I decided to write about those awful Instagram ladies with silver hair, who expect a medal for going gray. They all have tons of followers who idolize them and eat up every positive, self-congratulating post about Loving Life, or practicing yoga. To me, these women seem interchangeable; they all have a silver mane that they constantly refer to, and they are all very thin if not emaciated.

So I googled “gray-haired women” to look for some images to copy. None of them excited me until I saw one who called herself a “Pro-aging Ambassador.” I never heard of this title and have no idea if there’s a million or if she’s the only one. And I don’t know what duties the ambassadorship entails. Does she travel the world giving speeches about the Wonders of Aging?  Does she chair committees?

I would like to adopt my own title: Anti-aging Ambassador. I will go around complaining about getting old (which I already do constantly, in an unofficial capacity.) I will persuade those silver foxes to wipe the smiles off their wrinkly faces.

Instead of “embracing the gray”, I will extol the glory of dyed hair. I will heartily mock the actresses who have suddenly embraced their gray. Jane Fonda, Andi McDowell, even Jennifer Aniston, apparently. They all look better with their hair dyed. Maybe they’re just too lazy to keep up the color, but let’s not act as though they cured cancer. Plus, you need to spend plenty of time to keep that silver looking soft and shiny instead of dull and coarse.

My sister has a friend who went gray a million years ago, before she was forty, and we always wondered what her problem was. Why did she just let her turn grey and straggly? Was she making a Statement? Was she saying, “I’ll show you, society, I don’t have to adhere to your beauty standards”? Her hair is still gray and we’ve decided she’s being passive-aggressive.

Being old truly sucks. There is nothing good about it. Nothing. All those platitudes that begin with, “The good thing about getting old is” are lies. “…you stop  caring about what people think of you!” “You are so much wiser!” “You know what really matters in life!”

Please. I am nearly seventy and still totally crushed if someone doesn’t like me. I don’t know anything about anything, and keep making the same mistakes. I’ve obviously learned that life is fraught with catastrophes, but I already assumed this as a teenager from reading Thomas Hardy novels. I have acquired no wisdom to pass on except “wear more shorts while you’re young!” I have opinions and policies but not wisdom. And I’m just as confused and mystified as I’ve always been. I have no idea what matters. I’d like to keep my eyesight and be able to wipe my own butt but otherwise I don’t know what ‘s important at this point when the key milestones of life have already passed.

Late adulthood is a time of deep reflection and introspection. If you are proud of the life that you have led, then you should feel a sense of peace. If, however, you are haunted by regrets and failures, you will likely experience despair and resentment.

According to Erikson, either ego-integrity or ego-despair characterizes the end of life for older adults. The virtue of this stage is wisdom.

Well, yes but no. Maybe it’s just my ego-despair talking, but the old people I know are all worried about diabetes and Alzheimer’s and health insurance. We can’t remember words and don’t like to crouch down to tie our shoes. Personally, I salt everything and eat lots of processed food but most of the old people I know are serious about their diet. We want either Botox or fillers and wish we could lose that roll of flab. When we watch TV and see someone for the first time in years, we scream “OH GOD, WHAT HAPPENED TO HIM/HER??” Maybe that last part is just me, but I doubt it.

For as long as you can ward off old age,  you should enjoy the use of your body and brain before they become a burden to you or someone else. Prepare for loneliness and a lack of purpose. Make sure you have all the cable channels and a good TV.

And for fucksake, commit to the upkeep of your hair and don’t believe it when your partner or children say you look great with gray hair. They’re just threatened by your lingering attractiveness, such as it is. I may be senile but my hair is glorious! I pay a fortune to color and tame it but it’s worth every penny. To paraphrase Yeats,

only God, my dear,
Could love you for yourself alone
And not your yellow hair.

You can let yourself go, I mean embrace your gray, if you must, but bury me blonde. Or cremate me blonde. Whatever.

Not long ago, I saw my own thigh in the sunlight though my bathroom window and I screamed. EW! Whose leg is that? I thought. I’m not kidding; that was my actual thought. I guess I expected to see my thigh as it exists in my memory. Not the world’s best thigh, but not a dry crepe-y one with no muscle tone. Today as I walked my dog, wearing cut off jeans because of the awful, muggy heat, I looked down and saw it again. Truly an old thigh, commensurate with my age but no less disappointing and even shocking.

You think this is stupid and shallow but just wait. You too will experience this cognitive dissonance unless you go blind, in which case you’ll have a while different set of problems. Since I rarely look at my own body in bright sunlight, I had no idea this was happening. A person I know who inspects every inch of her body and face every single day and exfoliates with a stiff vegetable brush will never be taken by surprise.

