NEW ERA DIARY
AGING AUTHENTICALLY
May 20, 2023
I was shocked and not a little bit unnerved at my first glance of the latest cover of Sports Illustrated Swimsuit 2023 Edition. It has a picture of Martha Stewart, at the age of 81, clad in a bikini top that plunges in front displaying the better parts of her equally aged breasts represented by the magazine editors as “celebrating an aging woman”. The problem is that the woman does not reveal decades of graceful aging rather an air-brushed photo of a woman enhanced by years and surely millions of dollars of surgical touch-up to her face and body. She appears to me a virtual reality of herself. This is Martha Stewart’s life long interpretation of aging, or as Jessica Define writes in her Substack on May 1`9, 2023, “My general takeaway: It doesn't count as “celebrating an aging woman” if you're celebrating her for still looking young and fuckable.”
What struck me as most sad were the responses to Define’s article (a woman who has excoriated the media, the male dominated structure that messages and defines female standards, and the degree to which women have either allowed themselves to buy into or naively accept those absurd notions of beauty that so gravely impact women. This ‘enhancement’ is sold as beauty augmentation and lifestyle improvement, like a soldier who loses a leg in a war and can now receive the latest in prosthetics. One doesn’t have to lose a limb nowadays for this aesthetic refashioning. One only has to lose their soul… and possess an adequate bank account.
Martha Stewart as she wishes to display herself.
And, did I say impact women? How dare I. Men have not only gone along for the ride, but are at the helm. There is an adorable parlance describing this phenomenon: “When a man marries a woman, he wants her never to change. And, she does.” / “When a woman marries a man, she wants him to change. And, he doesn’t.” Sadly, I get this to be the case. Society accepts a man’s aging - sagging belly, wrinkles, disheveled, unkempt, rickety body and all. But, a women is expected to defy gravity. A male who attends to aging remains agile not pretty, is flexible not fawning, is healthy not harnessed. Contrarily, female health is associated with youthful appearance, unnatural attractiveness, keeping any show of aging at bay. Or, as Define insists, this is “ageism masquerading as age inclusivity.”
This is commercial phoniness, selling the idea that a woman near death should not only care about what other people think of her, but at all have in mind a desire to project any ambition to appear like a magazine idol or young swimsuit model under the pretense of making women feel better about getting older. The egotistical slobber is beyond belief. Really, how many women can afford (if they had any inclination in the first instance) the sheer quantity of injections and length of “scalpel-ing” (my word) and healing that goes along with the look of un-natural aging. Not to mention the extreme risks and consequences to all this surgery or implementations - appearance-related anxiety, depression, dysmorphia, disordered eating, self-harm, and worse.
And, what is natural looking about that? Or, as Matt Labash states in his reflection on the MS look, “And now, of course, Martha Stewart is doing the sexy grandma act, with her drooping décolletage and strategically placed upper-arms wrap, meant to cover the skin that slackens in us all as we age, part of nature’s cruel and inevitable process. I don’t like the Laws of Nature, either. But I didn’t write them, I just have to live by them. As do we all.” There is nothing self-empowering about resisting this inevitability.
Adele’s graying and my belly on full display in Santa Fe.
Then, she had the unmitigated gall to tell Variety Magazine in an interview that she has never had cosmetic surgery. But, whether true or not, who needs plastic surgery when technology can falsify every reality with Apps that can lift, shine, shape, tighten, and hide…oh hell, make you look exactly like Elle McPherson if that’s your desire. Who cares how you got to look fake when you look fake? Who cares that a piece of you is destroyed when you believe you are better for not being you? And, this is not to say that a man or woman cannot or should not pay attention to their aging process as a reflection of health and well being which can imbue a positive outlook, or provide personal pride in attire, and the like. But, who the hell and why would anyone want to emulate being a kid, a twenty something when no matter how you present yourself it is, in the end, an embarrasment.
A passage in the book Light Years by James Salter stands out, “The light was mild. A mole near her jaw had darkened. There was no question, she looked older, the age of one who is admired but not loved. She had made the pilgrimage through vanity, the pages of magazines, through envy itself to a vaster, more tranquil world. Like a traveler, there was much she could tell, there was much that could never be told. Young women liked to talk to her, to be in her presence. They were able to confess to her. She was at ease.” To be at ease is to be greatly admired.
I would be remiss if I pretended the mass of media messaging had not affected me. It had. Adele named it: Delilah. Delilah was everything from allowing myself to be distracted by other women, to feeling that Adele was not enough, or that she needed fixing, or someone else could fulfill me more or was more compatible. I don’t believe it was immaturity alone. My sense is that the pervasive and invasive nature of these ideas solely for advancing profit becomes societally absorptive. Repetition lends a banality to thought and blind acceptance. It is dangerous in that we lose how we are perceiving and treating ourselves in the process.
Aging, to me, is a gift. It is an astonishing and extraordinary experience I have come to accept. It has changed my relationship with my wife and with women. I used to think that despite my age I could be cool in the presence of young women. But, not only was that inauthentic, it was humiliating. I wasn't fooling anyone. My superiority routine, my success pretense, my semblance of sophistication and worldliness all were coverups. Charades of insecurity. Being myself has made me available to all the beautiful aspects of aging - greater acceptance, growing wisdom, the ability to express honestly my thoughts, a willingness to expose my heart. I view Adele through that prism. She is so much more to me now as I appreciate fully all that she means to me in her complexity. I have taken responsibility for the dance between us being made aware of the third entity in every relationship - the WE. The ineffably concrete presence that we are both accountable to.
And, yes, I still think Adele is lovely, attractive, has the softest skin to the touch…and looks great for her age. But, most importantly, she has been a devoted mother, an absolutely committed partner, and my friend. She is wise and smart. She is the person who I love doing absolutely nothing with. She is the person with whom I can say nothing to and communicate. She is the person who has no expectation any longer of who I am or could be. Thus, my desire is simply to sink more deeply into all aspects of her and our lives.
