If you're a woman .. to age is to fail

Before I am trolled for this headline, hear me out.

Last week as I was scrolling through Instagram, I started writing a comment beneath a ‘flashback’ photo of one of my friends.

She’d posted a pic of herself 10 years ago, and I started writing “You look exactly the same now as you did back then!” (with a couple of love heart eye emojis).

Then something profound smacked me firmly in the face.

I realised that I had fallen for a sinister - and not to mention lucrative - marketing ploy. An insidious tactic employed to prey on women’s insecurities.

To make us believe that … to age is to fail.

And I felt like a bit of a chump.

I mean, I’ve always been a sucker for good marketing (hello, I started drinking coconut water in 2008 because I was sold it would make me look like Jennifer Aniston. Still waiting BTW).

At that moment, looking at my mate’s photo, I felt well and truly conned.

In fact I felt collectively as women we had all been conned.

Fooled into believing that to look the way you did 10 years ago was some kind of feat, worthy of public validation.

But are we to blame?

We see it played out all the time in the tabloids. An older man is a distinguished silver fox, but a female with a few lines and grey hair has “let herself go”.

Tabloid Daily Mail’s trope is all about making women feel like sh*t.

 “You won’t believe what she looks like now”, or “Kate Moss stacks on the weight” or “Gwyneth causes controversy after exposing her ageing chest on Instagram”.

It’s no wonder J-Lo makes a point of uploading bikini photos EVERY year on her birthday. She is screaming to the world: “Hey I may be 55 but I am still HOT”.

J-Lo posting the obligatory bikini birthday selfie …

Think about it.

Every single part of beauty marketing campaigns targeting women centre around having plump skin, pouty lips, glorious (not grey) hair and a ‘youthful visage’.

I’ve never seen a commercial targeting men with saggy skin and man boobs.

And it is kind of, well, sad really.

Also, if i’m being honest, it is pretty damn exhausting.

This perennial quest for youth for women is bloody hard. And expensive.

I loathe to think of the dollars I have spent over the years on cosmetic treatments and elite skin serums and dermatologist-approved moisturisers and weird red light skin firming masks and god-damned jojoba oil from the Congo rainforest.

Yet here are men having $20 haircuts and using expired $10 moisturisers on their face.

So, as I sat there about to publicly proclaim my mate a champion as though she’d found the cure for cancer, I changed my mind.

I decided to make a point (to myself) and deleted the message I had begun writing underneath her photo.

I was feeling pretty smug, so went on to cull all the Instagram accounts I followed of the (highly filtered) influencers seemingly selling the message of 'youth rocks and old age sucks’ to me.

Yesss. I was positively raging against the (time) machine now.

Pretty soon I’d be cancelling my hair-root appointments and going ala natural forever more.

Yeah for girl (I mean mature woman) power!

Two days later I text my mate to ask her what she’d been using on her skin.

Sigh.

Baby steps.

Old mate silver fox probably doesn’t feel the pressure to scream to the world “this is 60”. He is a man after all 🙄