If you do as much web surfing as I do, you cannot help but notice the ads, especially since they appear on major websites like Yahoo and the Weather Channel. They show female faces morphing from smooth youth to wrinkled age, then back to youth with the application of whatever product is advertised. Wrinkle cream, chemical injections, skin peels, and lip puffers are all in my face wherever they can put an ad. There is a parlor selling this sort of stuff right next to my workplace, and it's not the only one in the neighborhood.

I am a female of a Certain Age and there are millions of me in the United States. We are all attached to the media whether we like it or not. And the "beauty industry" knows just how to keep us hooked. Those morphing young-to-old faces are like our lives in the mirror compressed to a few seconds. They lance it home to us that our youth is gone. The rest of the media, with an insistence that feels like repeated injections, shows us endless armies of pimped-out girls in high heels whose original bodies have been surgeried and dyed and depilated and Photoshopped almost out of existence. The important thing is that people prefer the artificial to the real, whether they admit it or not.

Some writers have talked about the "pornification of culture" (this book was written in Finland and published in England, not in America, so it should be taken seriously) and the influence of pornography in American society in this 2005 book by Pamela Paul. I have noticed the increasing raunchiness myself over the past twenty or even thirty years, but I don't know whether it is my right to comment about it. Anything I say would come out sounding like a prudish old biddy. And the males I know are all in favor of it. It's a steady stream of scantily clad tit-illation and soft porn that they don't even have to pay for!

For me, the morphing female faces are the modern version of an ancient artistic motif: the skull on the table. It's called a memento mori, which is a compressed Latin phrase meaning basically "Remember, you will die." We, the aging female consumers in a culture that idolizes female beauty (and it's not just America…try Brazil) are forever past our brief teenaged moments of fresh, slim, graceful allure, if we ever had any to begin with. No amount of Botox or creams can hide the skull beneath the quickly shriveling skin.

Posted at 3:45 am | link