Rose tells Wright that "Jodie Foster once said [...] that if you'd wanted to, you could've been the best actress of your generation, suggesting that you didn't want to." Wright says "I never thought I was good," but later Private Lives of Pippa Lee director Rebecca Miller suggests that Wright has had "maybe not the most pragmatic career." And elsewhere Wright has mentioned passing on roles to spend more time with her kids. A recent Redbook interview quotes her as saying, "I turned down so many films because I wanted to be a mom that…they stopped offering." But she also makes it clear that this was a choice, something she "wanted" more than being the best actress of her generation, whatever that means. When Redbook's Stacy Morrison tells her, "People might be tempted to say, 'You gave up your life so he could be Mr. Sean Penn,'" she responds, "He was already Mr. Sean Penn. " And she says,

I really wanted to be a mom. I didn't want my kids to be raised by a nanny, which would have been the case if I were working two movies in a year, you know? And I would have been hospitalized with fatigue. So that's where the no-brainer came in. I did what I wanted to do: I raised my kids.

The fact that Hollywood's version of greatness is incompatible with Wright's preferred family life may be more Hollywood's problem than hers. Underscoring this, Wright makes it clear that The Private Lives of Pippa Lee is the first movie she's truly proud of. It's that pride that appears to prompt Wright's tears, and she later says of working on the film, "Me personally, as an actress, I think I just went, 'get over being scared.'" This kind of confidence comes later in life for many people, not just actresses, and it's a shame that Hollywood is most interested in women when they've not yet developed the self-concept age can bring.

The obsession with youth may be one reason that, as NY Times film critic Manohla Dargis said yesterday, "women are starved for representation of themselves" onscreen. It's not just that older women want to see older women — it's also that women want to see female actors portraying the same variety of human experiences that male actors do, and in order to do that, they may need to mature a little bit. Much has been made of the male actor's ability to grow old and still get roles, but this isn't just about a few gray hairs and the ability to appear opposite younger starlets — it's also about the freedom to grow and change as an artist, something Hollywood doesn't allow very many women. The movie industry, like so many others, needs to make space for women to live their lives, which may include taking some time off to have kids, and definitely includes getting older and wiser.

Related: Robin Wright Penn: Life After Sean [Redbook]

Earlier: "Fuck Them": Times Critic On Hollywood, Women, & Why Romantic Comedies Suck

Natasha Singer writes in the Times that premature ejaculation (abbreviated PE, also a setting in which it would be especially embarrassing) is the new erectile dysfunction, a male sexual issue with a drug to match. In this case there are two drugs — a pill called Priligy, and an aerosol dudes are supposed to spray it on their dicks if they have trouble lasting more than a minute. Neither is approved in the U.S., yet. In a study, the spray increased penetration-to-ejaculation time to an average of 2.6 minutes — not a huge difference, but maybe enough to feel like an improvement for some men. Singer points out that "there is no doubt that some men are distressed about their inability to control their orgasms," and for those who are deeply dissatisfied with their sex lives, medication may provide some help. But the maker of the spray, Sciele Pharma, claims that one in three men have PE, and this may be exaggerated.

Dr. Wayne Hellstrom tells Singer that somewhere between 20% and 30% of men have PE at some point — but he doesn't say how many of these cases clear up on their own when, say, the guys hit nineteen or so. And psychiatry professor Leonore Tiefer says,

Rapid ejaculation as opposed to slow ejaculation is common, but there is slow and fast everything in the world: slow and fast walkers, slow and fast eaters, slow and fast breathers. When you tell someone they are a fast ejaculator, it makes it sound like there is a right time to ejaculate and, if you ejaculate before, it's a medical problem.

Tiefer's words highlight a contradiction in Sciele Pharma's marketing: if one in three men really has PE, couldn't it be considered a normal variation, rather than a disease? The question is even more apt in relation to menopause, which every woman who reaches middle age undergoes. Singer also wrote the Times menopause article, along with Duff Wilson, and the two writers note that before allegations about cancer risk tainted the drugs' reputation, hormonal treatments were marketed as an almost necessary response to menopause. They cite a commercial in which Lauren Hutton "runs down a beach and warns of the health risks of estrogen loss," saying, "My doctor said if you don't replace estrogen that you lose at menopause, your risk for certain age-related diseases could increase." Since the breast cancer connection was posited, estrogen for menopausal symptoms has been rebranded as "menopausal hormone therapy," rather than "hormone replacement therapy," downplaying the idea that hormones need to be "replaced." Yet hormone advocate Suzanne Somers (pictured) continues to prescribe hormones as "the juice of life," and menopause as a disorder requiring treatment — and she's not alone.

The pharmaceutical industry likely cares far more about money than about gender, and the diseasification of both PE and menopause show drug companies turn to both men and women when they want to make a buck. Their appeals, however, are different in character. Treatment for PE seems to imply that men are insufficiently virile if they can't last "long enough," and that they need help in aerosol form. Of course, jokes about premature evacuation are ancient, and Sciele Pharma didn't invent male performance anxiety. But they are capitalizing on it, by implying that the solution to fast ejaculation isn't a change in sexual practices (last time I checked, a dude's hands and tongue still work even after he comes), but a spray to make him just like every other guy. Or rather, just like the Ideal Male as defined by restrictive social norms and eagerly reinforced by profit-minded executives. The Ideal Female, by contrast, is forever young. Lauren Hutton may have talked about health in her commercial, but the anti-menopause forces have long focused on sexiness and femininity, which are apparently the exclusive province of women with dewy faces and equally dewy vaginas. The idea that bodies change as we get older, and that sex might change along with them — that it might include more lube, more oral, or more imagination — seems anathema to an industry with a big financial stake in promulgating a single, difficult-to-achieve standard.

