Is it possible to feel more and less confident at the same time? As I approach my 40th birthday next year, I find myself inundated with targeted ads online, all promising to make me look younger, healthier, and more beautiful.
I have reached the age when women are expected to start disliking our looks and bodies. We are supposed to become obsessed with looking slim and youthful, trading our time and money for the latest anti-aging products and techniques that promise to make us look 20 again in no time.
I'll be honest: I have mixed feelings about the messages I get about my age. After speaking with many women my age and older, I found that my feelings are very common. Reaching our 40's and beyond often brings a lot of contradictions.
On one hand, many women report feeling like they have finally discovered their true selves as they leave their 20's and 30's, having discovered a genuine self, free from the fears and pressures of youth (Casado-Gual, Dominguez, and Worsfold, 2016; Greer, 1991; Stončikaitė, 2021). On the other hand, some women also feel discarded, marginalized, or invisible as they age (Calasanti and Slevin, 2001; Gullette, 2004). No longer the object of constant sexual desire as they were in their youth, they struggle to find a new identity that doesn't live under the constant scrutiny of the male gaze.
Like many women, I sometimes feel torn between the growing confidence I feel as I get older and the occasional crushing weight of self-doubt that comes with my changing body, face, and skin. I can't help but pinch an unwanted roll or a newfound wrinkle. The urge to pluck the increasingly abundant silver hairs is strong.
How can you feel more and less confident simultaneously?
The Woman Behind the Mask
There is a decades-old term I recently learned that explains this strange paradox. It's called the mask of aging (Featherstone and Hepworth, 1999).
The mask of aging represents the experience of some women as they age, in which they can't reconcile their inner youthful selves with their aging outer bodies. This contrast between how they feel and how they look can be confusing and upsetting.
Inside, they feel young and vibrant. Having also gained the benefit of wisdom that valuable experience brings, they now feel both young and wise a winning combination that is sure to boost confidence and self-image.
But when they look in the mirror and see a woman who looks very wise but not very young, the mismatch is hard to accept. Their perception of this aging woman is experienced as a betrayal of the young woman to whom their inner identity is tied. This incongruence becomes a threat to their self-esteem.
I believe this is why so many of us, myself included, struggle with our appearance as we age. We live in a culture that insists we remain eternally youthful or lose our worth (Gullett, 2004). Since we still feel youthful, being seen as less valuable than we were in our 20s is unacceptable.
As a result, we often endure costly and painful cosmetic procedures, over-commit to time-consuming skincare routines, and try to fit our changing bodies into clothes that no longer suit us. Instead of embracing the freedom that comes with discovering our authentic selves as we age, we regress into futile anti-aging efforts that can do little more than buy us time. They will never turn back the clock, nor will they truly bring us the positive self-image we seek.
Embracing Our Age
Entering our 40s and beyond can be a time of great liberation. Freed from the constant sexual objectification many women experience in our youth, we can turn all our outward focus inward. We can begin healing our hearts and minds, make time for pleasures we neglected in our younger years, invest in connecting with our loved ones, and perhaps for the first time, connect with our deepest selves, too. But that work will mean letting go of the societal conditioning about our value and worth as we age.
Changing the Narrative
It's time for feminist women to start reshaping the narrative around aging. And perhaps that work is an internal job. I sometimes wonder if many of us need to do some deep healing of our own self-image and self-worth before we start trying to change our culture's long-held stereotypes of women as they age. Like any kind of advocacy work, sometimes the first step is untethering ourselves from the indoctrination we've received since childhood. To achieve that, there are several truths we need to embrace:
- The male gaze is harsh and says nothing about our true worth.
- Freedom from sexual objectification is not a sign of our decreasing value but rather a sign of our culture's toxic obsession with youth.
- Seeing a mismatch between our inner feelings and our outer appearance makes sense. Bodies and faces change as we age, but our inner mental world can stay youthful as long as we wish.
- Aging is healthy and normal, despite what the expensive anti-aging industry wants to tell women.
- Being vocal about our needs and experiences is how we normalize healthy attitudes toward women's aging and end our isolation, marginalization, and erasure.
When we learn to untether our identity and self-worth from our culture's sick fixation on youth, we will become better advocates for ourselves and for women more broadly. We will not be invisible. We will be free.