I was reviewing all the great Sports Illustrated Swim edition photos published on Instagram. It is all great fun. I did get offended though and here is what happened…A 55 year old woman “with silver hair who says she wants to change how society views women over 50”. The problem is that this woman, looked exactly like all of the other models except she has silver hair. How is that changing the perception of how people view women over 50?
The young looks are not youth. This woman had perfected the young look. This is the same as all women either do or try to do. How is that different in any way? I liked the plus size model and the model with alopecia. Now those models are different and bring a new point of view to modeling.
By the time I was twenty five years old, I had a scar on my stomach (straight up and down) from my two caesarean sections. After breastfeeding several humans, my breasts are no longer perky. Later, as I got past my forties, I put on a few pounds, a very few, but still. Ironically, I never got a grey hair until I was 60 years old. My skin is unbearably white and because of that, I am somewhat allergic to the sun. When I get too much sun I break out in hives. When I was in my 40s: I tore my meniscus and so now I sport a few scars there from the surgery. At 55 years old I was a tiny bit overweight, scarred, with pale skin and long brown – blonde hair. That is a body that would change the perception of women over 50. What I mean by that is that, at the time, I was still attractive. However, no one would have considered putting me on the swimsuit calendar, not without an airbrush.
That’s my point, we only want to look at young perfection. We want perfect skin, perfect skin tone and a flat tummy for our swim suit calendars. We aren’t open to seeing real women, their real skin with sagging breasts and scars on the belly. We have manufactured sexiness into perfection. We don’t need to do this. We can love the bodies we have and present them that way too. We don’t have to be embarrassed by our imperfections. They were never imperfections until airbrushes were (in fact) invented.
I was young when, in the early sixties, women everywhere, were burning their bras. It was a freeing period in women’s history. Did we really have to bind our bodies and be uncomfortable and hurt just to leave the house? Women everywhere were throwing their bras into big burning barrels. We thought we were on our way to victory and to emancipation!
Instead, bras came back with a vengeance and this time they were stylized, sexy and 3 times as expensive as they used to be. If you don’t have perky breasts you can look like you do have perky breasts for $42.00.
There are lots of beauties in my family, and all of the women, have a story to tell about their own struggle with body beauty. There are so many stories about that struggle, so very many stories. Young women are buying botox injections, or purchasing micro-blading for eyebrows, or having fat sucked out of the tummy to bring back that before-baby feeling. All of this for why? The body beauty is still so very beautiful at 35 and 40 and all of the way along to our own date with death. The physical body owns beauty and needs not the artist’s paint in order to be beautiful.
Marketing sexuality as a function of all beautiful young women has pushed our perceptions into a place of non-reality. This non-reality takes away the gratefulness that we have for the here and now. For example, the here and now that I am sixty years old and am still sexy. The here and now of forty-nine that looks like thirty-two and is still gorgeous right now.
Women, at any age, are beautiful, just as they are. We don’t need airbrushes and don’t need perky breasts. We need to be appreciated for who and what we are, right here and right now.