Of course, menopausal hormone treatments provide real relief to some people — and premature ejaculation spray may as well. The problem comes when people feel that they should take drugs because their bodies are inadequate in some way. One of the healthiest things in our culture could do would be to accept variations in both the way we look and the way we fuck, whether these variations are inborn or arrive with age. But that acceptance might lead to a corresponding acceptance of aging itself, of wrinkles and fat and hair loss and, eventually, death. And were we to truly embrace senescence for what it is — a natural part of life — we might buy a lot less shit. Which, of course, would be bad for the many companies clamoring to bring our penises and vaginas up to code.

Sure, It's Treatable. But Is It A Disorder? [NYT]
Menopause, As Brought To You By Big Pharma [NYT]

Ridley notes that "there are flecks of gray in the mane" and "his face has grown more gaunt."

Two things:
1. Really? because he looks the same to me.
2. Who cares?

As the commenter known as "Railsplitter" writes on the Daily News site:

HA!! Every president has aged within the first year or two in their job! Look at Clinton and Dubya! Both aged like 20 years!!! Its not an easy job haters, and no one seriously expected him to clean up this mess he inherited in 10 months!

When is the sick obsession this society has with youth (or a youthful appearance) going to end? There was a time when politicians would powder their wigs — to look older. With age comes wisdom, experience and maturity. Admirable qualities in a leader. And let's face it: Would you rather he focused on cosmeceuticals? Or Afghanistan?

Ten Months After Inauguration, Stress Is Showing On President Obama's Face [NY Daily News]
Related:Sick & Twisted: "Anti-Aging" & "Cosmeceutical" Ads

• Despite earlier reports, Cheyvonne Molino, a woman who knows Garrido and the girls says they never acted robotically and didn't wear prairie dresses. • President Obama and Megan Fox are both experts at packaging sound-bites according to The Huffington Post because they each have made similar statements in different interviews. Yesterday when asked about claims that those who dislike him are racist, Obama told both George Stephanopoulos and John King basically, "Are there some people who don't like me because of my race? I'm sure there are." In a Rolling Stone interview Fox talked about her "powerful, confident vagina," and she told Cosmopolitan, "Women hold the power because we have the vaginas. If you're in a heterosexual relationship and you're a female, you win." Maybe their respective thoughts on racism and vaginas are just very consistent. • Between 14 and 23 percent of pregnant women experience a depressive disorder during pregnancy and 13 percent took anti-depressants in 2003. According to a new study short-term neonatal irritability and neurobehavioral changes were linked to maternal depression and anti-depressant treatment. • In the video at the link, a local Florida station, reports that parents are complaining about billboards in 16 cities that say "sex without consent is rape" that are paid for with federal tax money because the ads force them to discuss sexual violence with their children. • Many skin care products and cosmetics contain alcohol and pork products. Aside from being gross, this means Muslim women who keep Halal can't use them. After converting to Islam and finding few cosmetics options for Muslim women, a former makeup created OnePure, a cosmetics line approved and certified by the Malaysian Islamic Authority. • An AP investigation found that baby formula companies are aggressively promoting formula over breast-feeding in Vietnam. Formula companies have paid doctors to push their products and advertised formula for babies between six and 12 months even though Vietnam's law prohibits advertising formula for children under age one. • In a New York Times profile, Beth Kaplan, the president of GNC says, "I need to be part of a big organization, and my kids get it. I was at Bath & Body Works when my father died, and I struggled with being away from home. I resigned and thought my boys would be thrilled. My younger son, who was 8, was so excited that he jumped into my arms. My older son said, 'But Mommy, I really liked that job.'" • Sixty-eight of the 72 known people 110 and older are female, even though there are more boys than girls born each year. Part of the reason may be that men are five times more likely than women to die by firearms, men are more susceptible to fatal conditions like cancer and heart disease, and men are more likely to ignore emotional problems and are nine times more likely to commit suicide between the ages of 75 and 79. • According to government estimates more than 16 million Japanese women, or one quarter of the country's female population, are 65 or older. The country is anticipating a shortage of workers as the population ages. • The Australian Fair Work Ombusdman's office has found that women are being fired for taking maternity leave and being told to quit if they can't juggle work and family. In one case, a woman saw her position being advertised in the newspaper eight months into her maternity leave and was told she couldn't come back. In another case a woman's boss shifted her from five eight-hour days to four 10-hour days so she couldn't drop her kids off at day care, and told her to quit if she didn't like it. • The Pasco, Washington planning commission voted down a proposal to allow a Planned Parenthood in town because they say it would attract too many protesters. Anna Franks, president of Planned Parenthood of Central Washington says the decision was political: "What we have here are protesters protesting against Planned Parenthood that there may be protesters at our clinic." The county has one of the highest teen pregnancy and STD rates in the state. •

The confessional-style documentary, which premiered on HBO last night (schedule of upcoming screenings can be found here) follows McCabe (who narrates the film) n her quest to uncover why so many people will subject themselves to injections, surgeries, and peels to regain the appearance of youth. It is a siren song that McCabe is well aware of: At the age of 38, she reveals she has been scrutinizing her body ever since she came across her father's slides from his plastic surgery practice.

Refreshingly free of moralizing, McCabe establishes early on that she, too, struggles with the idea of aging. Setting a precedent for the rest of the film, she begins by analyzing how much money she dedicates to the pursuit of youth:

I found it amazing to watch her dollar costs unfold. McCabe, a smart woman who acknowledges up front that she is not making a wise decision, still cops to being close to $70,000 in debt, makes about $30,000 a year as a temp, yet finds $200 every six weeks to keep her gray hairs at bay.

