I was listening to the most recent episode of Feminine Chaos, and not to give away the secrets that only a paid subscriber should know, but Phoebe Maltz Bovy brought up a really interesting topic during that episode: when a woman says “I would never do (insert cosmetic anti-aging procedure here)” and she’s, say, 29 or 32, should anyone really listen to her? Not that she’s definitely wrong and she’ll definitely use Botox eventually, just that…maybe her “I would never” opinion on such matters at this point in time is not relevant?

Actress Sydney Sweeney, who is only 28, feels confident that she would never. As she was quoted in Page Six, she plans to “age gracefully” and never opt for any anti-aging procedures, even Botox or fillers. How courageous! Unlike this maverick here, I was planning to age ungracefully. At the age of twenty-three, I looked at a photo of Donatella Versace and thought, That’s how I want to age, but MORE desperate and distant from humanoid.

Joking, of course. Everyone wants to age gracefully. If I could choose between naturally looking forty when I’m sixty, or looking like a haggard lizard with gigantic allergic-reaction lips, obviously I’d pick the former. Because what “gracefully” really means is aging well, but doing so in a way where you either hit the genetic lottery and you didn’t need any work, or you got work and nobody can tell. Aging gracefully almost never means being fifty-seven and looking sixty-three because that’s just how your genetics shook out.

Claiming that you won’t get any procedures done “because you want to age gracefully” (especially when you’re a Hollywood star) is pretty laughable. What if Sydney Sweeney’s graceful procedure-free aging (assuming this happens) makes her look…not so graceful? Perhaps I’ll be wrong, and she will gladly settle into aging—not just charming little expression lines, but hollow cheeks, turkey neck, sagging jowls, boobs that reach her bellybutton, and other less endearing signs of aging which can’t be staved off with a healthy lifestyle. Perhaps she will be open to these things even if it means she no longer gets the exciting, sexy roles she gets now, and she has to play Peter Parker’s great-grandmother once she is visibly over the age of forty. And I would commend her for that! But honestly? I have my doubts. She will likely only age gracefully (ie: not get any work done) if the natural course of her aging is genetic-lottery-tier.

And it’s understandable that right now, she thinks she will fall into the genetic lottery category! Young women (and I acknowledge some might still put me in this camp, I’m only 36) often imagine themselves aging really well. But “aging really well without intervention” and “looking ridiculous with lots of unnecessary plastic surgery procedures” unfortunately aren’t the only options. And I just can’t trust anyone’s “I would never” if they believe those are the only possible paths.

I’ve met many young women who insist that, absent any cosmetic procedures, they will age really well because their mothers did. To them, Botox and fillers are ridiculous grifts that will only make women look worse, and they are extremely confident about this fact. On the other hand, I have met almost zero young women who admit that they maybe don’t have extremely lucky genetics, and their mothers actually just look their age or older, and they might also one day. Not because they’re taking bad care of themselves, but because it’s actually just normal to look your age, and some people will naturally look a bit older. Almost every woman I’ve ever met was confident she looked 5-20 years younger than her real age; almost none of them have ever been like, “You know what? I’m 35 but I could pass for 40. It’s fine though.”

And can you blame them/us? Even if you’re a liberal, even if you’re a feminist, even if you’re surrounded by nothing but self-affirming soundbites about how “wrinkles are beautiful” it’s impossible not to realize just how important our youth is to our value—not just to men, but to everyone! Products (other than calcium chocolate chews) aren’t marketed to old women. Songs aren’t written about old women. Fashion isn’t designed with old women in mind, unless it’s that brand of mall-tier clothing that’s vaguely boehmian-meets-Peruvian-meets-Western. So when we imagine ourselves getting old, we have to imagine that we’re going to age like Susan Sarandon (who has obviously had work done, but that’s beside the point.)

There is a common talking point I see from relatively young women (I’d say, typically under forty) who are confident they would never. They insist that wrinkles are great, aging is a privilege, and we should never mar our natural beauty with knives or needles, but then to illustrate their point, they double down on the fact that they happen to look really young for their age in spite of (or perhaps, because of) their Botox-free routines. I get that it’s verboten to be a woman and admit you aren’t hot or young-looking, but this really negates the overall thesis that we should welcome aging like the first cozy day of sweater weather. If we are supposed to happily embrace aging, it discredits you if you also happen to be one of those people who is aging really well (if that’s even true, which…I have questions.) I would love to hear an anti-Botox screed from a woman who actually is old, or who looks older than her age and doesn’t care. If your reason for not getting Botox is that you’re already beautiful without it and you’re confident that using rosehip oil is going to keep you looking twenty-nine forever, I just cannot take you seriously.

