holding operation

commodified girlhood, invisibility, and turning the page to 43

The Summer of the Girl headline was everywhere in 2023. Barbie + Taylor Swift + Beyonce. Then there was girl dinner and girl math, neither of which is real dinner or real math, by the way. I’ve been thinking about these things lately, girlhood and womanhood and age and the ways we subtly suggest women shrink into smaller places and infantilize ourselves. I loved Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, and I watched Taylor Swift’s Eras movie in the theater with my daughter feeling inspired and jealous that she gets to grow up in this time with role models of women who take up space. But why aren’t we calling grown women women? 

This has been on my mind as I’m currently teaching The Great Gatsby to my AP students who are loving it as much as I do. The dismissal bell surprises me in class because I lose track of time, and I’m slayed by Fitzgerald’s language every time I reread. His sentences glide like figure skaters, but the subtext cuts like a blade. We were analyzing a passage in class the other day, and I pointed out his phrasing of the “men and girls” arriving at Gatsby’s party. Girls who “came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.” Moths. Fluttering and voiceless and inconsequential. Daisy’s first words in the novel are “I’m paralyzed with happiness,” and we learn how true that is when she makes no decision to change her life in the end because she cannot tolerate discomfort and truth. Her assertion that the best thing her daughter could be is a “beautiful little fool” seems outrageous at first, but then you see that women who are beautiful fools are rewarded in the world Daisy lives in. And let’s not forget about Myrtle who in the end becomes discarded carnage in exchange for her “perceptible vitality” and “smoldering” body. Yes, Tom is emotionally stunted in his own prison of toxic privilege, and Gatsby never ascends to the social acceptance and validation he craves. But at least the men in the novel aren’t paralyzed or discarded. Gatsby dies trying, reaching, in a moment of glorious crucifixion, immortalized as a beautiful mythic figure in Nick’s narration. In the end, the women in the novel (usually called girls) simply fade into the background like the fluttering moths at the party. Sure, Fitzgerald’s story illuminates the deep disillusionment and hollow dream of American success, and all of the characters suffer. But the women suffer in a particular way that centers on their own paralysis, and I see something in the portrayal of these women that I still feel in the world around me a hundred years after he wrote that book. 

I’ll be 43 in a few short weeks, and I’m feeling that societal pressure to freeze myself, to somehow hold onto girlhood, to cling to it instead of letting it slip through my fingers.

A couple of weeks ago, I sat in the cafeteria of our local high school for the freshman parent orientation to select courses for my son. As I waited for everyone to take their seats, I noticed a woman at the table in front of me. She was polished and beautiful, and I couldn’t stop staring at her forehead, smooth as glass. Then I noticed the friend she was talking to looked much the same. I let my eyes wander around the room and suddenly realized that it was a sea of icy smooth foreheads. I live in a corner of the suburbs where it feels like I’m surrounded by women who have an expensive secret arsenal of tools to fight the hands of time. I didn’t even know everyone was Botox-ing until I was out to dinner with a large group of girlfriends a few years ago and it came up. Most of the table had been using Botox and fillers for a few years, even before they turned 40. It was another moment like what I wrote about recently when approaching midlife felt like adolescence, like a pre-teen kid who realizes everyone else is wearing a bra or using deodorant when they haven’t begun yet or didn’t know they were supposed to. I drove home that night feeling a little behind and wondering if I’d come to regret my lack of concern about it.

Well here I am a few years later with a face that still moves and a forehead with grooves to prove it. Susan Sontag says in her fabulous essay “The Double Standard of Aging,” “Women become the caretakers of their faces and bodies, pursuing an essentially defensive strategy, a holding operation.” Holding operation seems like a fitting term, frozen faces fighting the siege of age. I have no judgment if you use Botox because it makes you feel like your best self, but I have no time or money to invest in that defensive strategy nor is it a priority for me, and I’m trying to embrace something else instead: the truth that aging is a privilege and not a problem. 