As the viewer is reeling from the cost, McCabe says, "I may drop my health care coverage, but I'd never stop covering my gray. It may be insane, but it's the truth."

And...it is. Covering gray isn't something I am currently dealing with (and I think a silver afro would be kind of fierce), but I could completely relate to making bad financial decisions in the pursuit of beauty or fashion. How much money have I given to Zappos that could really be earning interest in my Roth IRA? Yet and still, I find myself trading long term financial security for a series of short term beauty boosts.

Looking specifically at the dollars and cents of it all, I am reminded of a series called the Cost of Beauty. PHDork examines the price women pay in pursuit of prettiness, noting:

[W]e can fairly surmise that the majority of harpies–70%–spend between $101 and $1000 per annum on beauty costs. Those numbers fit with both the mean and the median.

As to what sucks up all of those HarpyBuxx (they're not just good for abortions anymore!): our lovely, lovely tresses: 43% of expenditures go towards hair cuts, coloring, or other services. Make-up takes up another 29%. The rest:

Hair removal: 8%
Nails: 7%
Other products: 7%
Spa: 4%
Appliances: 2% [...]

A number of you expressed surprise at your spending, comparing it to X months of rent or groceries. It does add up: what else you might spend $613, or even nearly $800 a year on?

What else indeed? Most of us will never know. We're too hooked on beauty pimps and their products.

One person, who comes to illustrate how far people will go in their quest to find the surgical fountain of youth is Sherry Mecom from Texas.

(Is it just me, or does Sherry sound a lot like Ruby from the Style network?)

Sherry seems determined to use money to correct the past. She was once overweight until she had gastric bypass; she continually works on her body; and she is obsessed with the waterfalls and LG dishwashers she procures for her home. She alludes to a poor upbringing and being unhappy, but it feels like she is unsatisfied. Instead, she plans the next big purchase in her quest for a total life upgrade.

In the course of her travels, McCabe meets another daughter of a plastic surgeon - Erica Rose. However, the things that Erica has internalized about self-improvement differ dramatically from Mitch's low key messages from her father:

The quest for perfection is punishing, and not just for women. Youth Knows No Pain also reaches out to men in pursuit of camouflaging their ages. Men have their own hang ups, that just manifest differently and at an older age. The focus is more on hair transplants, face lifts, and lipo, less about botox and wrinkle creams. In an interview with New York Magazine, McCabe discusses some of the more obvious gender differences:

The women in the film were self-critical, and it was the men who were judgmental of others. What other gender differences did you notice?

We asked women why they were scared of aging, and everyone said, "Being alone. Being alone." You never heard that from men. Society is changing so much, and it's becoming more competitive and we have to stay in the workplace longer. Aging is affecting men in different ways, especially if they're in sales or something. When it comes to aging, men are concerned about being destitute, or in a nursing home. And being alone, but more in the sense of not having someone to take care of them.

However, it is interesting to note that the men seem more invested in critiquing the looks of others. While the women show a lot of competitiveness over beauty and aging (there's a great scene where McCabe asks the doctor if she has less wrinkles than one of his other, slightly obnoxious clients (cough, Mary Rambin, cough), and then cheers when he agrees), the men see no problem with informing women exactly what is wrong with them. Gary Baldassarre, one of the patients profiled, is documenting his own journey to regain his hair through a really graphic hair transplant operation. Yet, he sees no issue armchair analyzing women on television:

Another man, Norman Deesing, is an interview subject because he paid more than $50,000 to essentially look like Jack Nicholson. However, he has no qualms about turning to McCabe at some point during filming and pointing out to her that she's "let herself go [...] from the neck up." Admirably, McCabe brushes off the comment.

After the first hour of the documentary, the focus shifts a little from exploring what is happening to exploring why we seek these remedies. Who wants to go to a Botox party, being injected by a dentist who carries around the toxin in a cooler? Why do we pay so much money to distort our faces? Part of the answer lies in our need to conform to what society says is appropriate:

While most of our issues may stem from low self-esteem, "internet celebrity" Julia Allison's offhanded comment about "having an expiration date" struck hard. While she doesn't seem inclined at all to fight this idea of disposable women, it accurately summarizes the feelings of a lot of women in the documentary. They want to stay young in order to be relevant, to be seen as beautiful, to have access to society. It is this fear of obsolescence that drives the industry, which goes hand in hand with a fear of mortality. Some women, like How Not To Look Old author Charla Krupp, have acknowledged their enemy and have committed to fight literally to the death:

I laughed when I heard Dolly Parton unabashedly admit she was going to "get nipped and tucked until [she] is in a pine box," but for some reason, every time I watch this clip of Krupp, chills run up my spine. Are we really moving toward an era when it will be unacceptable to show any signs of aging?

And what happens when the potions and creams and procedures stop working?

Near the end of the documentary, McCabe sits down with Sherry. It has been three years since they first met, and Sherry went through a rough year. Sherry often uses plastic surgery as a mood boost, and after a bout with depression is actively planning her next procedures. McCabe switches between the first and third meeting to provide some insight into Sherry's development, while Sherry openly discloses her fears about not having the money to keep up the fight against time:

Youth Knows No Pain was engrossing, depressing, and thought-provoking, made even more poignant by the candid self-examination of its creator. After chronicling her memories of her father and her longtime fascination with mortality, she ends the film with an astonishing admission: after all that she's seen during filming the documentary, McCabe decided to take the plunge and start on injectables like Botox herself.

