A lil’ fun fact about me: I aged about twenty years in 2023. In the span of a couple months, my body went from age 31 to 51.
→ In January I started taking injections of Lupron Depot, a drug that shut down my (one sh*tty) ovary, putting me into menopause.
→ In July, I had the ovary removed.
→ In September, I got it back from pathology and put it in a jar I keep in my office.
In all, I forced my body to go through menopause in about six weeks, which — whooooooh! — I do NOT recommend, because it ain’t for sissies, that’s for sure.
Why I did it: Surgical menopause is kind of a last-ditch effort to treat PMDD — premenstrual dysphoric disorder — which is a topic for another day …
My point is, reader, that I got to witness my body age rapidly. I’m talking:
Belly fat
Double chin
Muscle loss
Wrinkles
… and that’s just the most visible stuff.
I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t devastating, even though I keep reminding myself that I knew it was going to happen. But, no matter how many pep talks I give myself about beauty being skin deep, I keep feeling I’m losing my value way before my time.
Your Beauty In The Patriarchy
In a patriarchy, our value is tied to our appearances first. The closer we fit the “beauty standard,” the more “value” we have.
This also means that, no matter how hard we fight it, women’s “value” decreases as we age.
So, in an effort to fight the inevitable, some of us throw everything we have into trying to delay aging with more and more extreme measures. We buy skin creams that promise to change our skin overnight. We get Botox and filler and dye our roots. We spend a fortune on products that promise to reverse the clock, hoping that it will give us a little more time before we fade to irrelevance.
(I’m not saying it’s right; I’m saying it’s true.)
And this is not a judgment on injectables or skin treatments. I’m just pointing a finger at why we go through all the effort: It’s because we live in a society that tells us that our youthful appearance is the most important thing about us.
And, damn, does that mean the clock is ticking. ⏰
The Takeaway
I’m outing myself as a feminist who applies tretinoin to her face every night before bed in the hopes that it gives her what the youths call “a dewy glow,” and who recently purchased a box of something called “Frownies.”
It feel a little hypocritical, but I’m not gonna stop doing it.
I’m telling you this in case you are also torn between:
rejecting the patriarchal beauty standards and waltzing into middle age with our middle fingers held high
googling the best lotions and potions that will delay the wrinkles we know are coming
Because, personally, I waffle all the time. When my dermatologist told me it was a good time to talk about Botox, I almost just told her: All right, let’s just do it already! A bunch of gals I know started doing it preventatively, like, a decade ago, so, by that standard, I’m already behind the eight-ball.
Then, the other half of me is like: Hell, no, I’m not giving into an industry that makes money off of the insecurities of aging women!
If we refuse to buy into anti-aging, we’ll make it easier for the Gen Z and Gen Alpha girls to spend their thirties and forties looking however they want. They can tell the beauty standard to go f*ck itself.
In my best moments, I can look in the mirror and say “thank you” to the crows’ feet starting to appear around my eyes. Because it wasn’t always a given that I would be here long enough to have them. Or to laugh enough to earn them.
Intentional, hyper-speed menopause forced me to figure out how I felt about aging much faster than my friends. Having a baby at 27 and a hysterectomy at 29 took me from maiden to mother to crone at the speed of light.
And, now, from the viewpoint of an unruly, premature crone, I’m telling you that we have a choice. It isn’t necessarily an easy choice.
But, if we know why we feel pressured to be hairless, smooth, and forever-young, we can decide if it’s really worth all the effort.
“But, if we know why we feel pressured to be hairless, smooth, and forever-young, we can decide if it’s really worth all the effort.”
I love this, Micah. I get a lot out of Jessica DeFino’s writing on the beauty industry and I think you would too! She has a lot of brilliant things to say, but one recent thing that sticks with me is her candor around the “why” of the beauty products and routines she sometimes chooses to use. She talks about wearing, say, concealer as a way of alleviating social pressure to look a certain way (young, fresh, well-slept). If she knows why she’s choosing to alleviate that pressure, it feels less like a default behavior and it puts the beauty-conforming behavior in context.
The beauty industry is so thorny and fraught and hard to talk about that any deeper context or nuance can be really useful, so I appreciate you going into it here.