Let's Not Care About Aging Gracefully

0:00This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. You chose to hit play on this podcast today. Smart choice. Make another smart choice with AutoQuote Explorer to compare rates from multiple car insurance companies all at once. Try it at Progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Not available in all states or situations. Prices vary based on how you buy. It's fake. It's fake. What fresh hell laughing in the face of motherhood. What if I just age regularly with Margaret Ables and Amy Wilson? What's stopping you from looking like Jennifer Aniston? A podcast that solves today's parenting dilemmas.

0:46So you don't have to. I'm all about a good moisturizer, people, but you're not one moisturizer away from having seven facelifts that look.

0:58Hello, everyone, and welcome to What Fresh Hell? Laughing in the Face of Motherhood. This is Margaret. And this is Amy. Today, we're talking about how not to care about aging gracefully. Are you ready for this? I'm ready for this, Conver. I believe I am. There may be some crying, but let's see. I'm so ready. I am here with the research this week, but we also have an amazing mailbag this week. This is an email from Dana, who is a longtime listener. She says, Hi, Amy and Margaret. I recently did a very hard thing and moved my family across an ocean to a different country for my spouse's job. And leading up to our move, when people asked me how I was feeling, I tended to channel Margaret and respond, this is water.

1:39It was my shorthand to say this is the life that I was given or chose, and I was handling it as best I could. Now that we're established in our new country, I find that Amy is the voice in my head saying, who knows what is good and what is bad? As much as I wish I could have reassurances that I'm providing a great life for my kids, none of us will know until we're on the front porch in rocking chairs. I repeat these words to myself to stay sane in the bombardment of decision-making that is motherhood. Thanks for the laughs and the words of wisdom. Thanks, Dana. Love that. I mean, And I know many people who have moved overseas with their kids, mostly good, I think, and are having a great experience of it.

2:19But it's hard enough already when you're doing it in familiar circumstances. So love this. Thanks so much for the email. We love hearing from you. If you got some thoughts on the podcast, shoot us an email. That is nice. I already know my forehead is big. You do not need to tell me that by email, guys. Thank you. Don't tell me I'm not aging gracefully. Oh, gosh. Yes. This episode, this was my idea. And it came to a head for me with the picture. Demi Moore attended the Chanel fashion show with a little dog on her lap looking insane, looking maybe like 28 years old, like she looks robotic. She does look good, I think.

3:01And she was the toast of the nation. look at Demi Moore. This is aging gracefully. What's stopping you? And I was like, is this aging? How long do you have? I mean, I got a lot on what's stopping me. Right. I would say the number one quality that I think of when I see these pictures of her is insane thinness. I think it's probably pretty much your business to weigh what you weigh. But when we see a person who appears to be 20 to 40 pounds under the average weight for a person of their size. And that is lauded as amazing and toasted the townness. I had a friend when I was living in LA where basically every dialogue is like, you look great.

3:53It's how everyone greets each other. And she had a very severe autoimmune disease. And every time we went out, people were like, you look amazing. The idea that like the closer she got to being invisibly thin, the more celebrated she was, was deranged. We are in this moment too, where we've taken the body positivity, right? All bodies are fine and we shouldn't comment on them to seeing the two stars of a movie that's based on the events in The Wizard of Oz, you know, looking skeletal. And you're not allowed to say that. There's people saying they look amazing. And then the people were like, wait a minute, something's wrong.

4:32It's like, you can't just, don't say that. Don't say that. You're not allowed to say. And I don't need to say it on social media, but I want to be able to say it to my kids. This isn't what people are supposed to look like and don't buy into the notion that we are. But this goes beyond just wait. It goes far beyond just wait. It's this constant, ongoing self-improvement narrative. Demi Moore already looked good. Now she's had more surgery and she's even thinner and she looks even, I guess, better in a Barbie doll kind of way. But the point of it is that you're constantly improving yourself and that it's held it up as like, what's stopping you from looking like this at 63?

5:13Well, a million dollars, but also I'm not crazy. Right. And yet we are a million dollars. Also, I'm not insane. Right. So those are two things that are stopping me. Do you remember, I think it was probably 15 years back now, it was a woman posing in like a bra top and shorts with three little kids under five, I think, age four and a half, age two and a half, age eight months, let's say that the kids were labeled. And then the chiron or the words were like, what's your excuse? That was sort of the idea. Right. My excuse is genetics. My excuse is the lack of interest in working out 16 times a week.

