As I approach 40, I find myself constantly scanning the bodies and faces of women I encounter out in the world and attempting to judge whether they are older or younger than me. It’s as if I realized that my internal age clock needed re-calibrating, and I was still equating myself to women around 30. But I see myself being extremely judgmental about it, towards both myself and to these other women. “At least I don’t look as old as her.” “Ugh I wish I looked as young/cool/sophisticated as her.” It’s like I’m in high school again. I suppose measuring myself against real life women instead of airbrushed or photoshopped models is a better scenario? But I’d rather not be judging anyone at all.... so, to the point of your subject line, how do we also escape the female gaze, including the self gaze??
I’m in my early twenties and have never felt any sort of body image discomfort until I downloaded Tik Tok maybe a year ago. It distorted my ability to remember what most people look like because even random videos from small accounts featured really conventionally attractive women. I always understood beauty standards to be some sort of ideal that society thought women *should* look like, but knew most of my friends, family, colleagues didn’t actually look like that. Tik Tok’s model of viral, quick content consumption made me feel like the standards actually *are* how women look. I used to be okay being “average” because that’s, by definition, what a large number of people were. But Tik Tok made me feel like an aberration because it presented an “average” totally detached from reality. Coupling this with the drastic reduction in the time Gen Z people spend with actual people compared to other generations, I think it can change the way your brain subconsciously samples of reality in pernicious ways. I really encourage all my friends to ditch Tik Tok and think the worry many people have about it’s effect on kids, especially girls, is completely justified.
I'm in my early thirties but when I was in my twenties, I noticed in the 2010s that the viral makeup tutorial trends ("contouring", etc.) seemed to have an outside impact on some women I knew and seemed to increase the already awful pressures they had to look a certain way ("thinner," "lifted," etc.) Some of this is a female-gaze (enforcing the male-gaze) problem too!
I have a significant facial difference (a big blue birthmark splashed over a third of my face) which means that I've spent my young adulthood largely out of the pressure to "be pretty" on social media, because no matter what I do, hardly anyone sees my birthmark as beautiful except myself. I'm constantly judged on something that no amount of makeup or surgery will ever make go away, so why even participate? When you get taken out of "the game" as I have, through no effort of your own, you can really see how degrading a lot of it is. It's almost been a relief. That said, I've intentionally "curated" my social media content by following social media accounts promoting birthmarks as normal human conditions. Even if I don't feel pressure to change or cover up my birthmark, it still feels lonely sometimes when one ideal of how a woman should look like is pressed at all fronts.
My hair is white. I'm of an age now when that is not uncommon, but when I first stopped coloring, I was just 61. Then and now, I am an active woman, intellectually and socially, so I was stunned by the reactions I got to my white hair. Instantly, I was a "little old lady," dismissed and patronized. I am fortunate to live in a retirement community where I look like everyone else and don't have to put up with any "written-off" treatment on a daily basis. To bolster my self-image, I interact with the world now largely by writing so that my words are judged and not my age.
I think there is not a clear line between being "pretty/beautiful" and being "sexually attractive." I don't know if that's a societal thing or an intrinsic thing. When you're trying to "dress professionally" or "dress up for a fancy occasion" then that line is especially unclear. As an adult I have a better sense of how to dress, but as a teenager it was a mess, because I was new to dressing in an adult way, and also new to having an adult psychology/emotions, and I had very little experience with either. I think that teenagers could really benefit from some clear guidance on this, but that assumes adults are prepared to give that guidance. Even as an adult, the kind of clothes I would wear to a formal occasion are more revealing, more fitted than the kind of clothes a man would wear to a formal occasion -- and that's true even if I dress in a mature adult married woman "not looking for male sexual attention" kind of way. And I'm not really sure what to make of all this.
