Essay
Even Smart Women Hate Losing Their Youthful Looks
By Vivian Gornick
Illustrated by Ira Blutreich
People have been looking at me since I was fourteen years old. All my life, I walked into a room and heads turned. I never knew what it was they were looking at, certainly I never had a good time with it, but there it was, a given in my life, that the way would be smoothed for me because of the way I looked. I knew that alright. What I didn’t know was how much I depended on it. I never dreamed that around fifty it would all just stop. When it did it was like a mallet coming down on my head.
—Andrea, a corporate lawyer
The British art critic, John Berger, in an influential book called Ways of Seeing observed that in our culture: men watch and women are watched. Think about that for a moment. That means that men grow up thinking it their right and obligation to look appraisingly at women; and women grow up feeling it their necessity to be appraised favorably. This twin activity is lodged deep in the psyche of every man and every woman. No matter who you are—whatever your upbringing, whatever your personal values or actual experience—there’s no escaping this particular influence of the culture. If you are a man it increases your sense of potential to gaze at women, and if you are a woman it decreases yours when you are no longer being gazed at.
Such a state of affairs is mind-altering. An educated woman in an Arabic country where polygamy is lawful once said to me, “I know that my husband will not take two wives. But the fact that under the law he can, affects his emotions and it affects mine.” By the same token, a culture that includes men forever watching, and women forever being watched, cannot help but affect, in some important sense, the way we experience ourselves as people out in the world.
The sentence I just wrote was easy enough to write, but its content has been difficult to digest. It is taking me years, in fact, to absorb its full meaning.
When I was thirty-five years old, I belonged to a consciousness-raising group. We were fifteen professional women in that group: writers, lawyers, academics, and one industrial chemist. Everyone in the room was attractive, some remarkably pretty, and a few drop-dead gorgeous. The sessions were about work, relationships, politics, competition. One evening we devoted ourselves to the question of looks.
In the course of that conversation it became clear that every one in the room hated the fact that women who were not beautiful spent their lives feeling secretly deprived and discounted, no matter how accomplished they might otherwise be; and that those who were beautiful spent their lives—secretly or otherwise—feeling superior, whether or not they did anything of value. The whole situation was outrageous, we declared hotly, and we refused to buy into it. We would not lend ourselves to a system of exchanges that daily rewarded women for looking “great,” and punished them for not looking “great.”
This meeting took place thirty years ago. The women in the room that night are now all in their sixties. One way or another, I stayed in touch with everyone: some are good friends, some acquaintances, some people I run into from time to time. In the years between we have lived our lives, each of us according to her own lights. We have fallen in and out of love countless times, we have divorced and married countless times. We’ve written, we’ve taught, we’ve made scientific discoveries, and handed down legal decisions. Our work has been recognized, even applauded. In short, like everyone else, we have thrived and we have suffered. And we have—each and every one of us—lost our youthful looks.
The change in appearance has been an education. Every woman in the group has felt the consequence of her altered looks acutely; and every woman has been embarrassed into feelings of shock and surprise at how much she hates seeing herself grow older. None of us could have predicted in advance that we’d react this way to the aging process because none of us could have foreseen the hundred little instances—from small perks to large considerations—that, in the course of an ordinary day, provide an ease and a pleasure for a pretty young woman that disappears dramatically in middle age. A young woman need do nothing to gain attention and consideration. She need only be. Her unadorned existence provides interest and animation—in return for which she receives unearned privilege. For a middle-aged woman it is otherwise, as she watches low-level attention (and that same unearned privilege) evaporate from her life as a result of no longer looking young. It works like this:
Two women, one young and pretty, the other handsome and middle-aged, are standing together on the street hailing a cab; or in a store or a restaurant waiting for service; or at a corporate business reception. The cab rolls to the feet—of the younger; the man behind the counter turns automatically—to the younger; opinion in the reception hall is solicited—of the younger. These may seem like instances of triviality, minor occurrences if you will, almost non-occurrences, not worth remarking on or even recalling. And the younger woman doesn’t. But the older one does. Because the occurrences are cumulative: they mount up, and finally add up, to what’s called social invisibility; the kind of public dismissal or discounting that makes one feel an outsider, encourages self-doubt, gives the impression that life is narrowing down.
Dianne, the industrial chemist, was one of the drop-dead gorgeous women in our group. As a girl and a young woman she bore a striking resemblance to Katharine Hepburn, but her beauty, if anything, had made her uneasy. “My whole life I refused to be impressed by my own looks,” she said recently. “ I was far more interested in being taken seriously as a scientist. But—and this is what’s been so surprising—privilege, it seems, came to me anyway because people thought I was good-looking. And I, apparently, made use of it (how could I not?)—but I didn’t know I was making use of it…until it was removed. Now that it’s gone, well, it’s not that I feel devastated, it’s just that…” She stopped speaking, looked vague for a moment, and then said quietly, “In some way the world feels smaller.”
