A recent headline story at MSNBC that discussed the downside of plastic surgery and other medical beauty enhancers and age “restoratives” got me thinking, yet again, about the fact that I am approaching fifty.  There is a great line in the film When Harry Met Sally about turning forty when the Sally character wails to Harry that she is going to be forty soon and when he reminds her that this “soon” is still eight years off she replies, “But its out there.”  And I think probably every woman understood what she meant. Old looms for women in a way that it doesn’t for men.  And it’s not that men aren’t judged physically – they are – but more in terms of weight and fitness than for getting older with its requisite wrinkles and hair loss. Women are condemned for it all. The loss of skin tone. The weight gain. The wrinkles. The graying hair. Mainly just for the fact that we can’t stay twenty. Although seriously, who wants to stay twenty?  Aside from the youthful appearance and stamina, there is the larger issue of the lack of common sense and wisdom that only life and experience can bring.  Speaking for myself only, I would not trade who I am and what I know to be the twenty year old girl I was again.

Still women, many of them, will try just about anything within their budgeted grasp (and a few beyond) to keep the obvious signs of age at bay. The trouble is that anymore these methods of age eradication are too easy for the average person to spot which leaves them not marveling at the woman’s youthful appearance but trying to guess just how old she really is.

Botox is a curious thing. It’s poison really, but it is used to paralyze facial muscles which has the effect of smoothing wrinkles. The dangers were supposedly minimal but the most recent studies have found that contrary to what doctors who use botox have told patients, the toxin can and does cross the brain’s blood barrier.  So in addition to a smooth, expressionless face, a person is also exposing brain tissue to a deadly toxin.  Who knew?  Well not the people who touted Botox as some miraculous fountain of faux youth, and they really should have.  Known that is.  It’s not as though patients need to be wrinkle free to make it through a day as opposed to say migraine sufferers who also receive injections of Botox as a form of preventative treatment.  If a person were to weigh the benefits against the risk, which group of people are taking the bigger chance?

We women bear some of the responsibility for this obsession.  We willingly support industries which hack none to subtly at our self-images.  We buy the magazines, the cosmetics and the hair dye. We diet or jump on every exercise bandwagon to roll by or swallow dubious pills that tout even more dubious results. I don’t know that we can be entirely blamed though.  Would we know that we should be unhappy with aging if the end result – being marginalized – were not so evident in our culture?

I admit I highlight my hair to hide the loss of pigment (I can’t call it graying because the strands are snow-white), but I haven’t succumbed to a full on dye because I know I am too lazy to maintain something like that.  And I exercise but this stems back to my fat pre adult teen years when I was “such a pretty face”. The trauma lingers. I also have a pretty strict diet though this owes nearly entirely to my food allergies and loss of gallbladder than a love of self-deprivation.  So am I part of the the problem? Fifty looms – five and a half years – and I can’t say that the idea is welcome or repugnant at this point. I really don’t know what I will look like by then though I am sure that my husband will still find my bum luscious though I doubt that I will be attracting any whistles from the population at large (though interestingly I did get a whistle while running last week at the gym – not bad for forty-four.)

Youth is best left to the young. The rest of us might be better off redefining what beauty looks like at 40 or 50 and beyond rather than letting the standards be set for us. Or better yet, we might try focusing on things that are real aging issues like maintaining our health and our minds.