5:56The idea that you need an excuse to not look like 0.01 % of the population looks is absurd. But there is this, I'm quoting Meredith Jones, who wrote a really interesting book called Skin Tight. She talks about what we have as a cultural expectation of continuous transformation. The most interesting part of that book to me was she talked about that the new ideal is what she calls stretched middle age, which is like Kris Jenner. Kris Jenner looks like you can't tell how old she is. She might be 32 or 70, like women who avail themselves of these huge projects of looking younger, which include surgery, which include insane weight loss.

6:39Right. And just thinking about this all the time, they get to a point where you can't tell how old they are. They don't look young. Exactly. They don't look old. They look like you can't tell how old they are. And that's what we're sort of supposed to aim for now. Well, and I think it's capitalism all along, baby. Like it's also that someone will sell you 48 pounds of hair to wear on top of your head. I was talking to somebody the other day about a person on television and oh my gosh, their hair looks so gorgeous. And I said, you do realize, right, that at least 50 % of that hair is sewn onto their heads.

7:15Did they know that? No, they were sort of like comparing their own hair to that person's hair. Mindy Kaling did like a huge feminist act when she explained in an interview a couple years ago, like, don't feel bad about what your hair looks like compared to these people. Their hair doesn't look like that either. It's all fake hair. and for most people who have never been on a tv or movie set they have no idea that like kyle richards has the hair of a healthy five-year-old because she's it's fake it's fake and here we are feeling bad about it and comparing ourselves to something that we could buy but we're not allowed to acknowledge that it's fake right we're only we're only allowed to say how beautiful it is and then feel bad that we don't look like it is what i'm getting at right And I think that this kind of toxic embracing, as you were talking about, of, well, we don't comment on women's bodies.

8:08I get it. But at the same time, if you're telling me that weighing 90 pounds at the age of 65 while having 47 tons of hair and no wrinkles is something to aspire to, I have some notes on that. I have some pushback. And it's easy to be like, you know, screw that. And it's not as easy to really, we're going to get into this. Like this goes deep for all of us. And so it's one thing to say you're resisting it. And then it's another thing to resist it on a daily basis. So Jaroslav Baranski, he's a Polish psychologist who actually has done a lot of research in this. We'll be talking about him. He talks about the pictoriality of culture.

8:53He says that we are constantly confronting our own body image with bodies of other people, bodies from the media. And he calls that a normative area. If being 90 pounds at 65 years old with lots of fake hair that we're not supposed to acknowledge as fake becomes the normative area for what people can or are supposed to look like, then all of a sudden we are managing our own image of our body against that. the pain is in the gap, right? And so we turn to things to try to address that gap. And he says, one of those methods is rejuvenation, an intensive practice of disciplining the body, medical and pharmacologically, adorning the body and strengthening it so as to keep it young, healthy, efficient, and sexually attractive.

9:40That becomes a project. And the Meredith Jones would be like, right. And the project is the point. And the eternal project is the point. and never stop, never stop maximizing. Right, and there is some biological imperative stuff going on here, right? After the age of fertility, women's attractiveness goes down and men generally seek younger and younger partners. Like there is a biological imperative there that I should find a partner with whom I can procreate. Even if you're not thinking that. Oh, no, no, I'm saying like deep biological lizard brain stuff. It's pheromones, you know, it's like you're getting catcalled on the street and then one day you're not right because the male gaze is drawn towards fertility.

10:24There you go. You're out of the male gaze. And the idea is that you can change that by cutting pieces of your face off or starving to death. Right. And what's stopping you? I mean, how long do you have? So many things are stopping me. Well, this is where it gets slippery, I think, because you move from like, okay, not all of us can be Kris Jenner, but all of us can age gracefully. The point, Margaret, is for you to age gracefully. What if I just age regularly? Right. And what aging gracefully even means, there are people who say it means getting plastic surgery and the people who say it means definitely not getting plastic surgery.

11:09It depends on who you're asking. aging gracefully is she looks like a monster what did she do to her face to every celebrity over the age of 50 right or look at how jennifer aniston is aging gracefully which i have no idea what jennifer aniston is doing but it involves money that i do not possess right and also an interest that i don't possess i think that's what it is i think when people magazine says aging gracefully What they mean is a lot of work going on that I don't have to confront, right? The duck is paddling successfully, smoothly across the pond. And I can't tell there's stuff going on beneath the surface.

11:49Right. And also, it's so deranged that many older female celebrities sell beauty products that are predicated on like, this cream will make you look like me. And I just want to say, you're missing a pretty big step of what also makes you look that way. Too late now. I'm all about a good moisturizer, people, but you're not one moisturizer away from having seven facelifts, that look. Kate Mann is a sociologist. We've talked about her on the show before. She's a great substack. She says aging gracefully often means looking as young as possible for as long as possible, and that it is a trap dictated by a culture that devalues older women.