1. I got online around the time I was 14-ish, back in the early Xanga/LJ days of blogging. I’m pretty petite and babyfaced, but I usually had gender-neutral user names and this was in the pre-Facebook era. To this day, it’s really, really saddening to me how people treated me and my thoughts with more respect online when they coded me as masculine or at least non-feminine. I’m a lawyer in my 30’s now but still look a little young, and I still am surprised by the deference I get via writing vs. the assumption that I’m the secretary or clerk irl. (My first name is pretty femme imho, but plausibly could also be a man’s name.) Embodiment is great most of the time, I mostly am glad to be a woman, but this part of it sucks.
2. Re: images of 30-something women, I do feel like this age bracket is weird in the way that being 13 is weird. Like, a 13 yo could be anyone from a very small, prepubescent kid to like, the big, pot-smoking baddies at the skate park. At this age, there are women I know who look 22 and have very carefree lifestyles; there are women who look 42 and have crushing responsibilities toward children, finances, have experienced grief, etc. The span of what it means to be at this stage in life is so wide that I try to grant myself and others mercy, and remember that aging is often a reflection of life lessons learned.
3. It’s so gross but I do get a slight frisson when my younger friends tell me that they forget that I’m five years their senior. I’ve also gotten into Pilates, which I love, but lie to myself that it’s solely for “my health” and not at least 40% because I want to maintain a certain sort of *~hot body~* that, realistically, age or children will take from me at some point.
I'm in my mid-late 20s and a lot of the images and style advice I encounter is organized around what's "flattering" for "mom bodies," which is an only slightly coy way of saying that something makes your stomach look flat. So I do see a lot of relatively unfiltered images of average woman, but mostly in the context of criticizing them. You have to be indirect when you criticize other women, as in "that dress doesn't do you any favors [which you definitely need]," but if you're talking about yourself you can just come out and say "I need to hide my my disgusting arms" and if any bystanders happen to have the same features you're insulting, that's their problem.
I had a weird experience regarding what a woman of my station (mother of young children) should look like.
Pregnancy aggravates my asthma. One day when my husband was away on work, I needed urgent care for asthma but couldn't get it since I couldn't justify the risk to my children (both born and unborn) of my getting behind the wheel while faint from lack of breath to get to urgent care. While I lay there, barely sentient, gasping, a born child of mine tipped a lamp onto my face and broke my nose. Now I really needed urgent care!
We went to urgent care when my husband got home, but urgent care insisted my nose wasn't broken, just misshapen from swelling. But, if I liked, I could make a non-urgent appointment with a nose surgeon weeks later if I was still worried. As the swelling went down, it became clear my nose was simply in a new shape. The nose surgeon, perhaps trying to make me feel better that I had missed the chance to set my broken nose and could not have it rebroken while pregnant to reset it, complemented me on the broken side of my nose actually looking nicer than the unbroken side! He said people pay him good money to break their noses into such a shape!
Again, I think he was just trying to jolly me along during a time when nothing could be done. But what I was thinking (but not saying) is, "But who pays for an asymmetric nose, and even if others would want both sides of their nose to look that way, I didn't. I just wanted to be believed in time to have my nose treated before the break set, and I wasn't."
"What are the primary visual sources of what it means to be a woman your age that you encounter?"
Hair color is the one, without question. Does a woman in my age group of matrons in their middle years color their hair?
When I see her in public, does she have children and grandchildren with her? These are definitely markers. If you have children who are young adults or even older, you are definitely in your middle years.
"What are the non-visual ways you form an image of what it means to be a woman your age?"
What are her interests? Middle aged women tend to have interests that younger women don't think about, like retirement matters, dealing with young adult children, and eldercare matters.
I had somewhat similar growing-up thoughts as yours, Leah. I viewed putting time, effort, and money into beautification as falling for a scam - and aiding and abetting the sustained oppression of half the population.
But these cultural practices - contouring, wearing revealing clothes, getting your nails done, pilates - they don't have to be for the male gaze at all. And they never detract from the inherent worth of the woman who does them. A lot of our societal problems would be solved if everyone recognized that the most contoured and scantily clad girl has the same worth as the most modest.
