Letters to the Editor
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More Plagiarism (sorry- couldn't resist!)
...And the girl behind the counter has a tattooed tear
One for every year he's away, she said
Such a crumbling beauty, ah
There's nothing wrong with her that a hundred dollars won't fix
She has that razor sadness that only gets worse
With the clang and the thunder of the Southern Pacific going by...
(Snipped from "9th and Hennepin" by Tom Waits)
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cashing in on our insecurities
It was a great pleasure to read most of these thoughtful posts. I would like to add another cultural explanation for the mainstream American obession with youth-oriented sexuality (Unlike Bellingman's reductionist argument that biology alone drives desire. Has he bothered to read the variety of responses from the previous posts? Determinism clearly doesn't exist!) which was beautifully argued by Mark Greif in an article called “Children of the [Sexual] Revolution” published in Harper’s Magazine, the Nov. 2006 edition. Greif contends that our obsession with adolescent sexuality stems in great part from the sexual liberation movement and emergent youth culture of the 60s whereby the idealization of youth and youthful experiences, which are often characterized in terms of sexual experimentation, has become a part of our cultural identity. He writes: “The lure of permanent childhood in America springs from the overwhelming feeling that one hasn’t yet achieved one’s true youth, because true youth would be defined by a sexual freedom so total that no one can attain it.” Moreover, the notion of sexual liberation is no longer one of choice, to have or not to have sex, but rather of necessity – one is expected to have sex with the same supposed zeal and energy-level of an adolescent! So now that liberation has gone the way of liberalization, marketers are more than happy to supply whatever commodities will make an adult feel young and fresh again and that’s where all these representations of sexualized adolescence come into play: marketers idealize youthful sexuality and then try and sell it back again to aging adults! And it works, like a charm. Our insecurities makes us vulnerable to such manipulations. Which is even more reason to fight back and accept one's appearance!
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To Anonymous "Ever Darker"
You need a new boyfriend, bad! Someone who's crazy about you and you feel secure and content with, not someone happy to explain to you that "the problem is that as men age, the pool of women they find attractive only widens" and you "think the range he gave was 16-40."
And please don't allow your sense of self to be drained by the insanity that is our consumer culture. The industries that make untold billions of dollars off women's self-loathing don't deserve your soul! (And neither does that boyfriend, who I'm sure knows how insecure you are and yet feeds into it instead of reassuring you.)
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Be at peace with the impermanence of life
This LW has gotten lots of great advice as well as some seriously unsympathetic remarks from people who don't appreciate what she is feeling...
So here I am to put yet a bit more advice out there for LW and people who are feeling similarly. Here it is:
Life is impermanent. Every circumstance in our lives changes. Our bodies change. To attempt to resist this creates great suffering in our lives. If LW can get to a place where she accepts this impermanence and is at peace with it, all of the worries and anxiety she is experiencing will melt away.
We all start out young, the Maiden stage, with fresh young skin, the kind of bodies where we can eat what we want and exercise it right off, stay out dancing all night and still look good the next day. We are also inexperienced in life, sometimes unsure of what we're supposed to be doing or who we are. This shows up in the scary decisions we sometimes make at this age.
Then later on we are in what many writers call the Mother stage---- the age when women are working on raising a family and/or advancing in their careers. We have a different kind of beauty at that age: maybe there's sun damage or laugh lines, maybe we carry a bit more weight than we did at eighteen, but we're strong. We can tote a 5-year-old on one arm and three bags of groceries on the other (or a laptop plus a sheaf of briefs home from the office, or all of the above!) We're more experienced and decision making comes easier, though we continue to question the big questions in life.
Finally, around the time we have raised our kids and/or gotten to a pinnacle point in our careers, the Crone appears. "Crone" is GOOD THING, please understand that. It does not mean bad-looking or grouchy or anything of the sort. We may be slowing down physically, and there are probably more wrinkles and other signs of aging. It means that we have the life experience to guide us and, if others are smart enough to ask us, them as well. We have been the 20-something party animal. We have been the 30 and 40-something mother and/or career person. We are still as smart as ever, and in addition to that, we have experience and wisdom to temper the impetuosity that may have been our guiding element in our 20s.
If the LW can come around to this kind of view of her life--- and ignore the short-sighted silliness in the media or the and risk of elective cosmetic surgery to stave off aging (as if that could be done!)--- she will be at peace with the fact that life is impermanent. She will be happy in herself, and because she is, everyone will be drawn to her as moths are to flame. I hope that she get there.
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I'm so glad it doesn't matter!
I've been thinking about this for a while now, and I'm wondering if our fixation on remaining sexually attractive is a psychological holdover from a time when women had no choice but to marry. Having been married for looks at one point, and subsequently divorced for looks, I'm profoundly grateful that, at 40, I have no need to remarry. I could probably do it. I'm the anonymouse whose meds are keeping her young-looking, but I don't have to.
And I'm glad, because I'm still attractive enough to be afraid to risk it. I can't always tell whether men are in love with me or my face, mostly because they can't always tell, either, and being in love with my face lasts about 1.5 - 2 years. Then they wake up one morning and realize that I'm an actual human being with actual strengths and weaknesses, not to mention a personality of her own. Infatuation won't get anyone over that hump.
The LW is right to fear this on the eve of her marriage, because a number of men think aging is legitimate grounds for divorce, if not an affair. If her appearance was the primary hook, she could very well be in trouble.
Postponing the wedding might not be a bad idea, especially if they've been dating for less than three years. Far better to have no wedding at all than to go through a divorce.
So as I read through these letters, I wonder if it might not be a good idea to wait until time starts to overtake my meds before I even think about dating again. Sure, a lot of men within spitting distance of my own age will be chasing younger woman, but you know what I call them? Dodged bullets. I'm not interested.
So I never repartner? So what? I have friends and family, so I'm not really alone, and I'd rather continue this way than marry a man who likes my face but dislikes me, or simply dislikes women in general but likes to screw them.
LW, think long and hard about your upcoming nuptials. If you are having thoughts like this on the eve of your wedding, something is seriously wrong. I don't think you trust this man, or you don't trust his affection for you, and if you're at all attractive, you may have grounds for fear.
Are you angry at younger, prettier women because they're more attractive than you are in general? Or are you angry because you sense that they're more attractive to your fiance than you are, and that the gap will only widen as you age?
Because you will age. We all do, and a man who falls in love with a woman's face will fall out of love once it changes.