During morning shifts in assisted-living, I get to help our senior residents groom and prepare for their day. The residents I work with are generally in their 80's or 90's and are at varying levels of physical and cognitive ability. Something each of the women I have the opportunity to work with have in common is their long history of profound accomplishments. Something else they each have in common is their concern for their appearance.

When I say that these women are accomplished, I'm not making an overstatement. These women have been engineers, philosophers, educators, business moguls, scientists, mothers, politicians, and the whole lot. They're sincerely awe-inspiring people to have the opportunity to work with.

With minds and spirits as successful as theirs, it's a wonder to me how these women despair over their altered appearance. As I am brushing their hair, getting them dressed, or helping put on their finishing touches, I often hear phrases such as: "I can't believe this is what I look like now" or "I used to be beautiful."

Developmental psychologist Erik Erikson has theorized eight integral psychosocial stages of development, the last being ego integrity vs. despair, experienced by persons age 65 and over. Persons in this stage are either developing integrity in pride of their accomplishments, or are developing despair in worry that they have not accomplished enough. For women I see in this stage, ego integrity is related to beauty as integral social value. A person who is unable to achieve ego integrity is said to lack in wisdom and experience greater periods of depression, anxiety, and hopelessness.

This is not to say that all women over the age of 65 are solely concerned with their appearance, that's a horrible stereotype. I notice that these women are incredibly wise and proud of what they have done, but their ability to maintain this pride is fogged by their negative body image.

Aging is difficult. We already live within a culture that rarely supports and celebrates the geriatric population. But for women, this inevitable process can be even more grueling. Let's look into some examples of how we don't give women permission to age:

1. The Anti-Aging Movement

I can't spend enough time being irked by this phrase. I wish I could be more eloquent about this one, but "anti-aging" as a term is so ridiculous. Humans age. Time passes. I'm no scientist, but it's a thing, I promise. The Anti-Aging Movement has been presented as a social movement with the aims to reduce effects of aging and extend life expectancy. As someone who works with older adults, I would love to see more movements that understand how to work with easing the physical effects of aging (i.e. sensory/motor skill loss, arthritis, painful gait, incontinence, etc). But alas, movements like this give rising to the beauty industry's grasp (which already holds a thin and white ideal).

Products like this fill and fuel the market advertised to older women, which is absurd. I mean, maybe this isn't just a glitzy moisturizer. Maybe this is actually a topically applied cream that can inhibit biological processes that all organisms are subject to. Maybe? If only. But it's a linguistically reinforced reminder that a woman should do her best to refuse the aging process being expressed on her face. Which leads to the next examination:

2. Wrinkle creams

I once had a woman say to me, "I don't want to use those products. I have these wrinkles here for a reason. They remind me of all of the times I've laughed, cried, and have shown my emotions. It's a road-map on my face, and I'm proud of it!" Unfortunately, I have only met a handful of older women who resonate with this. Articles on ways to reduce and prevent wrinkles flood women's "health" magazines and media. For me, I frown every time I see them, in hopes that I can further expedite the wrinkling process. Humans are going to get wrinkles. As we age, we lose skin turgor, moisture, and fats. Skin is the largest organ on the body, it (like all other organs) will change as we age.

3. Ageism in everyday conversations

Ageism is discrimination directed at a group based on their age. Ageism is usually aimed at persons under the age of 30 and over the age of 60. When we engage in conversations, jokes, or phrases that have ageist undertones, we're enforcing cultural ideals that harm these groups on a day-to-day basis. When we (I'm saying this to myself too) do things like: treat a woman's age like it's a secret, say "I know I look young for my age, but it'll sure pay off when I'm older!", make mal-intentioned jokes about grandmas, scrutinize an older woman's appearance greatly in comparison to her male counterparts, we're doing a more-immense-than-we-think-disservice to this population. We're ostracizing a natural process into an alien world we don't want to participate in.

I could go on, but I think the point has been made:

Aging is hard, and it's even more difficult for women. Women are constantly being sold ways to buy out of the aging process, which is an obviously impossible feat. The mere existence of these messages reminds us that a woman is perceived as nearly useless unless she can fit into conventional beauty standards or be utilized for her sexuality. The pervasive "anti-aging" culture in and of itself is dehumanizing to women, in assuming that a woman should be responsible for not submitting to an innate, human process.

To close, here is a Carrie Fisher tweet-quote on aging, because we all need more Carrie Fisher tweets in our lives:

"Please stop debating about whetherOR not I aged well.unfortunately it hurts all3 of my feelings.My BODY hasn't aged as well as I have," Fisher wrote on Twitter.

She added, "My body is a brain bag, it hauls me around to those places & in front of faces where theres something to say or see."

While on the subject of body-shaming, Fisher brought up the issue of gender imbalance by retweeting a supporter who wrote, "Men don't age better than women, they're just allowed to age."

Disclaimer:

This is only a very, very brief examination intersecting older adult females and body image culture within the United States. Discussions surrounding trans/non-binary body image upon aging would take a bit of a different lens in terms of media examination given commercialized heteronormativity. There can further be synthesized elements of race and physical ability in terms of the aging process and the media through more in-depth research.