But keeping shit from falling apart is just too time consuming. It already takes me forever to get ready for bed, and my beauty routine is practically non-existent. Have  you guys seem Kim Kardashian’s new skincare line with nine (or 12?) products that she says are essential to use together in a certain order? Forget the cost. The time spent at your sink would move bedtime to around 4:am. No, Kim, don’t make me!

So being an old bag leaves you very few choices of how to visualize and project your image to yourself and the world. On one end of the spectrum is Paulina Porizkova, who at 57 never stops bitching about how the male gaze won’t acknowledge her aging appeal while shoving her remarkably well-preserved body in our face nonstop on Instagram.

Paulina rose to fame at just 18 years old as the first Central European woman to be on the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. Almost 40 years later, Paulina said she still feels sexy and hated society’s obsession with looking youthful. Despite still feeling confident though, the mother-of-two said younger men haven’t been interested in her.

daring to look her age!

Haha Paulina, you hate the obsession with looking youthful? I guess all the bikini shots are just something you do for fun.

She said: “I am now completely invisible.“I walk into a party, I try to flirt with guys and they will just walk away from me mid-sentence to pursue someone 20 years younger.”

God, just shut up Paulina and fuck off. Eat some sandwiches. If you want to hear more of this faux insecurity, check out her Instagram.

At the other end is Bridget Fonda, who has evidently rejected all efforts at looking young and attractive. When I first saw a recent picture of her, I didn’t believe it. It could not be her. Even though regular non-celebrities look old and fat when they’re old and fat, Bridget Fonda’s transformation is just startling. She is unrecognizable.

then and now

I felt sort of betrayed by Bridget. I should have admired her courage to stop pursuing a narrowly defined ideal of female beauty. Maybe she’s trying to live the opposite existence of her aunt Jane, whose face is now a clownish travesty

Somewhere in between these two extremes is a healthy outlook on aging. I just can’t find it.

It’s not the male gaze that bothers me. It’s my own gaze in the cruel morning light of my bathroom. I’m going to get some under eye filler and then go around pretending that I’d never get any filler, just like J. Lo and everyone else.

And I’ll stop wearing cut offs or just remember to not look down. Aging is so horrible! I just googled the insulting term “aging gracefully” and found a list of tips. I’m not going to follow any of them, because of my PDA, but you can if you want to.

Thoughts, ladies and gays?

When I saw an ad on Sephora online for a “Booty Mask“, I was excited by discovering a  new avenue of ridicule. Haha, I thought, how absurd, a beauty mask JUST FOR YOUR BUTT! I’m still amazed by the aisles full of weird Korean sheet masks at my local CVS. It seeks like overnight, people have become obsessed with masks. In my world, skin masks are something you do maybe every six months when you’re bored and nothing’s on TV.

Silly me! I went to laugh at the website for B-tight Booty Mask, because little did I know that butt products already comprise a whole category of creams and scrubs and masks that promise you a smaller, bigger, smoother, better smelling, tighter, and more voluminous ass.

Think about your butt and everything it has to go through every day. invest in your booty skin, Don’t leave your booty behind! 100% Safe & Effective. Increases Skin Firmness. Helps Reduce Cellulite. Tightens The Skin.

Do I really have to think about my butt more than I already do? As the daughter of a full-throated misogynist who liked to shout about random women, “Look at the fat ass on that one!” I am more than aware of my butt, and not in a good way. After 27 years of marriage, I still try to walk out of the room backward if I’m undressed.  I couldn’t put into words what the flaw is; I just know that my butt’s very existence is an offense of some kind.

And yet I am not prepared to buy any butt products. The language employed to describe these products is itself a crime against humanity. Here’s part of a review on Refinery29:

To my surprise, mirrors weren’t necessary — although I did literally “look back at it” twice while lying on my stomach just to make sure my entire bum was covered, adding more product as needed. Once satisfied with the pink-tinted mounds behind me, I did as instructed and scrolled Instagram for 20 minutes while it hardened.

“Pink-tinted mounds”?! SOMEONE NEEDS TO DIE.

Then there’s the actual names of the products, like “Tush” (“plumping and lifting infusers for the tush,” $175) and even worse, “That booty tho.” How could anyone name a product that, unless they’re trying to kill me personally?? I guess I should be grateful they didn’t go with “Dat”.

Who’d like to try a Bamboo Charcoal Butt Cheek Mask? This one you use after the Butt Cheek Cleanser, and it offers:

the added benefit of brightening age spots, sun spots and hyper-pigmentation. Ingredients include MSM and Vitamin C, which make the complexion look clearer and more radiant with each use.