"What about spirituality? Inner peace?...Well, that didn't work." After struggling to make sense of why women subject themselves to beauty treatments instead of aging gracefully, she succumbs to the promises of younger looking skin and a small chance at cheating time.

McCabe's documentary ends with her undergoing different bizarre treatments. Watching her take a needle through the mouth in order to puff up some flesh in her cheek, I kept coming back to her opening admission: It may be insane, but it's the truth.

Youth Knows No Pain [HBO]
Youth Knows No Pain - Full Schedule [HBO]
The Cost Of Beauty, Part 1: The Research [The Pursuit of Harpyness]
The Cost Of Beauty, Part 2: The Numbers [The Pursuit of Harpyness]
The Cost of Beauty, Part 3: The Alternatives [The Pursuit of Harpyness]
Youth Knows No Pain Examines Anti-Aging Industry [New York]

Earlier: NonSociety Nincompoop Mary Rambin: Abortion Is Just Like Botox
How Not To Look Old Author Doesn't Look Old, But She Does Look Stupid

I loved Sarah Haskins' new video, which is all about turning 30. As she says, now that she's "old," she's paying more attention to commercials for incontinence and osteoporosis. (She also wears a really heinous pantsuit throughout the entire video.) At the end, when she takes all the pills at once, she suddenly finds herself wanting to go to clubs and do young people things. (She's still wearing the pantsuit.)

I reached that milestone 2 years ago (the 30 milestone, not the incontinence or pantsuit milestones-fortunately, I have yet to hit those), and it's funny: Before I turned 30 I certainly thought of it as a turning point. When I was, say, 25, I was sure that 30 was going to be this magical turning point when I suddenly got all my shit together. I wouldn't feel "old," per se, but I'd feel more content, secure. Life would be less of an emotional rollercoaster. I'd probably even be completely done with my quarterlife crisis!

And in fact, turning 30 was sort of a relief. I threw a big karaoke party and got drunk and felt, looking back, that my twenties were all about highs and lows, and my thirties would be about security and really getting to know myself.

Then I turned 31 and thought, oh, fuck, it's really happening.

I first moved to New York ten years ago, after graduating from college, into a teensy two-bedroom apartment on Allen and Houston streets, on the Lower East Side. I had the smaller bedroom; it fit a full-size bed and a dresser, and not much else. I paid $850 a month, which was tough since I was making $25,000 a year working as a sales assistant at a magazine. I remember my take-home pay every two weeks was $712. (That's me, below, around that age, hamming it up in a supermarket.)





By the fall I had a new job and a new life plan: I was going to go back to school and get a PhD, and become a professor. It's funny when I think back on that year-I was 22 and everything seemed so slow. In college, everything changes every four months and I was discovering that it takes longer for things to change in the real world. I was at my first job for three and a half months, which felt like an eternity. I'd been at my second job for only a couple of months when I decided to apply to grad school.

I have a file cabinet in my apartment now that's like an archive of my life from the late nineties to the mid-aughts: bank statements, contracts from long-forgotten freelance gigs, back issues of the newspaper I worked for in Philadelphia. I was rooting through the cabinet a couple weeks ago, in an eventually abandoned attempt to clean it out (a shredder would probably be helpful, here), and I found a journal I'd kept for a few months in 1999. It's a spiral-bound 80-page Mead notebook, with the $2.29 price sticker from Duane Reade still affixed in the upper right hand corner. Anyway. I guess on the night of November 15, 1999 I was feeling restless, because I filled four pages with lists of what I wanted to be doing or have achieved in ten years, three years, one year, and one month. (Note: This is not a task I perform regularly. I must have read an article in a women's magazine or something that this was "helpful" when one is "floundering.") This is part of what I wrote in the ten-year goal list:

- have a PhD [nope]
- be married [nope]
- have a child [nope]
- have a dog [yes!]
- live in a big apartment in Brooklyn or Philadelphia or Boston or San Francisco [sort of—I live in Brooklyn, but no one would call my apartment "big"]
- be working on my second book [sort of! I did write one book, with ex-Jezebeler Jessica Grose, and would love to write another one, if anyone has any great ideas]
- know another language [again, sort of—in graduate school I took German and Italian, but I can't really communicate in either one now]
- have a garden [and once more, sort of—we have a backyard but our landlord tends to the garden]
- have really good friends [yes!]
- know how to knit [I learned how to knit soon after this and still have not finished the scarf I started around the year 2000]
- know how to sew [barely]
- be in the middle of reading a really great novel [not at the moment, no! But if you haven't already, I highly recommend Zoe Heller's new one, The Believers]
- have an article published in The New Yorker [why, yes! I wrote a Talk of the Town last month, thereby getting in just under the wire]

Strangely, my list of things I wanted to be doing in ten years is actually, and strangely, more accurate to real life than the lists I made for what I wanted to be doing in three years and one year and actually even one month.
Looking back on the list after ten years is also funny because it neatly glosses over all of the highs and lows of being in your twenties. I went to grad school, dropped out after an agonizing year of going back and forth about whether or not I should drop out, worked for a couple years at an alt-weekly, and then went back to school. I dated a string of wrong guys and a couple right guys. I became an intern at the age of 28, which was horrible and humiliating and turned out to be one of the best decisions I ever made.

When I was 22, though, if you'd told me I was going to be an intern when I was 28 I probably would've just crumpled to the floor and sobbed.

