By: Ritobrita Mishra
For so long there has been a societal pressure on women to aspire to have a more youthful appearance, claiming beauty to be one-dimensional and superficial. This message is enforced by so many platforms such as magazines and skin care lines with anti-aging products, both profiting off of having women trying to retain a younger, youthful appearance. It’s become a taboo for women to even hint at the fact that they are aging, and if it shows then it needs to be covered up as society will otherwise deem you unattractive. This has inspired a fear of getting older and thus has created a harmful mindset in women that looking youthful gives us worth and meaning and aging essentially diminishes our significance.
When seeing how often women are congratulated on retaining a youthful look, one starts to question where this mindset came from and why is it that for women, looking young is more celebrated than age itself? Why are these pressures only enforced upon women? And why do men get a pass to look and celebrate their age when the same right is not given to women? Who essentially perpetuates this narrative of looking youthful being the ultimate end goal?
One huge influence that is responsible for this narrative are fashion magazines. The way Vogue, Cosmopolitan, Seventeen, and so many others all display and enforce a certain youthful appearance with the celebrities, especially the older ones that grace their covers. With the use of photoshop and filters there has been this harmful repetitive narrative being constantly recycled that looking young equates to being beautiful. This awareness starts to seep in for girls at a very young age and follows them throughout the rest of their lives with the media constantly displaying this kind of imagery. The message this sends is that despite all they have achieved and the journeys they have all taken, they still have to maintain this appearance of looking young as that is something that ultimately determines their external significance and their age needs to be hidden from society.
Social Media is another huge preparator that prioritizes the youthful look through filters, and as mentioned before, photoshop that has helped establish this mindset to the youth that looking young should be the ultimate goal. Girls from their highschool years feel pressured to use certain anti-aging products (when they clearly don’t need it) to aspire to look more youthful then they already are as they are following what has been communicated to them which is that they will achieve true beauty by looking young forever. This harmful mindset is taken further with plastic surgery such as botox, and certain beauty rituals, that help girls conform to this feminine beauty ideal which has become so heavily ingrained in our society.
Men, though have their own pressures enforced upon them by society, do not need to care as much about their appearances as women do, as they are more recognized for their success than anything else and thus them looking their age does not hinder them in the long run. Whereas women from a very young age need to maintain an appearance that is almost impossible to manage. We have been programmed to believe that looking our own age is ugly and unacceptable to society. Thus we continue to reach the goal of looking ever youthful despite the harmful mindset and consequences that might come with it.
Age should be celebrated and not something that we should be fearful of. Women should be able to embrace the years they have spent on Earth and not have it be something they hide due to external pressures. Our bodies are constantly changing and accepting the years that our bodies have gone through should not be frowned upon but welcomed. Looking healthy does not need to be exclusive from embracing age yet for the most part it is. There isn’t anything wrong with taking care of yourself but the mindset and goal of trying to look healthy and trying to look young often blurs together and looking healthy becomes lost in the fray and the common factor in all of this is the fear of growing older.
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