politics of wrinkles

A woman with crows feet is often described as a fading beauty, while a man is considered distinguished

Like most babyboomers, I can remember a time before breast implants and stick insect hips were the favoured notion of beauty for the under 25s. I also remember when Botox injections and sag did not dominate all conversations about ageing among the over 40s, when we had something called the ‘life process’.

Back then, women did not seem to worry overly about wrinkles. Anyone who did, merely upped the odds in other directions, undoing a button here, putting an extra dab of perfume there, or tightening the belt around her waist. Waists were de rigueur, representing the ultimate in sexiness. A woman over 45 who could still boast a 25 inch waist knew she had nothing to fear from age. She did not worry about a boob job or whether her bottom was too big. A good waist commanded attention. When the ‘life process’ still held sway, that elegant politician, Barbara Castle, showed off her neat waist proudly and ignored the greying hair around her temples; she always made sure it was beautifully coiffured, however, and that her bright red lipstick was on straight before tearing into members of the opposition.

At some point in the last two decades, this philosophical attitude towards the ‘life process’ (with its implicit appreciation of older women) was strangled, in the wake of a new youth culture spawned by Hollywood – the town where a woman’s working life ends at 28. Hollywood has politicised wrinkles by creating a diminishing market for older actresses like Michelle Pfeiffer or Isabella Rossellini, who at 44 was voted the most glamorous woman in the world. But it has also short-changed women generally, depriving us, on the whole, of beautiful, mature women playing complex roles that mirror the lives of real women aged over 40.

Far worse than clearing older women off the map is the fact that the media and Hollywood, in particular, are selling women a blatant pack of lies about their bodies and ageing. The notion that female beauty only has a shelf life of 25 or 26 years, or that it is easily manufactured via a surgeon’s scalpel, is a shockingly distorted image of womanhood. It has concertinaed the rest of us into false notions of beauty and perceptions about age, which cause self-hatred and intense suffering.