12:30Yeah. Hashtag agree, Kate. You've got it. And then Google AI, this is interesting. I put aging gracefully, what does it mean? And to Google, and I try to avoid when I can just, you know, looking at what AI says and actually going to the sources of people who have researched such things. But what was interesting is that Google AI said, which is, you know, collecting, it's doing some sort of oversight of everything that's been said about it and putting it into its LLM. It says that aging gracefully means exercising and getting enough sleep and looking good and having a positive mindset. Don't lie to me, Google AI.

13:06You're full of lies. Yeah, yeah. Be super blissful while you're not bothering me by looking like you've had children or are over 40 years old because I don't want to look at that with my eyes. I have so many thoughts on this, let's take a break. We'll be right back. Fun fact, everyone, tea is the oldest drink in the world. I mean, besides water. And that's why Peak Tea's green and black Pu-erh tea duo provides truly old school metabolic support. Rich and naturally occurring polyphenols and gentle probiotics, green Pu-erh is deeply nourishing and supports immune health and cellular renewal, helping you feel resilient and energized.

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17:20That's in Los Angeles. There's an old joke that the best looking boy and girl from every high school moved to Los Angeles to become famous because they're gorgeous. Like everywhere you go, the people really are good looking. The guy who just checked my carburetor is Brad Pitt. It's just a world of very good looking people. And I found that for my friends who had been on the hood of the car in a bikini kind of models or beautiful. That 40-year-old line was so frightening and shocking. There is, I think, some parallel between how much your appearance defined your life as a person under 40 that makes post-40 feel like an absolute nether region of doom.

18:09Right. If aging is morally neutral, certainly unavoidable, and we're trying to say like it isn't something you should feel bad about it is inescapable so is this feeling that i need to look younger and look good because society does value it you see what i'm saying like you're not a bad person for like geez i wish i didn't look my age because society devalues women who look their age after a certain age and so i wish that wasn't the case but you're not a bad person for wishing that you looked a little younger or a little thinner like you were being sold that all day every day it's true like you were saying before it's a biological imperative that youth is valued and more in women than in men.

18:47Aging gracefully is not something we ask of men. I remember as a teenager kind of railing against, is plastic surgery the craziest thing you've ever heard of? Like the idea that you hate your face so much you would want someone to cut into it? Very 16-year-old. Who would do that? And my mother said I have had clients who maybe got divorced or maybe just were having a hard time in life and they got a facelift and it made them feel much, much better about themselves. It's not fair to just be like losers get plastic surgery, winners don't care what people think of them. Everyone cares what people think of them.

19:28I was somewhere at a kind of a crowded party and I was feeling myself and I was thinking I looked kind of good. And this woman from across the party was like, hey, I had no idea you were pregnant. I was like, lady, I'm in my late 40s. I'm not pregnant. Like I cried on the way home. I was I was upset. You know, I don't want to be perceived as looking fat, which is basically what that was. But at the same time, I don't want to obsess about my weight. Right. And I want to eat a normal amount of food and go to the gym sometimes. Right. But you have to kind of be able to hold both of these ideas. Demi Moore has been like one of the most beautiful women in the world since she was 16 years old.

20:10Right. She'll hold on to it at any cost. At any cost. So it isn't our fault that we feel this way. Of course, like you'd feel bad if somebody says that. And Sarah Miller, she wrote an article called Desperate for Botox in The New Yorker. I'll link to it in the show notes. And she says that the worst moment is the moment when I kind of forget that my face doesn't look the way it used to. And I see myself in a mirror by accident or in a photo. And I think that can't really be me. You know, I thought this was an original joke and I put it in my book. When did I get like this? That came out 15 years ago about how funny it was to catch a sight of myself in the mirror and be like, who the hell is that?

20:50That's a universal thing. And it's actually, you're not a bad person for feeling that there's like a psychological reason for that. My husband has gotten used to me holding up pictures and being like, does this look like me? Is this what I look like? Right. Every picture of me is bad all of a sudden. I don't know what's going on, you know? Felt. But I think I have never looked at a picture of you and been like, Amy looks old and ugly in that picture. Well, that's what's so depressing. Because your husband's like, no, that's a good picture of you. Like, it is? That's a good picture of me? That's me in a good day?

21:21holy cow, I didn't realize that the way I feel inside is not how I look outside. Yeah, but when I look at you, you look beautiful and young. It's not like I'm like, oh no, you look bad. It's definitely going on in our own head. I think this is very hard, but it's work I've really tried to do. I remember talking to someone just obsessively talking about their neck, which is basically the very first thing to show your age. Your face, you've been moisturizing, and you're doing all this stuff, but your neck just looks wrinkly. I remember having this conversation with a relative of mine. I just have to do something, my neck and going on and on.