Your butt has a complexion that needs to be radiant?? Is there enough time in the day to beautify every body part? I know there’s an overnight mask for your feet that promises to give you smooth, baby-soft feet. Maybe wee all need to be babies again. Soft and new, devoid of pores and age-spots, spitting up milk but still preferable to something that’s been around for awhile, accumulating age spots.

But wait, I just found Rump Bottom Rub by Lush, and the comments almost make it all worthwhile!

Ladies and other people with butts, are you ready to invest in the dream of a bigger, smaller, tighter, more radiant ass? Until they make one with my father’s voice screaming out of his car window, I am abstaining.

Mid-rise. Four-pocket styling. Single cropped leg. Zip-fly. Partially lined. Tonal hardware.

“Single cropped leg.” Roger that. No explanation necessary! Here’s another view:

So good.  All eyes will be on you, hopefully. It’s a casual look, and quite breezy on the one leg, but you can upgrade for a more formal look by getting the nicely proportioned matching jacket.

For some reason, I think the trousers would be better for a one-legged person, don’t you? Instead of leaving that poor exposed leg to just hang there so vulnerably, a one-legged person would look great, without having to to take it to a tailor. I feel the same way about the popular one-armed look in dresses and tops. I just don’t feel good about the bared limb.

Let’s say you’re Dan Cooper, a guy who is currently featured on a reality show in the UK, living in a house with 4 other “extraordinary” people. Evidently, viewers don’t have much sympathy for Dan, who had his leg chopped off in order to feel “whole.”

Dan has BIID, and suffered for many years with the affliction of having one too many legs. Interestingly, this appears to be an extremely British disorder. There’s a great documentary somewhere that spends time with a few of these guys and they are all British. A Scottish surgeon got in trouble for amputating healthy legs, even though he was just trying to prevent his patients from seeking a potentially life-threatening back alley solution to their being bipeds.

Be that as it may! Dan is now a TV personality and people will just have to learn to accept him. Thank god that fucking leg isn’t tormenting him any more. But how good would he look in those mid-rise, partially lined pants at Ssense?

I’m just saying.

Yesterday I bought a pair of Levi’s with tummy control. It was a milestone. And a defeat.

You know all those commercials about “belly fat?” And maybe you say to yourself, Ew, what a slob, I wouldn’t let that happen to me!

But after a certain age, your tummy appears out of nowhere. You used to worry about your thighs or something, but you never gave a thought to your tummy. When you look down and realize you’re on your way to becoming a sumo wrestler, it’s too late.

So now I still wear the same size but it isn’t the same. I hate it. I can’t wear a fitted t shirt or everyone will know. At home, I can sit on the couch and mourn the rolls of flab, resigned to the fact that they aren’t going anywhere. I perk up at the new ads about Cool Sculpting, a procedure that promises to freeze and evaporate your tummy fat.  If only! I think it would be worth a few thousand to have a  flat stomach again.

And yet, how could you do that, knowing there are starving refugees living in tents without anything? Your flat stomach would be a sin against humanity. So instead of sinning against humanity, I went to try on the new Levi’s.

Sure enough, they hold your tummy in, with an extra layer of something. They look just like regular skinny jeans. Whereas those Not Your Daughter’s jeans are cut for elephants and are super unflattering. I bought the new Levi’s, even though I was horrified that they cost $98. Ninety-eight dollars may be a transgression verging on sin, especially given the stacks of jeans in my closet.

Later at home, I tried on my new jeans. I noticed that they smelled funny. Not funny, but awful. An awful chemical smell that I couldn’t quite identify. So I took off the tags and hand-washed them in cold water. Then I rinsed them with Downy. Then I put them in a warm dryer. When I took them out, they still smelled awful.

I asked my husband to smell them, even though he hates being ordered to smell things. He thought he smelled cleaning fluid.

I’m going to exchange the jeans, unless all the tummy-control Levi’s smell like cleaning fluid, as a punishment for my vanity. Maybe I am double cursed with a tummy roll AND a heightened sensitivity to smell. (see hyperosmia.) But what’s a person supposed to do? Just go around like that and embrace the aging process?

I reject the aging process. I would rather cut off my head than have grey hair. I don’t want to get flappy arms. I don’t want to deal with it at all.

Have you seen Elon Musk’s mother in her new ads for Cover Girl? She’s got the white crew-cut and the dark lipstick, and she smugly declares in her murderous South African accent:

They say at a certain age, you just stop caring. I wonder what age that is.