And the way I see it, the push for gender-as-a-spectrum and the rise of nonbinary pronouns in particular is generally a more accurate representation of the way most people experience gendered cultural practices. People choose a bit of column A (femme practices) and a bit of column B (masc practices) and mix it up as they see fit.
I think a lot less energy should be spent worrying about the pronouns people choose, or the rise of people who identify as nonbinary, and a lot more energy spent directly confronting the horrific oppression women and girls face in our messed up society. Sure, sometimes people identify as nonbinary as a direct result of that oppression. But *our* gaze should be focused on the oppression!
It's horrifying to me that we still tolerate the predation and abuse of kids and women - online and offline. That we don't have better systems for identifying sexual abuse, and that abusers walk away with light sentences (if any at all). That child marriage is still legal in this country. That sexual abuse in foster care is dismissed as both common and to-be-expected. That we don't teach kids about their bodies in school, or about consent, or mandate comprehensive sex ed. There is so much that can and should be done, and the concern about pronouns (and trans folks generally!) directly sucks the energy out of finding solutions to our real problems.
Mary Harrington persuasively makes the point, as does the much earlier essay from The Atlantic on the sex recession (the December 2018 one in particular as there are several articles addressing this) of the obvious reasons young women and women in general want to avoid the pornographic gaze. And the internet has exploded that experience so it feels much more dangerous to be a woman (and perhaps might be -- the stories in The Atlantic on what a man thinks is normal sex is exploitive and degrading to say the least.)
I am 61 and feel attractive for what that's worth. I am currently reading "Health as a Virtue: Thomas Aquinas and the Practice of Habits of Health" by a Methodist pastor and theologian Melanie L. Dobson; although she obviously addresses health as the main thrust of her book, physical beauty makes an appearance. Somehow by pursuing God's will, including in the care of the body that in turn is used for its own proper ends, puts all the questions of beauty in perspective. The soul shines through and makes us beautiful -- in ways not captured by advertising or even a camera -- if we cultivate a virtuous life, including the habits of health per Aquinas. Here is a succinct video on how to remedy the situation generated by the pornographic gaze, but perhaps of interest only to Catholics and Orthodox believers: https://www.osvtalks.com/talks/eucharistic-healing-of-the-pornographic-gaze/.
What efforts do I make to curate the images I encounter? Okay, here I'm thinking this includes non-visual ones... I love to read novels, and I latch on to an author like an Amy Tan or Marilynne Robinson, or Naomi Novik and they are all about the inner life of the characters... so the "image" I'm forming of these women isn't usually ABOUT the physical.
ALSO, I think something as long as a novel HELPS you see a good, understandable portrait of anything as complex as a human being, with all her flaws and foibles, and her virtues and inner beauty.
This topic makes so much sense to me. When I was about 14 or 15, I sent school-portrait-y pictures to a guy friend (non-romantic) on IRC about my age. (probably 1 or 2 years younger) When we talked the next day, he messaged me back and made a joke that I didn't immediately understand about what he did once he was in possession of my picture. (Because the usage I was familiar with of the verb the friend chose was mostly as a swear, for "goofing off / dawdling / not doing work.") Note: With this one, I think he probably was saying that falsely as a joke because it was funny to him and he didn't "get" how it would sound to me.
Same school-portrait-type pictures sent to another guy non-romantic friend, (about 20, I think) around the same time, and he told me that he'd had a dream and I was in it and he felt bad about it. :<
It took me less than a year to decide to switch to an IRC username that lacked identification of me as female. (Originally I was "JustaCowgirl." Yeah, that was not genius-level username-creation, lol! I thought it femininely-cute, but sufficiently wholesome. Now that I think about it, none of the 3 other female online "regulars" on that IRC channel--even ones who flirted constantly with males--had a identifiably-female-by-Western-standards username.)
So not your main point, but I came here to comment that one of my life's missions in my preteen years was to get myself into Zillions somehow (finally achieved it by unexpectedly becoming one of the winners of a homemade-gifts contest!), and I totally agree with you about that making me a lifelong advertising skeptic in a way that shaped my self-concept as a woman.
