Age gracefully. What does that mean to you? To me, it means to not feel ashamed of getting older. It means loving yourself the way you are naturally. It means no plastic surgery of any kind, except the absolute necessary kind. And by "absolutely necessary", I don't mean "to cover those wrinkles on your face". I mean "to cover the skin missing from your face after that horrible car accident".
I happen to find the naturally aging female more attractive than most youthful, photoshopped female. I'm sorry, have you missed my 9,000 posts about Marcia Gay Harden? They're the best sort of women. Classy and sexy and with a poise that a girl in her 30s wouldn't even know how to fake. And that's coming from a heterosexual female.
Nevertheless, I was horrified to find myself ranked in a list of people who criticized Kim Novak for her plastic surgeries in an article on The National Post.
If you're too lazy to click the article, my tweet was this:
"Kim Novak's plastic surgeon gave her a procedure called 'Taste This Lemon Forever' #Oscars".
Now, this was meant as a light jibe toward a very obvious procedure or two (or twelve).
Above most things, I am a feminist of sorts. I love a facetious "get back in the kitchen" joke as much as the next guy and I do fancy myself a hard-to-offend comedienne, but I really am a pretty staunch feminist. That being said, I'm also very against plastic surgery. Again, the unnecessary kind.
Women are certainly held to a high standard of looks, especially as they age. In a so-called man's world, it's easy for a man to say a woman has to look a certain way in order to be perceived as attractive. Personally, I've never given a damn about vanity or its related nonsense. Do I wear makeup? Yes. Do I have to wear makeup in order to leave my house? NO. I am comfortable in my own skin. And not just because I'm 28. Because I value myself as more than my face or my breasts or my waistline. I am a human being with thoughts and feelings and ideas and something to say and that's way more important than the inevitable crow's feet that will make themselves at home on my face.
However, I can empathize with the pressure of being held to an unrealistic aesthetic standard. All women are held to that standard, whether they play into it or not. And I'm sure with Hollywood being an intensely vain environment where one can either Botox that forehead or never work again, it's probably really easy to say "One more injection, doc!"... at least until the procedure is over. Then, I imagine, it's difficult to say anything. Rimshot.
But I want to be very clear when I say that I was in no way tearing Kim Novak a new asshole for her choices. Would I have rather have seen her take the high road and age gracefully like June Squibb, who is three years her senior at the age of 84? Definitely. But I certainly don't want to be mistaken for clawing at my own gender. In fact, I'd like to do the opposite. I'd like to tell women to stop while they're ahead. To leave your faces alone. You're worth more than your face. More than that waistline. More than that haircut. More than any value placed upon you by a man or any other woman.
Ultimately, we all make choices for ourselves and only we know what's best for ourselves. So it's not my place to tell any woman she can't have any face she wants. It is my place to say that Donald Trump is a moron and I don't ever want to be publicly associated as agreeing with him on anything. EVER.
No comments:
Post a Comment