I reread Sontag’s essay last week because this topic has been on my mind so much, and I hadn’t read it since I was in an undergraduate women’s studies class and 21 years old without any understanding of what it would feel like to age in a female body. Sontag published this in 1978 when she had no idea what was coming. Or that Botox would be available at your dentist office and J Lo would be our new distorted view of what it means to be 50 years old. But so much of what she says is even more relevant today. It still feels like, to use Sontag’s words, “all women are trained to want to continue looking like girls.” Men get to age with only the fear of mortality, which is heavy enough. Women hardly get to metabolize that fear because instead we are preoccupied with our declining value, or as she says, “most women experience [aging] even more painfully; with shame. Aging is a man’s destiny, something that must happen because he is a human being. For a woman, aging is not only her destiny. Because she is that more narrowly defined kind of human being, a woman, it is also her vulnerability.”

What I’m realizing on the cusp of 43 is that even if I haven’t defined myself narrowly, the rest of the world has. I’ve been lucky enough to escape the trap of defining myself by how I look because my interior has always overshadowed my exterior, and my looks have never been my currency. But now I’m in this weird place where I’m seeing small ways that girlhood does serve as some kind of social lubricant or something, and I feel it slipping away. In the maiden-mother-crone archetype, I’m squarely in my mother years but edging closer to the end of them. And what is happening as I slide closer to that threshold is that I have a desire to actually live in my body instead of disassociating from it with the interior life I’ve always been able to cushion myself with. And living in my body means paying attention to it, accepting it, seeing it for what it is. 

Men have it hard in other ways, but they are never expected to freeze boyhood. It’s the opposite actually; so many times I’ve heard man up uttered to a crying boy on a playground, a phrase I refused to ever say to my own son. But it’s different for us. As Sontag says, “the double standard about aging sets women up as property, as objects whose value depreciates rapidly with the march of the calendar.” Ouch. It hurts because it’s true.

I want to do this another way. I don’t want to waste hours of my one wild and precious life counting fine lines on my face and resisting the inevitable. But also I’m human, and like everyone else, I fear being discarded. And I’ve had an obnoxious five-step skincare routine for years, so clearly I’m no guru of aging acceptance. Thinking I’m okay with aging and actually being okay with aging are two different things. I still have work to do.

Lately I’m trying my hardest to put blinders on to drown out the distorted message we get about growing older. We forget what a seasoned face even looks like when cosmetic procedures are so easy to obtain, and we pretend J Lo or Nicole Kidman or Salma Hayek represent an attainable image of 50 for the rest of us. I’m looking to find new models of how it’s done. I heard an interview with Gloria Steinem once when she said that life after 50 allowed her to return to that state of girlhood we enjoy at 9 or 10 years old – not the commodified girlhood society defines for us, but that time when your knees were scabby and you rode your bike with hands lifted like a roller coaster ride and you didn’t yet care about what boys thought about you and hadn’t yet absorbed the critic’s voice as your own. I filed that sage advice in my head for later because that makes me want to run to my crone years without a fight. It sounds like freedom. Sontag claims, “Youth is a metaphor for energy, restless mobility, appetite, for the state of ‘wanting.’” When I look at it through that lens, maybe I’m aging in reverse because the older I get, the more I seem to allow room for restlessness and appetite, the more I know what I want to chase, the more I affirm my own wanting.

But what’s scary about aging as a woman is that there is an invisibility that comes along with it after a lifetime of a certain kind of visibility that is both exhausting and objectifying but all we’ve ever known. Approaching my mid-forties, I feel the swan song of whatever remains of that kind of girlhood society values and the reality that my years of invisibility will be here eventually. And there’s some grief and fear there. But I’m feeling that other thing too, that call to freedom, that reminder that aging is a privilege, and like everything else in life, I can make it what I want it to be.

Maybe one era is coming to an end in a while but the one on the way offers a freedom I haven’t had yet. Maybe I can inhabit these next few years with one foot firmly in each place and relish this transitional space instead of only grieving it before its over. Maybe I’m not as free from self-scrutiny as I thought I was and there’s an old belief about youth that I’m still outgrowing, old stories about girlhood I’m still trying to burn away. In these last few weeks of my forty-second year, I’m remembering again the final lines of that Sharon Olds poem that I clung to years ago like a life raft through another transition. Something has died, inside me, believing that, like the death of a crone in one twin bed as a child is born in the other. Have faith, old heart. What is living, anyway, but dying.