Ageing gracefully

That may well be the ‘ideal’ – but there is something to be said for ageing disgracefully as well

In all the shock-horror coverage of Renee Zellweger’s new face (don’t worry, I am not about to add my two-bits to the raging debate) the one phrase that popped up the most was that old cliché: ‘ageing gracefully’. The implication here, of course, was that Renee was ‘ageing’ but not at all ‘gracefully’. Instead, she was resorting to every trick in the book – tanning lotions, Botox, fillers, plastic surgery, and God alone knows what else! – to keep the depredations of Nature at bay (never mind that the actress herself put her new look down to being in a happy place in her life.)

I don’t know about you but if there is one phrase that is guaranteed to raise my hackles it is this one. ‘Ageing gracefully’. As if there is some societally approved standard of how every woman – and it is nearly always women who are discussed in this context – must age if she doesn’t want to fall foul of the Look Police.

She must not have had any obvious ‘work’ done. She must have a few wrinkles in place and her forehead should actually move. Any dyeing or primping must be so subtle as to be practically unnoticeable. It helps if she is the same size at 60 that she was at 30. But even so, she must not frighten the children by wearing short dresses, leather trousers, tank tops or (the ultimate transgression) bikinis at the beach.

‘Ageing gracefully’. You see it used in the media all the time. But it can’t be a coincidence that it is always used in the context of drop-dead beautiful women, who remain attractive despite the ravages of age. Leading the pack is the effervescent Meryl Streep, who wears her laugh lines and crows feet as a badge of pride. Following closely is Helen Mirren, who can still rock a red bikini at 60-something. Diane Keaton is another name that crops up on this list. Susan Sarandon was always given an honorable mention before she went and let the side down with a subtle facelift. Back home, we have our own icons of ‘ageing gracefully’ but the one who gets the most name checks is the late Gayatri Devi.

Whenever there is a shock-horror story about an ageing (by that I mean anyone on the wrong side of 30) star’s cosmetic surgery gone wrong, you can be sure that these women will be dragged into the narrative as examples of the ideal that all of us should aspire to: ‘ageing gracefully’.

Really? While I bow to none in my admiration of these ladies, they are hardly representative of our sex, are they? What they are is freaks of Nature, one born every 10 million or so, who are destined to be effortlessly beautiful, and remain so no matter how old they grow.

The rest of us? Not so much. We need help to look even marginally attractive when we are in our prime. So, what is wrong with trying a little harder as time goes on? Nobody blinks an eye at monthly waxing and bleaching appointments, fortnightly manicures and pedicures, six-weekly root touch-ups, and quarterly highlights: the minimum standard required for grooming these days. So what is wrong with pushing the boat out a little further when you feel you need a little more help? What’s the harm in trying to look like the best version of ourselves?

Do you look (and feel) permanently angry because of that frown line that glowers furiously from your forehead? Do you think a little Botox might make you feel better about yourself? Go right ahead and do it. Does the face looking back at you from the mirror look older and more tired than you feel? Will a few discreet touches of filler make a difference? It’s entirely your call. Do you (like Nora Ephron and millions of other women) feel bad about you neck? Get a little nip and tuck if that’s what you want. It’s your face, your body, your life, your choice. Do what makes you happy. And pay no attention to the naysayers around you.

On the other end of the spectrum, do you want to ‘age disgracefully’ in an entirely different way altogether? Give yourself permission to do so. Cancel the gym membership, fire the personal trainer, and junk that hideous diet regimen you’ve signed up for. Go for a walk in the park or do a little light yoga instead. Or just lie in bed and eat chocolate. It’s your life. And you’ve earned the right to live it as you wish.

As for me, I am determined to age as disgracefully as possible. Here, in no particular order of importance, are just some of things I intend to do as I get older:

• Cut my hair really short (think GI Jane) and dye it purple. (Grey is such a boring colour.
• Wear red leather trousers to all my business meetings.
• Tell it like it is – no more mealy-mouthed platitudes.
• Throw out all my high heels and live in ballet flats.
• Lie on the sofa all weekend watching endless reruns of Friends/Frasier/Modern Family.

I intend to do what I like, when I like, and to hell with the rest of the world. And while I’m at it, I’m going to retire the phrase ‘ageing gracefully’ from my vocabulary. Instead, I am going to celebrate ‘ageing disgracefully’. Now that has a nice ring to it!