I hesitate to use the term "quarterlife crisis" because I think it's vague and sort of pointless—it's called "growing up," really—but there was definitely a time, around age 25 or 26 or so, where it seemed like nothing was going right and whatever decision I made was going to be the wrong one, and I was letting everyone down, and nothing would ever get better, even if I did finally finish that scarf. Not to mention that for years, 30 seemed like it was so far off. That was when people officially became adults, after all, age 30. I remember when I was 22 looking at some of the people I worked with, who were, like, 27 and 28, and thinking they were so immature because they still partied with us 22-year-olds, and shouldn't they be married and settled down by now?

Needless to say, when I was 27 I wasn't settled down. And I laughed hysterically at Sarah Haskins' video, but there was, nestled in there among the jokes, a small kernel of truth. I don't go to clubs in pantsuits or take incontinence medication, but I am starting to feel like I've entered a different phase of my life.

"Many women fight tooth and bicep to delay arrival to this place. Midlife makes them feel invisible to men and somehow diminished, despite their accomplishments. No wonder all those big, fancy cosmetics companies and plastic surgeons frame their age-defying pitches in the feminist language of "rights" and "choices." They understand that some women see youthful physical beauty as an expression of their power," Hampson writes. But instead of trying to expose the youth-obsessed marketing ploys for the bullshit they are, Hampson instead decides that if women want to enjoy aging, they also need to enjoy the repulsive lingo that has popped up to describe their changing bodies.

Hampson declares that it is WOMEN who come up with these horrific terms: "they develop names for the various age-signifying bits that can seem as offensive as teenage behaviour, prompting a need for strict control," she writes, before chastising women for not loving themselves as much as the men in their lives surely do: "The names suggest annoyance, never love or fondness of the type men have for some of their parts. Which is unfortunate. Don't you love your teenager, despite his long, greasy hair?The cure, ladies, is to laugh." She then presents an appalling list of "funny terms," complete with terrible illustrations, designed to help us all celebrate the humor in calling a woman's "pooch" a "Menopot."

Yes, ladies, we should all get a big kick out of hilarious terms like "bingo wings" and "saddlebags," as really, there's nothing more hilarious than insulting a woman's natural aging process by attaching a degrading phrase to it. Those wrinkles around your lips from a lifetime of smiling? "Vampire Dinner Lips." The natural shifting of your bottom due to aging? "Old Lady Butt." That wrinkle between your eyes from frowning, or, god forbid, thinking? "The Bitch Wrinkle, also known as Chapter Eleven (an appropriate illusion to bankruptcy, given the cost of Botox)." Charming.

As Gwen at Sociological Images writes, "The article presents itself as an antidote to women's obsession with their bodies and aging, a way to help women laugh and accept their bodies. But the images that accompany it, clearly meant to make the figures into objects of ridicule, make it hard to imagine how they would achieve such an objective. Reading it just made me aware of all kinds of things I'd never heard of or particularly noticed before." Blogger Jessalynn Keller at Brazen Beauties agrees, noting that "it's articles like these that make women so self conscious about their 'aging female parts.'"

Perhaps if Hampson really wants women to love their aging bodies, she should stop pushing the same old sexist bullshit and leave "bingo wings" and "bitch wrinkles" to fratboys and douchebags. Holding up "bitch wrinkles" as some type of liberating phrase isn't helping any of us celebrating the aging process—if anything, embracing these terms is a sign of giving in to the pressures, rather than fighting against them. These terms are designed to help people laugh at women, not with them. Hampson may think it's a good idea to join in the fun, but I'm pretty sure most of us can age quite happily without ever hearing the term "bingo wings" ever again.

Body Lexicon For Aging Female Bodies [Sociological Images]
The Never Ending Critique Of Girls' And Womens' Bodies [Brazen Beauties]
Obsession With Female Body Parts Has Created A New Body Lexicon [Globe And Mail]

[Image via Suzanne Braun Levine, as taken by Ellen Warner]

It was, perhaps, inevitable that with the much-heralded decrease in personal luxuries like salon visits, some people should forgo dyeing by their own hands and let their hair revert to lower-maintenance gray. As Kathleen Clary Miller writes in the Los Angeles Times, she was tired of the hassle.

But you'll look older!" protests a friend. Guess what? I am older. And I'm tired of trying so hard to deny it. The once intermittent weave has graduated over the last few years into an every-six-weeks procedure that involves low lights, highlights and overall root color. Toxic fumes fill the salon air as I try not to breathe too deeply for the hours it takes to maintain what has, over time, resembled less and less natural blond and more and more an oddly greenish or orange hue, depending on the light I'm standing in.

Although she claims that "this is not about "letting myself go," unless going gray is that," her tone, and that of her friends, certainly conveys the idea that going gray is somehow giving up and giving in. I've heard that attitude before, not least from a chestnut-locked lady in her tenth decade to whom I may or may not be related, and while I support anyone's wish to look in a way that makes her feel good, I think that rationale's outmoded. So is this notion that hair-color automatically makes one look younger, which anyone who's glanced at a tabloid in their lives knows not to be true. Going gray, the author seems to feel, is bold. And maybe she's right: certainly those few who've embraced their silver hair - Emmylou Harris or Helen Mirren - are regarded as ageless exceptions doing something special, besides being the same two examples who people always have to go to. When was the last time you saw a woman with prematurely - or not - white hair on TV? The Golden Girls?

It's true that not everyone's hair goes as beautifully silver as these women's, and many don't want a crop of wiry white strands in an otherwise youthful mane. But going gray, generally, doesn't look that weird or daring. (Obviously no one in the 18th century thought so.) Well, depending on where you live - Miller draws the distinction between her appearance-conscious "Southern California friends" and her home in "the backwoods of Montana now where rumor has it that if you have all of your teeth, you're a beauty queen." So, it doesn't matter, you see, if she looks defeated and old!