To embrace “aging gracefully” in any real, legitimate way is to be completely open to aging, including the less cute parts, and I just can’t buy that openness from someone who either isn’t old at all, or is also desperate to prove how hot she is in spite of being (somewhat) older, AKA, still under 40. It’s like someone saying “money isn’t everything!” and claiming to be happily middle class, while also dropping a bunch of humblebrags about going to the Hamptons and having three houses. If a guy in a trailer park wants to talk about how money isn’t everything, I’ll listen.

Now, if you’re familiar with my work, you may notice I have also written about being 36 and not getting any injectables or other professional procedures done. Like a true tradwife, I have my husband cut my hair because it’s degenerate for a woman to choose her own hair length without permission (hahaha just kidding, although I bet some of you believed that. He does cut my hair though.) I don’t do any anti-aging treatments, although I do all the non-invasive stuff like a skincare routine, SPF, prescription Retin-A and a red light mask at home. So far, anyway, because again, no matter what a certain brand of Gen Z male gremlin likes to say on Substack, a 36-year-old woman is not really that old. And as ridiculous as it sounds to older women for a 36-year-old to be “aging gracefully,” I have heard women literally in their twenties bragging about “aging well.” What the hell is “aging well” when you’re twenty-four? Still having acne?

Anyway, I don’t think I’m “aging gracefully,” because I think I look my age anyway. But I also think that most 36-year-olds look fine, even if they aren’t doing any thing in particular to look fine. I probably look better than I would if I did absolutely nothing, but I’m not sure how much of a difference my skincare routine makes. I would need an identical twin to act as a control, but I just doubt there’s a big delta between what I look like now, and what I’d look like if I never cared about aging. You know what they say: “Are you still a user of niacinimide serum? At 37, it’s marginal.”

Now, just because I haven’t gotten injectables doesn’t mean I think they are pointless. I am confident I would look a little better if I got filler, but my reason for avoiding injectables has nothing to do with feminism, nothing to do with confidence or self-love, with no whiff of “I would never.” It’s entirely because my husband warned me that the steep price of injectables means I couldn’t buy as many clothing items or shoes. And frankly, I’d rather have a couple wrinkles and a new Sezane bag.

But I have the privilege to say that! For me, “wrinkles” are things that basically fade when I wash my face. Aside from the neck, but we don’t need to talk about the neck. The neck isn’t part of the face. The neck isn’t real. It can’t hurt me. Anyway.

Right now, the risk/reward ratio for injectables just isn’t worth it for me. Not because I am more enlightened, or truly think “wrinkles are beautiful,” but because I just don’t need injectables badly enough for it to be worth the hassle—RIGHT NOW. Will I be saying this when I’m forty-five? Fifty? Probably not! If I am lucky enough to live a long life, I can almost guarantee you that I will have some kind of procedure done. I don’t think everyone will, but I am confident that there is a degree of attrition away from the “I would nevers.” There are many women my age right now saying “I would never” who actually, very much will.

There is also a common tendency of the youth to, paradoxically, assume we know better than all older people. It’s funny, you’d think it would be the opposite. Older people have experienced more things. Presumably, unless they are old enough to be going full Biden 2024 mode, they’d be reliable resources, and we would listen to them. But now, “boomer” is a convenient insult for having opinions that young people deem incorrect, including things like “this isn’t the worst time in all of human history.” But why? I’m not arguing that women over sixty are all genius oracles who have all the answers, because then it would mean capitulating to everything my own mother says (and God forbid) but surely we ignore them and disregard them at our own peril. When they tell a twenty-seven-year-old that she doesn’t really know what aging is yet, the correct answer isn’t, “lmao, boomer, I’m going to age gracefully, unlike YOU.”