Complaining about Maye Musk to my sister, who hadn’t seen the ads, I showed her some pictures on my phone and noted that she’s 69 years old. My sister exclaimed, “Is that all? She looks much older!”

I felt a bit better about my tummy fat. I guess as long as I have Elon’s mother, I can carry on. But I still want the jeans.

You’re getting ready to go to a Halloween party and you’re going as Axl Rose. You’ve got your bandanna on and a t-shirt and you’re struggling to get your leather pants zipped up.

They fit okay a couple of years ago when you wore them to a Thanksgiving dinner where you brought a hand-crafted turkey centerpiece made out of Popsicle sticks and colored paper. But now you feel like a bursting leather sausage. So you say, Fuck this, and you go find your other leather pants, the looser ones, but the waist is tight and the rest is too big.

So now you don’t even want to be Axl. Fuck him and fuck everything. You’re a fat whale with no reason to live. None. You have reached a precipice; you should take your leather pants and jump off it. Or if not a precipice, then a milestone. The one where you turn your back on leather pants and relax in a cotton floral housecoat, your legs mapped with varicose veins and your swollen feel stuffed into slipper socks with the non-skid soles.

You can go around like that old lady in a (trigger warning!) Woody Allen film croaking “I was once a great beauty” to anyone who’ll listen.

But then you pull yourself together. You have to go to the party. Your partner is going as Slash. You’ve RSVP’d. So you decide to default to (trigger warning!) Slutty Axl. As long as you have fishnets you can be Slutty Anything. So you put on the fishnet tights and find the tartan skirt you promised to send to a friend in her 20s because Grandma Schoolgirl is just not your preferred self-image, even for Halloween.

Now you’ve pulled it out. So to speak. You still feel a little tragic. You had to compromise, and you know that you’re a pregnant-looking orca but at least now you can wear lipstick and mascara, Because Slut. You jab the mascara in your eye but still valiantly walk out the door on time.

You get to the party and have a drink, feeling your self-hatred fade away like a dream as you behold a girl dressed like Mia from Pulp Fiction, with a bloody nose and a giant syringe sticking out of her chest.

Before today, I have felt offended by images of prosthetic limbs that seemed to fetishize amputees.

Even though it’s none of my business what people fetishize, I will always remember the doctor who told Max to consider having his leg amputated. Max was visibly upset, but somewhat resigned. Everything was as bad as it could be for him, so why not this new development, too. As it turned out, his surgeon disagreed. Further surgery and physical therapy could save the leg. But pictures of prosthetic legs continued to fill me with anger and despair.

Losing a leg seemed indescribably horrible and unfair. But it happens. And clearly there are plenty of people who cope with this loss and don’t let it ruin their lives.

Kiera Roche is a strong-willed amputee who has challenged herself with cycling and hiking. She has struggled with ideas of ‘normal’ and looking different. She loves her beautiful new floral leg, and I love it too.

Keira and her beautiful leg have changed my thinking about amputees. I am grateful to have come across The Alternative Limb Project. I feel enlightened on a subject where my mind was once closed.

~

photos (c) the alternative limb project

Everyone is freaking out about Michelle Kobke, who managed to create a tiny waist by wearing tight corsets.

Personally, I find it disturbing to look at, but if her body is her temple, she is free to desecrate it.

Our eyes may not be accustomed to this distorted hourglass figure, but I don’t think it’s any stupider than getting obviously fake breasts.

Women are doing horrible things to their bodies all the time and as we have discussed, men are up to no good too.  I don’t know why people aren’t commenting on Angelina Jolie‘s choice of over-sized implants that are so disproportionate to her small frame. Is it because she’s supposed to be an icon of courage and righteousness?

Huge lips, tiny noses, enormous implants, hair extensions, fake cheekbones, it’s all bad. Michelle Kobke’s waist shouldn’t come as a shock at this point.  Our bodies have ceased to be our temples and have become our enemies. My own body is generously providing me with hot flashes and a nice roll of flab where once there was muscle. I’m not going to make my temple a battleground!  I’m not going to do ONE SINGLE sit-up.

Because all my energy goes to my hair.

Here is a model named Jazzma who’s been hanging out with a billionaire whose longtime girlfriend is Naomi Campbell. I snickered at the deforming photoshopped picture of Jazzma, and googled to see what she really looks like.

Wow, right? Look at that midsection. It’s like she’s a LIVING photoshop creation!

If I could photoshop my body, I’d give myself big boobs and toned thighs, and I’d stay away from Naomi Campbell’s boyfriend.

What about you?