For Carol, a journalist, the loss of youthful prettiness has brought on revelations of a similar but more severe order. “All my life I was a girl,” she says now. “I thought I was a journalist, but it turns out I was a girl. When I was young there always seemed to be a crowd of people (mostly men) waiting around to hear what I had to say. Today, when I’m out among people, I find myself either ignored or patronized. Men talk to me as if I‘m an idiot. It’s as though I’ve committed a transgression by getting older, and I’m being isolated for it.”
Last year I, too, was given a startling demonstration—I’m still absorbing the information it gave me—of what it means to be on the other side of the great divide.
I took a trip to Italy alone. It was a time of stress and exhaustion, and I remembered that once years before, when I was in my twenties, I’d taken a trip alone to Europe when I needed some R&R, and had had a marvelous time, returning home refreshed and renewed. Just what I needed now. This time, however, the trip was a failure. I came home disappointed and dispirited, more tired than I had gone.
It took me a while to figure out what had gone wrong. I realized that when I had traveled years ago in my twenties, everywhere I’d gone I had met with a widespread eagerness to engage. People hung around to help me with my lousy French or Italian, to lift my suitcases onto overhead racks or haul them down station staircases, call a cab, hold a train, pass me on through without a ticket, buy me a coffee, fall into conversation at the drop of a hat. Myriad tiny human adventures had befallen me as a young girl traveling alone that were now apparently unavailable to me as a middle-aged woman traveling alone.
It wasn’t that this discrepancy made my recent trip a disaster, it didn’t. There were no disasters, but there were no unexpected adventures either; not of the sort I had been depending on. I saw that I had been expecting—intending—to wing it: to sit back and let Europe unfold before my eyes in a panorama of events that everyone around was going to provide for me. All I’d have to do was show up, and respond. Vividness and excitement would then wash over me. And why not? I’d gotten myself there, hadn’t I? Wasn’t that enough? It always had been in the past.
Well, it wasn’t any more.
The trip made me see that life for a young woman is a free ride, and for me the free part of the ride was over. From here on in, I’d have to pay my way. That is, I myself would have to provide the pleasure, the interest, and the energy. I myself would have to stand in line for the ticket, sling the suitcase onto the overhead rack, read the guidebook, start the conversation—and generate the enjoyment. Whatever came my way after that would be gravy.
Now, back home, looking at the situation with greater clarity, I saw that the trip had been useful. It had made me think about the meaning of youthful looks—and all those years of the free ride—as I’d never thought about it before. Suddenly, middle age didn’t seem a terrible thing at all. On the contrary, it began to seem interesting. The important thing, I now saw, was to have the wherewithal to pay your own way. And by wherewithal I didn’t mean money. I meant the self-possession that comes with understanding that a life—anyone’s life—has to be made from the inside out. So that when the free ride is over, one receives one’s new circumstances neither as a surprise or even a disappointment; certainly not as devastation.
Men fear aging as much as women do, but their anxieties are bound up with the loss of status and position, not looks and appearance. An aging face can never mean to a man what it means to a woman, as youthful beauty has never been a provider of the goods of life for men as it has been for women. It is loss of position that makes a man melancholy and self-doubting (the statistics on men dying soon after retirement are staggering). Yet a man’s status and a woman’s youthful good looks are equivalent. In either case—lose position or beauty—people find themselves startled, drawn up short, suddenly asking vital and fundamental questions, (“Who am I? Where am I going? What am I doing with my life”?) In short: existential terror looms large. It is not, I believe, the fear of death that threatens, but the fear that our lives are not being lived; or rather that we are not living them.
For a woman, existential terror is the aging face. When a woman looks in the mirror and sees herself smooth and young she thinks, “I’m not yet accountable. I don’t yet have to explain or justify my existence. It doesn’t matter yet that I’m not taking responsibility for my life. I still have tomorrow. I’ll do it tomorrow.” When she looks in the mirror and sees herself lined and hollow cheeked she thinks, “Tomorrow is here. Now I’m accountable. Now I must do it. Can I? More important, will I?”
Such questions are either a downer or a source of stimulation. I prefer to take them as stimulation. That way, loss gets transformed into wisdom and life continues to provide adventure.
But I’m here to tell you: It still takes a lot of stamina and a lot of self-control to welcome the aging face.
Born, bred, and educated in New York City, Vivian Gornick is the highly acclaimed author of several books (Fierce Attachments, Approaching Eye Level, and The End of the Novel of Love) as well as numerous essays, reviews, and articles for such publications as The Nation, The New York Times Magazine, and The New Yorker, to name just a few.