Who are you calling aunty?

That traumatic moment when you realise you have tipped irrevocably into middle age

Last week a friend of mine called up sounding distraught. Given that she is generally a ‘glass is half-full’ sort of person, I thought that there must be a major crisis in her life. As it turns out, I was right. She was suffering from a serious case of mid-life crisis, sparked off by a visit to a five-star hotel loo.

It happened thus. She walked in and found a gaggle of excitable 20-somethings gibbering excitedly amongst themselves. They were still gathered around the sink when she emerged to wash her hands. And then, lipstick liberally re-applied, they started trooping out when one of them stopped and asked: “Whose bag is that?”

Without missing a beat, the other replied, pointing to my hapless friend, “That’s aunty’s.”

Yes, you heard right. It was that dreaded ‘a’ word. Aunty.

My friend, a well-preserved woman in her 40s, is used to seeing people do double-takes when she reveals her age and assuring her that she looks at least a decade younger. So, the ‘aunty’ bit was a fell blow that left her catatonic for the rest of the evening.

When she called me the next morning, she still sounded devastated. Did she really look so old that 20-something young women would refer to her as ‘aunty’? Did this mean that she was well and truly middle-aged now? Were the best years of her life over? Was she now on a slippery slope heading inexorably downwards?

I have to confess that I wasn’t terribly sympathetic. As someone who acquired her first niece at the age of 12 (in my defence, my sister is 15 years older than me), I have become accustomed to being called ‘masi’ or ‘bua’ over the years. So what, I asked my friend, was the big deal about being called ‘aunty’? After all, technically speaking, she could have given birth to any of those young 20-somethings. And her kid’s friends called her ‘aunty’ anyway, right?

That wasn’t the point, said my friend. “Standing there at the sink, I had this sudden epiphany. Now when people looked at me, they no longer saw as an attractive woman. They saw an ‘aunty’. They saw someone who was well past her sexy-by date. And as I stood there, I realised that soon nobody would see me at all.”

Yes, that’s a fear that all of us harbour at some level, don’t we? That as age takes its toll and nature wreaks its worst on us, we will turn into invisible women. The women whom nobody pays attention to; who are looked through at parties; ignored as they try to make purchases at a store. The women whom nobody leaps up to open the door for. The women nobody wants to chat up or flirt with. The women who are no longer seen as sexual beings.

In other words, the women who fit into the ‘aunty’ category.

And, for obvious reasons, this is especially hard for women who have been considered beautiful or sexy in their dewy youthfulness. They are used to being the centre of attention in any room they walk into. They are accustomed to being treated with deference. They are used to being objects of desire. They are conditioned to think of themselves as special. So suddenly being reduced to ‘aunty’ status comes as something of a shock.

And to an extent, it was this ‘Beautiful Woman’ syndrome that lay at the root of my friend’s trauma. It was a bit like the jolt an actress feels when she’s first told that she not being tested for the heroine’s role, but for the role of the hero’s mother.

But part of it was also down to the fact that ours is the generation of women who refuse to age. We are unwilling to let Nature take its course when it comes to our appearance. Instead, we rely on extreme medical procedures to keep looking young for as long as we can.

Ours is the generation that embraced Botox and fillers, treating them as lunch-time procedures. Ours is the generation that treats cosmetic surgery as an essential beauty aid, treating face-lifts as extreme facials. And not surprisingly, ours is a generation that looks much younger than our mothers did at our age.

We exercise and diet so that we weigh the same as we did in our 20s. We wear the same clothes as our grown-up daughters. We colour our hair every five weeks to get rid of those greying roots. We slather on the anti-ageing cream last thing at night.

We look in the mirror in the morning and we see a young person staring back at us. Yes, the jawline is a little slack, there is incipient creping of the neck, and the laugh lines run a little bit deeper. But hey, nobody would put us down for 40-something. We don’t look at day over 35!

And then, you walk into a five-star hotel loo and a 20-something calls you ‘aunty’. That’s when you know that the game is well and truly over. You have tipped irrevocably into middle age – and there is no coming back.

The backlash against Botox

It’s already visible in Hollywood; but is it travelling nearer home any time soon?

Have you noticed how the only time celebrities ever own up to using Botox is when they announce that they are giving it up? It’s a bit like how they only admit to `substance abuse’ (i.e. doing copious amounts of cocaine) when they are finally checking into rehab in the full glare of the cameras.