It reminds me of the day I got my first period. I was eleven. My mom was forty-one. The day after, I went to school wearing skintight silver jeans from Limited Too. My mom warned me that my first period was going to be extremely heavy and I should wear black pants. She also told me to pack more than one pad in my backpack. For some reason I still can’t explain (other than “eleven-year-olds are dumb as shit”) I refused. I confidently went to school in my silver jeans with one singular pad in my backpack. Anyway, I was sent home by third period (no pun intended) because I had bled through my spare pad, the entire backs of my jeans, and the sweatshirt someone lent me to wrap around my waist. It was so much blood that when I finally got to the school nurse, she audibly gasped. When my mom picked me up, she had to layer a garbage bag over the passenger seat. And yet, for some reason, I was convinced she was a dorky, boomer loser because she warned me about the dangers of menstrual leaks. She had been menstruating for almost thirty years! Why did I think I knew better? No idea. But anyway, that’s what a lot of young women sound like when they talk about aging gracefully.

I’m not saying you will definitely get work done, or even that you’ll sort of want to. Only that you truly can’t know when you’re twenty-eight. Or even thirty-eight.

I’m also not saying that plastic surgery always looks great and is always a good idea. Sometimes, it goes too far. I think drastically changing the genetic structure of your face (such as getting a nose job) after you enter adulthood, is incredibly weird outside of a few very specific circumstances. I am not necessarily pro-plastic surgery. I’ve never even had plastic surgery. I just have the humility to realize that even if I don’t feel young, I am, and I might change my mind when I’m not. And juxtaposing a woman’s “natural” face at thirty with that same woman’s augmented face at sixty-five, and feigning horror that she “aged badly” makes no sense. Of course she looked better at thirty. To judge whether her interventions were a bad idea, we’d have to see what she looked like right before doing them.

I know this has nothing to do with beauty, but hear me out: when I first started trying to conceive, I confidently declared I would never do IVF. IVF “took a toll,” as people constantly repeated. I posted to TTC forums and declared, “Any tips for what I can do naturally? I don’t want to resort to IVF!” And why would I do something that took a toll? Something with—ew—needles!? When an older family friend of mine had fraternal twins, I remember thinking, “Wow, she couldn’t just let nature take its course…she was so impatient she just had to do IVF. I would never do IVF! So many needles and artificial hormones when you could just take care of your health and have sex at the right time!”

And well, I needed IVF. Many of you know this by now, but my husband was born without a vas deferens (something about which neither of us knew when we started trying to conceive.) When I said I would “never do IVF,” I meant that I would vastly have preferred to conceive naturally after five months of well-timed sex than go through all the needles, financial strain and anxiety of fertility treatment. And who wouldn’t? The option I wasn’t envisioning was “not having children at all,” and faced with that outcome, of course I’d rather do IVF. Also, as it turns out, my family friend conceived her twins naturally and didn’t even do IVF, so my judgment was full of hubris and I was factually wrong. Perhaps this was a form of young woman privilege—fertility privilege (or imagined fertility privilege.) But it’s all the same basic deal. It’s the same reason that women who haven’t had children yet are confident they’re going to bake their own goldfish crackers from scratch.

Last but not least, I can’t help but think that the way young women (and early-middle-aged women) talk about aging is still so tied up in the idea that aging badly—or aging ungracefully—is justified cosmic punishment for being vain, shallow or otherwise Bad. And on some level, their youth is all they’ve ever known, so they have a hard time imagining themselves truly getting old. It’s a hypothetical, an alternate reality, not the future. Maybe they can imagine themselves as a very old person, well into their eighties, when being hot is the last thing on their mind, but they are not envisioning the awkwardness of being fifty-five and still wanting to look attractive but not wanting to try too hard. They believe that if you are a good person, you will age better, and that way they can reassure themselves with the fact that they will probably age well too. This is how you age when you’re unproblematic, as they say. Most people consciously know this isn’t true, of course, but on some level they believe it. Many young, liberal women who believe themselves to be feminists, who claim to think aging is a privilege, still think it’s okay to mock right-wing women for “looking old” especially if they got that way through “badly-done” procedures.

The amoral, unromantic truth is that some people will age better than others for no reason other than their genetics. A sudden illness or trauma can shift your aging timeline. If you are pushed into early aging by cancer, you will mostly just be thrilled that you survived cancer and less concerned about whether you are “aging gracefully,” although there is a chance you will still care about your looks to some extent. I am not demanding that my fellow young and early middle aged women open their arms to aging without a dash of fear or anxiety. It’s normal to be scared of the unknown, and even more normal to be scared of aging as a woman when you live in a world that acts as if a woman stops existing long before she is “old” in any legitimate way. But what I am asking is that we have some humility.