22:01This person was at the time probably in their seventies. And I really thought to myself, I've never thought about that. You're so beautiful and stylish and cool. The last thing I have ever thought about is your neck. But now I'm spending a lot of time thinking about my neck. There's a reason for that. Okay, hit me. It's called the mask of aging. There are two psychologists, male, Mike Featherstone and Mike Hepworth wrote a paper in 1999. Okay, dudes, I'll listen, but with a gimlet eye. They are talking about everybody. They're talking about humanity, not just women, although I think it pertains particularly as we were just discussing.

22:38They say the mask of aging represents the experience as you age in which someone cannot not reconcile their inner youthful self with their aging external body. So on the inside, you feel young. You also have the wisdom that you've gained with age. You feel like you did when you were 25, but you also feel better than you did when you were 25 because now I know a few things, right? Now I wouldn't put up with the stuff I put up with when I was 25. That's how I feel inside. It's great. Great self-image. And then you look in a mirror, you catch yourself in a mirror, that moment we were talking about before, and there's a mismatch that is really disorienting and difficult to accept because there's this mismatch, this incongruence, as I say.

23:21I think that's also everybody all the time. One of my kids just said to me recently, why do I sound so normal in my head? And then on a recording, I sound like a crazy squirrel. And I said, everybody has that experience. But I think the first time you have that experience, you think this is something to be fixed, right? I've got to find a vocal training doctor and make my voice sound like it sounds in my head. Any external view of yourself, I think, feels cringy to some degree. It does. But then this mask of aging thing, the problem with it is it gets more and more pronounced with each passing year, because the divide between who we feel like we are inside and who we are in the mirror gets more and more pronounced.

24:04And so they explain that this starts to feel like your body is actually a mask that is hiding who you really are. This can't be me with the body that bore three children and looks different. I have a scar. 25 years ago, you couldn't see it. It was a surgical scar and you couldn't see it. Like, wow, what a good job they did covering it up. But now 25 years later, you can see that scar because 25 years of aging is causing the skin to sort of, you know, puddle around it in an interesting way. And I look at that scar and I'm like, I feel a little bad about myself. Every time I look at it, it's like, why are you there when you weren't there before?

24:41It is completely unavoidable. And yet like you're reminding me that I'm aged and I don't want to look at it. Anyway, that disorientation starts and you start to feel like they argue, you start to feel like your aging body is the mask and it's hiding who you really are inside. And so you have to fix it so people can see who you really are. That's a really interesting point. It's not just I'm so shallow that I want to look beautiful. It's like I feel beautiful and I want everybody else to see me the way I see myself. Like it's not self-hatred, which is interesting. Right. If I could just fix this disconnect, then people would say, yeah, it's unveiling who you really are by like achieving the impossible and ruling back the clock.

25:26I remember someone I knew a long time ago came by, very excited. Do you notice? Do you notice? And they had had an eye lift. I didn't notice. It was completely impossible for me to register. This is a little strange to me because like, shouldn't you not notice? Isn't that the point of a good procedure is to have it? You look good, but I can't tell. I guess. And I mean, with love, I would not have been like, you know what you need? An eye lift. If I had to give you some advice, I would have hit 47 things before I got to iLift. We have been, since our youngest days, sold a bill of goods on what we're supposed to look like, what we're supposed to be doing with our faces and bodies.

26:15And it starts younger. As I was researching this, I came upon a Reddit post of a woman who said she was approaching 30, her words, asking how to age gracefully. She said, I notice already that my metabolism isn't the same. And what else can I be doing now in order to age gracefully? And people rushed to the comments to tell her sunscreen, this, that, lift weights, whatever, all of that. But in what world is somebody who isn't 30 yet already worrying about aging gracefully? A sexist world, I guess. But it's just depressing, right? When you think of the time that I spent worrying about looking my age or looking younger than my age, I was an actor.

27:00So as you were saying, that goes with it. An actor's actual age is a closely guarded secret. And if you look younger than your age, you'll work more. But only if people don't know how old you are. Because once they know how old you are, it doesn't matter that you look 10 years younger, but now they know. I fought that for so long. And so maybe I had a particularly intense version of that. But worrying when you're 35 about aging gracefully, I'm seeing these fine lines, like all that stuff. I just find it so, now that I'm well beyond that age, I find it so, so sad. It's sad, but also 65-year-old women are sad for us that we're having this conversation.