiences like Carrie Fisher’s is both dangerous and powerful.
Hollywood is not the only home of age anxiety. This phenomenon seeps into most women’s psyches. Jennifer Winer, opinions contributor at The New York Times has the following to say: “the truth, as any woman can tell you, is that there’s no place, no profession, nowhere that a woman’s looks don’t matter.” Unfortunately, most women can relate to my slumber party tale, whether it’s when they’re eighteen, thirty-three, or fifty-five. We’ve all cried in the bathroom, pre-emptively lamenting the loss of our already-feeble footing in society. We’re already women, we think, we can’t be ugly or old women too. Consider the nerve of our quest to be allowed the same biological timeline as our male counterparts.
“Youth and beauty are not accomplishments,” Fisher boldly reminds us. There are more interesting and valuable conversations to be having—kinder conversations—than discussing the ways in which women have failed society by not being time-stopping magicians. Fisher, like other women, has not aged badly—she’s simply aged. Let’s step back and allow women to do so without criticism.