As I approach 40, I find myself constantly scanning the bodies and faces of women I encounter out in the world and attempting to judge whether they are older or younger than me. It’s as if I realized that my internal age clock needed re-calibrating, and I was still equating myself to women around 30. But I see myself being extremely judgmental about it, towards both myself and to these other women. “At least I don’t look as old as her.” “Ugh I wish I looked as young/cool/sophisticated as her.” It’s like I’m in high school again. I suppose measuring myself against real life women instead of airbrushed or photoshopped models is a better scenario? But I’d rather not be judging anyone at all.... so, to the point of your subject line, how do we also escape the female gaze, including the self gaze??
I’m in my early twenties and have never felt any sort of body image discomfort until I downloaded Tik Tok maybe a year ago. It distorted my ability to remember what most people look like because even random videos from small accounts featured really conventionally attractive women. I always understood beauty standards to be some sort of ideal that society thought women *should* look like, but knew most of my friends, family, colleagues didn’t actually look like that. Tik Tok’s model of viral, quick content consumption made me feel like the standards actually *are* how women look. I used to be okay being “average” because that’s, by definition, what a large number of people were. But Tik Tok made me feel like an aberration because it presented an “average” totally detached from reality. Coupling this with the drastic reduction in the time Gen Z people spend with actual people compared to other generations, I think it can change the way your brain subconsciously samples of reality in pernicious ways. I really encourage all my friends to ditch Tik Tok and think the worry many people have about it’s effect on kids, especially girls, is completely justified.
I'm in my early thirties but when I was in my twenties, I noticed in the 2010s that the viral makeup tutorial trends ("contouring", etc.) seemed to have an outside impact on some women I knew and seemed to increase the already awful pressures they had to look a certain way ("thinner," "lifted," etc.) Some of this is a female-gaze (enforcing the male-gaze) problem too!
I have a significant facial difference (a big blue birthmark splashed over a third of my face) which means that I've spent my young adulthood largely out of the pressure to "be pretty" on social media, because no matter what I do, hardly anyone sees my birthmark as beautiful except myself. I'm constantly judged on something that no amount of makeup or surgery will ever make go away, so why even participate? When you get taken out of "the game" as I have, through no effort of your own, you can really see how degrading a lot of it is. It's almost been a relief. That said, I've intentionally "curated" my social media content by following social media accounts promoting birthmarks as normal human conditions. Even if I don't feel pressure to change or cover up my birthmark, it still feels lonely sometimes when one ideal of how a woman should look like is pressed at all fronts.
My hair is white. I'm of an age now when that is not uncommon, but when I first stopped coloring, I was just 61. Then and now, I am an active woman, intellectually and socially, so I was stunned by the reactions I got to my white hair. Instantly, I was a "little old lady," dismissed and patronized. I am fortunate to live in a retirement community where I look like everyone else and don't have to put up with any "written-off" treatment on a daily basis. To bolster my self-image, I interact with the world now largely by writing so that my words are judged and not my age.
I think there is not a clear line between being "pretty/beautiful" and being "sexually attractive." I don't know if that's a societal thing or an intrinsic thing. When you're trying to "dress professionally" or "dress up for a fancy occasion" then that line is especially unclear. As an adult I have a better sense of how to dress, but as a teenager it was a mess, because I was new to dressing in an adult way, and also new to having an adult psychology/emotions, and I had very little experience with either. I think that teenagers could really benefit from some clear guidance on this, but that assumes adults are prepared to give that guidance. Even as an adult, the kind of clothes I would wear to a formal occasion are more revealing, more fitted than the kind of clothes a man would wear to a formal occasion -- and that's true even if I dress in a mature adult married woman "not looking for male sexual attention" kind of way. And I'm not really sure what to make of all this.