My mom is passionate about her gray hair - although it should be said that she's lucky enough to have had it age very uniformly and in a very silvery manner, Like many things in her life, she invests this with an unwarranted sense of moral superiority. And that, is of course, as futile and judgmental and irrelevant as the high-horse parenting debates that clog parenting boards, proclaiming the superiority of all things natural. Unfortunately, the discussion has frequently been couched in moral terms (see: Anne Kreamer's Going Gray of 2007), and I worry that actually impedes acceptance. Hair color is not, nor should it be, a moral issue - we have a bevy of (increasingly earth-conscious) dye technologies at our disposal to help women choose their choices, whyever they might chise. And by the same token, going gray should not be regarded as any kind of surrender to grim inevitability. And maybe as that stigma dies, a little of the perception of all the signs of age as scary and ugly will go away too.

She's Good With Gray Hair [LA Times]

Related: Are You Woman Enough To Go Gray?

A piece in the Times claims that the newest generation of widows and widowers sees a dramatic shift from the dynamic they knew in married life: widows feel comfortable being independent, while a generation of men who rarely learned to cook or keep house finds itself lonely and dependent. Often responsible for organizing the family social lives, women generally have an easier time maintaining a circle of friends and contact with family and neighbors - in part because, perhaps, men of this generation might feel uncomfortable being dependent or seeking help. And perhaps partly as a result, a far higher percentage of widowers over 65 choose to remarry than do their female counterparts.

What's more,

Left to their own devices, older men don't eat as well as older women, are less likely to seek medical care when they are sick, and more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol. Older women have more chronic diseases, in part because they live longer, but older men are more likely to die suddenly from heart attacks and other catastrophic, stress-related diseases. Men over 65 are five times as likely as women to commit suicide. Divorced and widowed men have suicide rates three times higher than that of older men living with a spouse.

While it's delightful to hear that older women are increasingly happy and independent - and the truth of these assertions are certainly borne out anecdotally, I know in my own family - I don't like the tone of some of the comments in this piece. Especially this:

In a strange twist of fortune - some might call it poetic justice - age can bring with it something of a reversal in gender roles. The rise of an old girls' network, friends and family who see women through a lifetime of transitions, often contrasts sharply with the decline of the old boys' network, the professional associations that secure young men's places in the world but offer little support or solace in later life.

"Poetic justice?" Yuck. I get the point they're making - but I think this callousness belittles both these women's accomplishments and the sorrow of those men who have succumbed to loneliness. Certainly no one who's seen a grandfather struggling through learning basic housekeeping and eating poorly can take any larger satisfaction from the turn of events. Why can't we instead realize that the same rigidity of roles that we deplore could hurt not just women, but men, and find that not a source of satisfaction, but of sorrow? Nowadays, one hopes, the increased equality at both home and work will also serve to benefit men as well as women - that they, with some knowledge of cooking and caring for themselves, won't be left helpless.

The author also talks about the "liberation" some widows feel, and the plans for a new life, "none of which involved managing another man's domestic life." While this may be true for many, I rankle at dismissing decades of life according only to the modern terms that equate marriage of that generation only with domestic slavery. I'm thinking of my great-aunt here; after her husband's death, she took full advantage of her "freedom," traveling and enjoying friends, volunteer work and culture. She was happy, and yes, surely free of the need for security that may have bedeviled widows of earlier generations - but she'd also have loved a few more years with her husband. Maybe I'm thinking too of yesterday's "Modern Love" that painted a touching portrait of a long marriage and the joy of its companionship. Are men of this generation frequently troubled by a "loss of status?" Are women often happy to stay unmarried? Surely. But aging in our society is a lot more complicated than this - as are the individuals.

With Friends Aplenty, Many Widows Choose Singlehood [NY Times]
Yes, We Do. Even At Our Age. [NY Times]

It is nearly impossible to avoid the anti-aging machine, an industry goldmine that cranks out thousands of products promising eternal youth, or, at the very least, a postponement of our natural progression into old age. There are creams to fight off wrinkles, creams to fight off crow's feet, injections to erase laugh lines, and surgeries to lift one's face up in order to create an illusion of youth. But is any of it really worth it?

Writing for the LA Times, Stacie Stukin explores the "youth in a bottle" phenomenon, finding that for many women, anti-aging creams are as essential as everyday necessities like toothpaste and deodorant. Even with the knowledge that many of these overpriced creams may not really work, women cling to them, choosing to believe they are working, if only for peace of mind." 44-year-old Sharyn Belkin Locke tells Stukin that she remains loyal to her pricey brand because she doesn't trust anything else, even if the product doesn't exactly produce the results it promises: "There are so many products out there that claim to do this or that. Do you really ever see that kind of difference? I never do."

I use a drugstore anti-aging cream that costs about 20 bucks and makes my skin feel really nice. It also doesn't burn my sensitive skin, which is a plus. I started using it at 25, in a panic, after I read that women should begin an anti-aging routine at that age to stave off the aging process as long as possible. I already have crow's feet and laugh lines, due to, you know, laughing a lot, and having an eating disorder for seven years didn't help things either. But after a while I realized that my skin was not improving because of the anti-aging cream as much as it was improving because I was maintaining a healthy weight and eating well. The internal changes I was making, versus the external, were what was showing on my face. I still have laugh lines and crow's feet, but I like them, and I don't use the cream to "fight off" the aging process anymore as much as I use it because, like Locke mentioned above, it's a nice moisturizer and I trust it on my skin.

