Women Lose Their Looks, Not Men?
Just as "beauty is more than skin deep" so "they Say"....so is the way women are treated as they age. But, for this blog today, I am focusing on the way women are treated because of their aging skin and bodies.
I chose the two photos above of two attractive older people. The woman looks a lot like a woman you might see in an ad for a product for a anti-aging. Yet, a woman with the same look would not be portrayed in a movie as the man's wife. Usually, he would have a wife that could be the age of his daughter, or even granddaughter.
In the 1996 movie "First Wives Club" the women are friends, each are divorced, husbands remarried. Goldie Hawn is an actress who went to an audition, expecting to audition for the daugther, Monique and instead they wanted her to be the mother. She is at the bar, depressed and has had a couple of drinks, it pretty much sums up reality.
"I'm not Monique's mother!
- Lansbury's Monique's mother- Shelley Winters is Monique's mother.
- Now, that's good.
- Sean Connery's Monique's mother.
- Perhaps some coffee now.
- I take that back. Sean Connery
is Monique's boyfriend.
He's 100 years old,
but he's still a stud."
In 1978 essay by Susan Sontag titled The Double Standard of Aging, she really explains it well:
[For women, o]nly one standard of female beauty is sanctioned: the girl.
The great advantage men have is that our culture allows two standards of male beauty: the boy and the man.
The beauty of a boy resembles the beauty of a girl. In both sexes it is a fragile kind of beauty and flourishes
naturally only in the early part of the life-cycle.
Happily, men are able to accept themselves under another standard of good looks — heavier, rougher, more thickly
built.
A man does not grieve when he loses the smooth, unlined, hairless skin of a boy. For he has only exchanged
one form of attractiveness for another:
the darker skin of a man’s face, roughened by daily shaving, showing the marks of emotion and the normal lines
of age.
There is no equivalent of this second standard for women.
The single standard of beauty for women dictates that they must go on having clear skin. Every wrinkle, every line,
every gray hair, is a defeat.
No wonder that no boy minds becoming a man, while even the passage from girlhood to early womanhood is experienced
by many women as their downfall,for all women are trained to continue wanting to look like girls.}
I was 20 years old when she that was written. I am turning 60 in November. I would say I began to really noticing a
difference in the past five years.
My looks have gone through some real changes. Every line on my face seems to have deepened, My weight is a constant battle. My gray hair is really coming in,
and it's not that pretty color I remembered my grandmother had..
I am not hung up on my looks, I had three kids, I have had some health problems..but there are some feelings of guilt, ridiculous.
I do notice a difference many times in "how" I am looked at.. I also used to think as you age, respect would come
with it.
I have found this not to be the case, with few exceptions.
I realize there is big money in selling all of that anti-aging stuff to women. It's too bad the ads create images
that for the average old woman, cannot be become reality. Just what she needs, another thing to make her
feel older. These ridiculous goals of trying to be younger can't be reached and now she will feel like a
failure, as if she is doing something wrong by aging.
Instead, we should be encouraging older women to be healthy, to love themselves, to enjoy life..not only to accept themselves, but to embrace and be proud of who they are..