1. I got online around the time I was 14-ish, back in the early Xanga/LJ days of blogging. I’m pretty petite and babyfaced, but I usually had gender-neutral user names and this was in the pre-Facebook era. To this day, it’s really, really saddening to me how people treated me and my thoughts with more respect online when they coded me as masculine or at least non-feminine. I’m a lawyer in my 30’s now but still look a little young, and I still am surprised by the deference I get via writing vs. the assumption that I’m the secretary or clerk irl. (My first name is pretty femme imho, but plausibly could also be a man’s name.) Embodiment is great most of the time, I mostly am glad to be a woman, but this part of it sucks.
2. Re: images of 30-something women, I do feel like this age bracket is weird in the way that being 13 is weird. Like, a 13 yo could be anyone from a very small, prepubescent kid to like, the big, pot-smoking baddies at the skate park. At this age, there are women I know who look 22 and have very carefree lifestyles; there are women who look 42 and have crushing responsibilities toward children, finances, have experienced grief, etc. The span of what it means to be at this stage in life is so wide that I try to grant myself and others mercy, and remember that aging is often a reflection of life lessons learned.
3. It’s so gross but I do get a slight frisson when my younger friends tell me that they forget that I’m five years their senior. I’ve also gotten into Pilates, which I love, but lie to myself that it’s solely for “my health” and not at least 40% because I want to maintain a certain sort of *~hot body~* that, realistically, age or children will take from me at some point.
I'm in my mid-late 20s and a lot of the images and style advice I encounter is organized around what's "flattering" for "mom bodies," which is an only slightly coy way of saying that something makes your stomach look flat. So I do see a lot of relatively unfiltered images of average woman, but mostly in the context of criticizing them. You have to be indirect when you criticize other women, as in "that dress doesn't do you any favors [which you definitely need]," but if you're talking about yourself you can just come out and say "I need to hide my my disgusting arms" and if any bystanders happen to have the same features you're insulting, that's their problem.
I had a weird experience regarding what a woman of my station (mother of young children) should look like.
Pregnancy aggravates my asthma. One day when my husband was away on work, I needed urgent care for asthma but couldn't get it since I couldn't justify the risk to my children (both born and unborn) of my getting behind the wheel while faint from lack of breath to get to urgent care. While I lay there, barely sentient, gasping, a born child of mine tipped a lamp onto my face and broke my nose. Now I really needed urgent care!
We went to urgent care when my husband got home, but urgent care insisted my nose wasn't broken, just misshapen from swelling. But, if I liked, I could make a non-urgent appointment with a nose surgeon weeks later if I was still worried. As the swelling went down, it became clear my nose was simply in a new shape. The nose surgeon, perhaps trying to make me feel better that I had missed the chance to set my broken nose and could not have it rebroken while pregnant to reset it, complemented me on the broken side of my nose actually looking nicer than the unbroken side! He said people pay him good money to break their noses into such a shape!
Again, I think he was just trying to jolly me along during a time when nothing could be done. But what I was thinking (but not saying) is, "But who pays for an asymmetric nose, and even if others would want both sides of their nose to look that way, I didn't. I just wanted to be believed in time to have my nose treated before the break set, and I wasn't."
"What are the primary visual sources of what it means to be a woman your age that you encounter?"
Hair color is the one, without question. Does a woman in my age group of matrons in their middle years color their hair?
When I see her in public, does she have children and grandchildren with her? These are definitely markers. If you have children who are young adults or even older, you are definitely in your middle years.
"What are the non-visual ways you form an image of what it means to be a woman your age?"
What are her interests? Middle aged women tend to have interests that younger women don't think about, like retirement matters, dealing with young adult children, and eldercare matters.
I had somewhat similar growing-up thoughts as yours, Leah. I viewed putting time, effort, and money into beautification as falling for a scam - and aiding and abetting the sustained oppression of half the population.
But these cultural practices - contouring, wearing revealing clothes, getting your nails done, pilates - they don't have to be for the male gaze at all. And they never detract from the inherent worth of the woman who does them. A lot of our societal problems would be solved if everyone recognized that the most contoured and scantily clad girl has the same worth as the most modest.