I also got a reality check the last time I went to purchase a tube: while looking around the aisles, the Walgreens cosmetic counter woman called out, "Oh no, honey, teen skin creams are on the other side of the aisle." My first thought was, "Oh, snap!" My second thought was, "Oh, shit, she thinks I need Stridex pads. Do I have a zit? Where is it? Oh shit." You can never, ever win.

Dr. Laurence Rubenstein tells the LA Times that "There isn't a cure for aging because it isn't a disease. It's a natural and complex process that involves every system in the body." In other words, we're all going to age, no matter what we inject into our faces. There are, of course, ways to stop the aging process from happening too soon: quitting smoking, eating well, etc. But those things aren't easy for many people, and they certainly won't be boxed and sold at Bloomingdales for $200 an ounce.

Rebecca Seal of the Observer argues that even the most extreme anti-aging treatments aren't fooling anybody: "If you do get the pillow-faced look that's in vogue, you don't look better, you just look like someone who's had fillers in your cheeks and lips, injections in your brow, and perhaps a tiny little face-lift." In a youth-obsessed culture, the public is still quite aware of the difference between someone who is young and someone who "appears youthful."

I doubt that the anti-aging market is going anywhere anytime soon: beauty creams have been around for thousands of years, as evidenced by a recent discovery of a 2,000 year old cream in Italy that was comprised of "fatty acids in high abundance," the same "miracle ingredients" found in many of today's anti-aging creams.

Perhaps the best way to fight the anti-aging madness is to find a way to embrace the natural aging process while maintaining a sense of Perhaps if we celebrated older men and women in our culture as much as we celebrate 15 year olds, we'd all see that beauty isn't about a lineless face or a "youthful" glow, but about a face that tells a story of a life well-lived, a life of many laughs and smiles. My 84-year-old neighbor is one of the most beautiful women I have ever met, with stark white hair and bright blue eyes and a face that matches her deep, powerful laugh. She's also fiercely independent, quite wacky, and one of the strongest people I have had the honor of knowing. If they could bottle that, I'd pay a million dollars for it.

It's not as if I still don't get roped into the anti-aging madness every now and again—it's hard not to, especially when you see your peers jumping through hoops to maintain a younger appearance, and I'm sure as I get older, it will be even harder to have a "fuck it, I love my wrinkles" attitude 24/7. There are times when it feels like you'll be the only person with a wrinkle on her face in 50 years, though perhaps it we all concentrate more on protecting our bodies from the true ravages of aging by focusing on healthy habits to reduce our risks of cancer, heart disease, and osteoporosis, we'll find that a healthy interior will reflect itself on our exterior, as health, strength, and caring for one's body will provide the type of confidence that no cream ever could.

Eternal Youth Is An Ugly Obsession [The Observer]
Aging: You Can Hurry It, But You Can't Slow It [LA Times]
Youth In A Jar? Probably Not, But We Buy It Anyway [LA Times]
2,000 Year Old Cream Shows Aristocrat's Taste [MSNBC]

Elizabeth Wurtzel is someone whom many blame for the current vogue in oversharing and personality-driven youthquaking. Privileged, fucked up, and, of course, pretty, Wurtzel's always had enemies whom she could dismiss, infuriatingly and with some justification, as merely jealous. Although a genuinely compelling writer and a defining voice of her generation, she's someone who's always mistaken candor as a substitute for insight. And with the narcissist's blithely narrow world-view, has always ascribed a universality to her own experiences, mistaking our voyeurism for empathetic commiseration.

Most of all, love her or hate her, Wurtzel was always a professional Young Woman. And as an ambassador of her generation, Wurtzel's aging process is of more than usual interest to the public she claimed as her due 20 years ago. Which makes this Elle article, "Failure to Launch: When Beauty Fades," incredibly depressing. Basically, Wurtzel is growing older. And, in her words, "people who say they have no regrets, that they don't look back in anger, are either lying or boring, not sure which is worse." Not for her serenity and wisdom. No, she is panicking at the thought of losing the power of her beauty, her hold over (horrible-sounding) men, desperate to preserve her youthful looks ("Thank God for La Mer and Retin-A and Pilates"). As she explains with characteristic candor, she was always a beautiful child, a "hot number," a woman who traded on her looks. And she misses it. While she sees the danger and futility of valuing beauty overmuch, she can't help it: panic trumps insight and she doesn't seem eager to stop it. And it's scary to see a smart and accomplished woman so openly in the thrall of others' opinions.

In Salon, Amy Benfer ruefully analyzes this depressing meditation on mortality, and comes away disheartened. While she dispatches Wurtzel's self-deception and lack of insight with a razor-sharp incisiveness (and do read it), there is, as she points out, no schadenfreude to the exercise: it's impossible to take any pleasure in such naked unhappiness. In a way, though, we're grateful to it. While one can't help but come away from "Failure to Lauch: When Beauty Fades" feeling really sad for its author, if she wants to cast herself as a cautionary tale, we're willing to learn the lesson. Early success, education, conventional beauty, a thin body - Wurtzel achieved everything we're taught to want, indeed, helped form the modern mold of what we want. We're told all the time that this isn't everything, but it helps a lot to have that reinforced by an essay like this. Teenage girls should read it. And then they should listen to another youth icon, now turning 50. It was, after all, Morrissey who said, "age shouldn't affect you. It's just like the size of your shoes - they don't determine how you live your life! You're either marvellous or you're boring, regardless of your age."

