You know, I've always been excited about being old because I thought I could be like my grandmother: relaxed, full of life, smoking a cigarette from a bitch stick while calling the police on my neighbors, but then these people come along and mess up my entire fantasy. Now I have to dance? I don't even have the energy…
Back when I was in my early 20s, before I became the proud, dazzling, professional, skirt-suited woman-scholar that I am today (i.e. a hungry, unshowered, still-in-bed hangover-crone who's only managed to make it to semi-vertical today despite having had to pee for literally four hours), I used to make this joke in…
These are mesmerizing. Life is short, man. Also, women used to really do it up right, hair-style-wise.
It's well established that Hollywood's all-consuming obsession with having the smooth and wrinkle-free skin of an infant or young child, the luscious pelt of an young otter, and the calculating, bitter heart of a sea witch has birthed scores of bizarre cosmetic surgery procedures. It basically goes without saying…
Elizabeth Wurtzel is pissed at today's youth—which she dubs "the lamest generation"—because they suck at being in their 20s. And she should know, because she's 46. Or something? Also, she finds Lena Dunham's thighs "inexcusable." Can 60 Minutes just give her Andy Rooney's vacated segment already?
Confession, guys: unless I'm in the shower and I feel particularly grimy that day, I rarely wash my face. I figured my face skin was sort of like dirty laundry — if stuff lays around for long enough, everything just kind of cleans itself (I realize, typing this out, that my logic is flawed). Anyway, long story short,…
In a study of 50,000 adults published in Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, Danish researchers found that people report markedly fewer hangover symptoms as they get older. And it's no small gap: Twenty-one percent of women aged 18-29 suffered nausea with a hangover compared with just three percent of…
Huzzah. Another physical flaw for women to cash in the ol' 401k over. Conventional wisdom has long held that plastic surgery can "fix" most signs of terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad female aging, but the two surefire "tells" that you're dealing with a closet crone are the neck and the hands. Now that neck lifts have…
Like all Ladies of a Certain Age, I've been inundated with the message that female sexuality and desire meet their inevitable deaths sometime around 35. (I'm 31.) Not only that, but my dang uterus is probably going to dry up around the same time, denying me the opportunity to conceive and birth a tiny, monstrous poop…
The Golden Girls didn't lie to us — getting older rules. (It's especially amazing if you have a outwardly-cruel-but-actually-sassy-n-supportive Italian ma, but that's totally not necessary.) (Also, staying sexually active probably doesn't hurt — but you knew that already, Blanche.)
You might think that staying hydrated can keep the inevitable haggardness at bay, but experts warn that regularly swigging from water bottles could prematurely age you.
Kristin Scott Thomas is 53. Sharon Stone is 55. Both are beautiful, accomplished actresses, but they have very different thoughts about aging.
Sorry kids: One bright, punishing morning sometime in your mid-to-late twenties, you're going to wake up after the usual night of pounding the brews with a truly brutal hangover. Not the hangover you're used to — you know, the kind you can sleep through, still go to work on, joke about, or reverse with a cup of coffee …
According to conventional wisdom, on the stroke of midnight on your 27th birthday, Father Time begins to dog your steps and rapaciously guzzle up every last bit of your fertility ("fertility" being Father Time's snack of choice). Pursuing a career and putting having kids on hold is a risky idea, says conventional…
I never really thought about it before, but I guess "sad" and "angry" are emotions stereotypically applied to the elderly. Get off my lawn and all that. Dropping it into the ocean at the end. No, you can't have equal rights because the '50s. Et al. But a new study suggests that older people don't actually exhibit higher…
A new Japanese study has found that women's immune systems age more slowly than men's (misandry!), which is why, statistically, women slightly outlive men. As we age and our immune systems decline, we become more susceptible to disease and infection. This happens to women too, of course, but the study suggests it…
Eternal or even elongated life is an idiotic thing to wish for. You don't want to get old, and then tack on 50 more years of wrinkles and Metamucil. But prolonged youth? Full body youth? More time being young and nubile and beautiful? Absolutely. And the key to that could lie right inside your brain.
Elizabeth Wurtzel is 45. But she's not one of those 45-year-olds. You know, the ones who actually look like they have been alive for 45 years? She's different. She's figured out the way to stay young "for her age" —the Holy Grail of all concerned agers, everywhere — by doing two insanely simple things you never thought…
Of all the insane things that people have done to appear youthful throughout time — injecting fillers into your face, eating tapeworms, bathing in virgins' blood (and those are just the preferred procedures of Kenny Rogers. Haha! Relevant!) — using tape to smooth out your wrinkles actually ranks pretty low on the…
While it's likely you are spending (or spent) your twenties being fun, elusive, irresponsible, experimental, reclusive or any number of whimsical forays into frivolity that looked really good on TV shows, once you hit 30, you feel the pressure to become more responsible, more figured out. If you don't, you best be…
I'm turning 31 next week (plz send money and cake), and with that milestone I think I'm finally 100% settled into my life as an Old. And as terrifying as aging is, let me tell you—it's fucking awesome, because being young hurt. I don't know what it feels like to be a boy, so I can't speak to that, but I can tell you…
The women in my family dye their hair. I dye my hair, my mom dyes her hair, my aunts dye their hair. In fact, when one of my aunts visits from the East Coast, what do she and my mom do for fun? They go get their hair dyed. I know not one relative with even a gray hair, and the original color of our locks is a mystery…
The New York Times Modern Love column can be tedious, pretentious, and downright ridiculous. But sometimes it's compelling, heartbreaking, and beautiful. Today's piece just set my tear ducts into overdrive, and although I'm incredibly exhausted today (STFU, hormones!), I'm positive I'd still sniffle if I wasn't.
Agnes Zhelesnik started her teaching career when she was 82 years old. She just turned 99, and CNN reports that over the last 17 years, she's had a "huge impact" on her students' lives. Ms Zhelesnik — affectionately called "Granny" at school, teaches cooking, sewing and costume-making. Her daughter, a 69-year-old also…
You've done everything you could to deny that you're getting older — you've suppressed your love of knitting, you've continued to wear uncomfortable shoes and then there's that old aging portrait of you that you keep hidden in the attic — but the fact remains that time marches on and there's not a lot you can do about…
80% of the 53,364 people age 100 and older are women, according to the 2010 Census. Is it because women can deal with age-related diseases better than men, as some studies suggest? Maybe not, because men who do survive to 100 function better than women; the Census found that men were more likely to be living with…
Are you a mature, fully developed being? Can you take the world's punches, or at least block? Are you a "grownup"? If you're not sure, welcome to today's world, where figuring this out is a mishmash of mixed messages and blurry lines best stumbled over on your way to that Meeting of Grown People With Adult-Like…
Great news, wicked queens of America! Your shit just got hella validated. New research out of Stanford University indicates that the brains of older mice can be rejuvenated by commingling their blood supply with the blood of young mice. Well, KAPOW. "Do I think that giving young blood could have an effect on a human?…
After finding success with her comic strip Dykes To Watch Out For — which famously spawned the Bechdel Test
