Beauty and Aging
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve been surprised to discover that much of what I osmotically learned as I swam in my culture’s waters is wrong. Today, one of those discoveries became graphically clear, directly contradicting the cultural “truth” that aging is a tragedy to be lamented, embarrassed about, and avoided or “repaired” to whatever extent is possible. This is especially true for women, many of whom believe all their lives that their greatest assets are physical, and who therefore support a beauty industry that, in the US alone, will bring in over $85 billion in 2022 (not including the diet or cosmetic surgery industries). But today I was presented with evidence that proves, beyond a reasonable doubt, that when life is conducted well, aging can be a beautiful thing. Even for women.
I’ve been aware of Madonna off an on (who across the globe hasn’t been?) for the last forty or so years. I’ve never been a great fan. I got the woman-empowered thing she was cheered for promoting, though I thought she used the patriarchy’s own iconography, fetishes, and cupidity to “resist'“ it. Much was made of her bravery, but I considered her brazen rather than brave; as a teenager, I myself was brazen, so I know the difference: Except when opposition is a moral stance that puts personal wellbeing at stake, crossing boundaries and lines doesn’t take courage, just audacity. And, while I admittedly didn’t follow her career with intention and so am not thoroughly versed in it, I wasn’t impressed by her music, her videos, or her other extravaganzas, which I considered kitschy and a blatant attempt to “shock.” She struck me as a self-glorifying, self-gratifying hustler who endlessly sought attention and used patriarchal tropes to get it. Inverting tropes can be an effective tactic of rebellion, but Madonna intensified rather than inverted the target tropes. She may have intended to mock and satirize them with ironic visual hyperbole, but the effect was that she played into them, advancing the patriarchal pornographic aesthetic. She “rebelled” against restriction even as she glorified the ligatures. She didn’t unleash women’s sexuality, which was her professed aim; rather, she underscored the equation of sex with spectacle and commodification—an age-old disempowering message for women.
In short, I guess it’s fair to say not only have I never been a great fan; I’ve never been a fan at all.
Madonna at 62
This afternoon, Dyke revived my aversion to Madonna’s perspectives and projects when he showed me a recent photo. She’s apparently back at it. (More likely, she never stopped; she’s just been off my radar for the past few decades.) She has removed all traces of the face she was born with and had come to know and now looks like an ornamental mannequin–corpse in a stylish detective show. Her face is stylized, her eyes blank. It is an indifferent face devoid of movement and any hint of feeling or awareness. It is a face in which every trace of ever having been touched by life has been removed. She’s beautiful in the way that a marble sculpture is beautiful: all smooth geometry and math, formulaic curves and cool stone, with none of the messy thoughts or feelings that create expressions. This image she’s projecting, which required scalpels and blood and bandages and pain, is presumably her view of ideal womanhood. Vapid. Expressionless. Devoid of real presence. Not so much above it all as somewhere else, or nowhere at all.
So what’s the image she’s going for? What’s the message she wants to convey? Extrapolating from past stunts and press, maybe something like, I am a goddess, ageless, timeless. I am my culture’s—any culture’s—platonic ideal. I am differentiated only by my perfection, but that perfection lifts me into an apse to receive my due. Life may have touched me, but no one can prove it now. Time may have changed me, but I reversed its processes and erased both what I was and what I would have become. Look upon me with a worshipful heart. Look upon me with admiration and envy. Look upon me and weep.
In fact, that face almost does makes me weep, because I know that she is modeling a bloodless standard for many girls, boys, young women, and young men who are still in the process of firming up what they believe is important, what they should want to be and what they should want to possess. Some of them learn from iconic images to prize feminine beauty above all else, which is a radical misunderstanding and misuse of the gift that their lives could otherwise be. What makes life precious is experience, which emerges from our relationship to the world and to each other. It arises from our connection to the life and lives around us. These encounters with the world are where intimacy and devotion are conceived and born. They are the elements that constitute everything we believe and everything we learn.
What Madonna teaches drives me almost to tears.
Emma Thompson at 62
A counterpoint (and perhaps an antidote) to Madonna the Icon is Emma Thompson. While web surfing I saw a few photos of her, attached to an interview in which she discusses her latest movie, Good Luck to You, Leo Grande. In these photos, as well as in the interview itself, Thompson reflects the wealth and vibrancy of thoughtful engagement and connection. These photos led me to others of her, in various states of feeling: delighted, concerned, depressed, pensive, satisfied. In all of them, she is immersed in the world. She demonstrates the entwinement of the internal and the external, and the experience that springs from the process. This is a woman worth emulating, a woman whose beauty would only be lessened by a scalpel, no matter how expertly wielded. To alter her face would underplay what she has done in and with her life. She radiates it.
True, these are only photographs. Who knows what Madonna is like in person? I’m not speculating on that; I’m only musing on what she models to the world. Madonna strikes a pose. She displays a self-absorption with her own reconstructed face and body so thorough that it blocks anything else. Thompson is also posing, of course, but she shows the beauty of engagement with life. There’s no question which beauty offers more joy, inspires more love and fellow feeling, and is worthier of admiration and emulation.
Girls and women, choose wisely and well. Reject the endless pursuit of a cool and glossy youth via surgeons’ knives; radiate the beauty that can only be earned by pursuing connections to the profusion of experiences, including the struggles, that life offers you over the years you receive. Let yourself be touched by life, and let it touch you. It won’t leave you flawless. That’s fine. It will leave you worth knowing.
And that is beautiful.