The upside to losing my looks

I was inspired to talk to my friend Gwyne about feminism, looks, and aging during last Wednesday’s Substack Live (Grammy vs Auntie) by Liv Schmidt & the Sexless Allure of SkinnyTok. It’s very much worth your time.

Listening to

Diabolical Lies

, I realized how much less anxious I feel about my looks these days, ironically.

I remember being in my teens and twenties and being told, endlessly, that the most valuable assets I would ever possess were my youth and beauty. I felt intense pressure to capitalize on these depreciating assets while I could.

At the same time, the world told me to never use my sex appeal to my advantage. In fact, it would be best if I never realized I’m hot.

Of course, people would assume “the worst” about me if I ever got anywhere in life while I was still young and beautiful regardless.

Somehow, I owed the world my beauty while at the same time owing whoever happened to be looking at me at the time whatever they conceived of as “modesty.”

I’m forever grateful to my mother for telling me that I was beautiful, that it was important that I knew I was beautiful, that it was good for me to enjoy my beauty, and that anyone telling me to dress in a certain way to make them more comfortable was either jealous or a rapist or both.

I remember reading articles by older women complaining about their invisibility. They described being mostly annoyed by male attention until it went away. Was it more rare, or did it just not stick in my memory as well, to read about women feeling freer as they aged? But I did sometimes read that women felt less pressure to walk the tightrope of youth, beauty, and femininity norms as they aged. They felt less embarrassed by their failures to perfectly conform to narrow standards of youth and beauty.

I’m 39 now. I won’t pretend that I’m haggard. For a thin white woman, I’m aging pretty well. But men, young men especially, do not respond to me the way they did 15 years ago. I mean, some do. But most don’t. Nor should they.

I’m surprised by the relief I feel with this loss.