And the way I see it, the push for gender-as-a-spectrum and the rise of nonbinary pronouns in particular is generally a more accurate representation of the way most people experience gendered cultural practices. People choose a bit of column A (femme practices) and a bit of column B (masc practices) and mix it up as they see fit.
I think a lot less energy should be spent worrying about the pronouns people choose, or the rise of people who identify as nonbinary, and a lot more energy spent directly confronting the horrific oppression women and girls face in our messed up society. Sure, sometimes people identify as nonbinary as a direct result of that oppression. But *our* gaze should be focused on the oppression!
It's horrifying to me that we still tolerate the predation and abuse of kids and women - online and offline. That we don't have better systems for identifying sexual abuse, and that abusers walk away with light sentences (if any at all). That child marriage is still legal in this country. That sexual abuse in foster care is dismissed as both common and to-be-expected. That we don't teach kids about their bodies in school, or about consent, or mandate comprehensive sex ed. There is so much that can and should be done, and the concern about pronouns (and trans folks generally!) directly sucks the energy out of finding solutions to our real problems.
Mary Harrington persuasively makes the point, as does the much earlier essay from The Atlantic on the sex recession (the December 2018 one in particular as there are several articles addressing this) of the obvious reasons young women and women in general want to avoid the pornographic gaze. And the internet has exploded that experience so it feels much more dangerous to be a woman (and perhaps might be -- the stories in The Atlantic on what a man thinks is normal sex is exploitive and degrading to say the least.)
I am 61 and feel attractive for what that's worth. I am currently reading "Health as a Virtue: Thomas Aquinas and the Practice of Habits of Health" by a Methodist pastor and theologian Melanie L. Dobson; although she obviously addresses health as the main thrust of her book, physical beauty makes an appearance. Somehow by pursuing God's will, including in the care of the body that in turn is used for its own proper ends, puts all the questions of beauty in perspective. The soul shines through and makes us beautiful -- in ways not captured by advertising or even a camera -- if we cultivate a virtuous life, including the habits of health per Aquinas. Here is a succinct video on how to remedy the situation generated by the pornographic gaze, but perhaps of interest only to Catholics and Orthodox believers: https://www.osvtalks.com/talks/eucharistic-healing-of-the-pornographic-gaze/.
What efforts do I make to curate the images I encounter? Okay, here I'm thinking this includes non-visual ones... I love to read novels, and I latch on to an author like an Amy Tan or Marilynne Robinson, or Naomi Novik and they are all about the inner life of the characters... so the "image" I'm forming of these women isn't usually ABOUT the physical.
ALSO, I think something as long as a novel HELPS you see a good, understandable portrait of anything as complex as a human being, with all her flaws and foibles, and her virtues and inner beauty.
This topic makes so much sense to me. When I was about 14 or 15, I sent school-portrait-y pictures to a guy friend (non-romantic) on IRC about my age. (probably 1 or 2 years younger) When we talked the next day, he messaged me back and made a joke that I didn't immediately understand about what he did once he was in possession of my picture. (Because the usage I was familiar with of the verb the friend chose was mostly as a swear, for "goofing off / dawdling / not doing work.") Note: With this one, I think he probably was saying that falsely as a joke because it was funny to him and he didn't "get" how it would sound to me.
Same school-portrait-type pictures sent to another guy non-romantic friend, (about 20, I think) around the same time, and he told me that he'd had a dream and I was in it and he felt bad about it. :<
It took me less than a year to decide to switch to an IRC username that lacked identification of me as female. (Originally I was "JustaCowgirl." Yeah, that was not genius-level username-creation, lol! I thought it femininely-cute, but sufficiently wholesome. Now that I think about it, none of the 3 other female online "regulars" on that IRC channel--even ones who flirted constantly with males--had a identifiably-female-by-Western-standards username.)
So not your main point, but I came here to comment that one of my life's missions in my preteen years was to get myself into Zillions somehow (finally achieved it by unexpectedly becoming one of the winners of a homemade-gifts contest!), and I totally agree with you about that making me a lifelong advertising skeptic in a way that shaped my self-concept as a woman.