Failure To Launch: When Beauty Fades [Elle]

Confessions of a middle-aged "Bitch" [Salon]

Researchers at Case Western Reserve School of Medicine studied the body mass index of 200 pairs of female identical twins for two years, reports The Telegraph. Doctors chose twins so that they could control for genetic factors and focus only on environmental factors. The study found that twins with a BMI 4 points higher than their twin looked younger by two to four years. Doctors say this is because people who have lost weight have less volume in the face. "This loss of volume creates jowls and makes wrinkles develop," he says. "The older we get, the more the face gets depleted. When you lose weight, this look is enhanced and aging is accelerated," says Dr. Bahman Guyuron, lead study author, according to The New York Daily News. Guyuron said the findings apply only to women over 40, and that, "For women under 40, gaining weight obscures the facial definition that is inherent in a younger woman."

According to the study, women who are concerned about aging should focus more on maintaining a healthy weight than extreme dieting. "Even though being really thin is perhaps in vogue, we are not advocating that you lose too much weight because even though your body may look thin, your face will look older." Doctors say that yo-yo dieting also ages the skin by creating volume loss and repeatedly stretching facial ligaments.

The study also identified being divorced and being on antidepressants as factors that made the twins look older, in addition to the known culprits of thinness, smoking, heavy drinking, and exposure to the sun. "The twin who is divorced appears about 1.7 years older than the twin who is not divorced," said Guyuron. The research suggests that stress could be to blame, as well as the relaxation of facial muscles, which can be a long term effect of taking anti-depressants.

"The idea that being in a happy relationship is going to keep you looking younger, for me is a no-brainer. Being in a happy marriage, or indeed any social support system, has a protective effect on our health and our looks," said Dr. Linda Papadopoulous, a psychologist who studies body image according to The Telegraph. Papadopoulous said the findings of the report were positive, "but only if we read them in context." She added, "it is really encouraging because it suggests that if you learn to cope with stress, and learn to accept your body, then you cannot only change the way you think, but the way you look, too."

Dieting 'Makes You Look Older' [The Telegraph]
Study: Being Too Thin Will Age Your Face [The New York Daily News]
The Secret of Ageing Beautifully - Just Like Nigella! [The Telegraph]

[Image via Flickr.]

The parody asks questions like this one:

3. The last time you ate a Pop-Tart was:

_ When I was 6
_ When I was 15
_ Am currently eating a Pop-Tart

But the real RealAge test — at least two knockoffs of which now exist as Facebook apps — asks annoying stuff like your blood pressure and the much you drink and smoke, all to determine a number that is apparently more accurate than the actual number of years you have existed on this Earth. More accurate how, you ask? Well, since the RealAge homepage is chock-full of diet links, we guess your RealAge is supposed to reflect how old you look — you know, because fat=old and old=bad.

But it's also supposed to measure how healthy you are, aka how far you are from dying. It's a well-known fact that all deaths are caused by a person's RealAge being too high, which in turn is caused by doing naughty things like drinking, smoking, being stressed out, and failing to take RealAge tests. If you get in fatal car accident, your RealAge was probably 100 — if only you'd had the foresight to visit RealAge.com!

Seriously, just one obnoxious aspect of the RealAge test is its insinuation that getting old and being unhealthy are your fault, and can be avoided by dropping a jeans size and eating fruits and veggies. Another disturbing wrinkle: if you answer yes to any of the sites many offers of a free RealAge membership, your info will be added to a database that drug companies can access. The result, according to the Times, is that companies can send you marketing emails. Some of these emails may try to sell you drugs for diseases your info indicates you might have, even if you haven't actually been diagnosed with them.

Also upsetting is the implication that you should do things because they make you younger, and not because you enjoy them. RealAge's tagline is "Live Life to the Youngest" — they've handily replaced fulfillment and enjoyment with youth. Another Times article provides a depressing example of this mindset — apparently, listening to classical music now makes you younger. "Listening to finer music and attending concerts on a consistent basis makes your real age about four years younger," says Dr. Michael Roizen, "chief wellness officer of the Wellness Institute at the Cleveland Clinic."

The article includes some interesting thought on potential musical therapies for ailments like anxiety and insomnia, and we're perfectly willing to believe that music can be good for you. But it's also just good, and fun, and the idea that it's supposed to make you younger takes away some of the intrinsic joy and power of it. We're not saying you should be eating bacon-and-cigarette sandwiches every day and playing in traffic for dessert. But if you do everything in life with an eye toward turning back the clock, you're eventually going to be very disappointed.

How Old Are You Really? Can You Pick Up a Pencil? [New York Times]
Online Age Quiz Is a Window for Drug Makers [New York Times]
Composing Concertos in the Key of Rx [New York Times]

Earlier: Real Age Vs. Body Age: Apparently, We Are All Britney Spears

A study conducted by researchers at the University of Virginia tested the cognitive skills of over 2,000 participants ranging in age from 18-60. "The people involved – who were mostly in good health and well-educated – had to solve visual puzzles, recall words and story details and spot patterns in letters and symbols," the Daily Mail notes. 22 year olds had the best scores; after the age of 27, scores began to drop off, particularly in the areas of reasoning, spatialization, and speed of thought.

"Results converge on a conclusion that some aspects of age-related cognitive decline begin in healthy, educated adults when they are in their 20s and 30s," wrote Professor Timothy Salthouse, who believes that therapies designed to prevent the aging of the brain need to start much earlier in order to prevent cognitive deterioration.

So in the spirit of being more proactive, here's something to get you started on better understanding your brain:



Old Age Begins At 27: Scientists Reveal New Research Into Aging [Daily Mail]