The latest in the long line of Botox deniers is Nicole Kidman. The actress, whose forehead has been completely immobile for well on a decade, has never ever owned up to using Botox, putting her wrinkle-free look down to good genes and clean living. But brave Nicole has now fessed up, declaring that she no longer thinks Botox is a good look for her. She intends to give up the needle, as it were, and let nature take its own course.

Nicole is in good, if ever-so-slightly wrinkly, company. Both Courtney Cox and Jennifer Aniston, who once played best friends in Friends and now reprise the same roles in real life, also claim that though they have used Botox in the past (just the once, I’m sure!) they no longer do so. They simply didn’t like the way it felt and decided to give it up, they say, wiggling their eyebrows desperately to prove the point.

Terri Hatcher (Susan Myers in Desperate Housewives) went one better when she decided to ditch the botulinum. Getting out of the shower one morning, she took close-ups of her make-up free, Botox-less face and shared them with the world by posting them on her Twitter account. I don’t know if there is any connection but these days even Marcia Cross (who plays the control freak Bree in show) seems able to move her forehead just a teeny-tiny bit when she wants to show emotion. It’s just the slightest creasing of skin but still, that’s progress.

But while there seems to something of a backlash against Botox in Hollywood these days, there has always been one notable refusinik. Julia Roberts has never agreed to join the ranks of the frown-free because, as she puts it, she would like her kids to know when she is angry. As Roberts once famously said, she believes that your face should tell a story – and it shouldn’t be about your visit to your cosmetic surgeon.

But with such A-listers as Kidman now openly eschewing the frozen look, could it be that the tide is finally turning. It certainly is beginning to look like it. Both Annette Bening and Julianne Moore in The Kids Are All Right had marvellously mobile faces, liberally sprinkled with laugh lines, crow’s feet and creases on the forehead. And as the stars traipsed down the red carpet at the Oscars recently, there were more wrinkles visible on faces than we have seen in years.

Ironically, just as the Hollywood brigade seems to be giving up on the trend, the Bollywood bunch is embracing it with both syringes. These days all our 30-something actresses have fewer lines on their faces than they did when they started out in their 20s. Some of them can barely raise a brow to express surprise, let one frown to show disapprobation. And then, there are those 50-something actresses whose eyebrows are raised so high that they look perpetually startled (perhaps they can’t believe just how old they have gotten).

Needless to say, every one of them denies using Botox but they take great pleasure in pointing out who else has been having the stuff injected on a monthly basis. During one of the many shock-horror moments on his show, Karan Johar even asked his panel of guests to name someone whose Botox had gone really bad. It is entirely another matter that Anil Kapoor got the wrong end of the stick and went on about how Shilpa Shetty’s lips had changed shape and ruined the continuity of his film. (Karan had to gently point out that this must be put down to collagen not Botox.)

And as is usual, real life mimics the world of celebrity. Never before has the use of Botox been so commonplace. And yet, it is hard to find a 40-something woman who admits to using it. Ask them about their suspiciously smooth foreheads and they will tell you about this marvellous facial they had at that spa in Thailand or refer you to this new eating plan which involves all the best anti-oxidants the planet has to offer and which does wonders for the skin.

Honestly, if their noses grew any longer, they would need the services of the plastic surgeon for something more than a little jab of the needle.

But maybe we should just give these ladies some time. Who knows, after a few years of being unable to express any emotion on their immobilised faces, they may just decide that it’s best to go all natural. And then, just like Nicole, Jennifer, Courtney, Terri and the rest, they may finally admit that they had been shooting up all along.

Until then, I guess, we will have to live with their lies, even if their foreheads give away the truth so effortlessly.

Nothing is impossible

Living by that motto can often be a recipe for disaster

The thing about bringing up an entire generation with the motto ‘Nothing is impossible’ is that in time they come to believe in it.

So, what’s wrong with that, you ask. After all, isn’t that the spirit that turned a young, mixed-race boy from a single-parent family into the President of the United States? Yes, we can, said Barack Obama to the people of America. And yes, he could.

So, what could possibly be wrong with thinking that you can achieve anything you set your mind to?

Well, nothing at all. So long as you are focused on finding a cure for cancer, mapping the human genome, breaking the record in the 100 metre sprint, or turning bacon into an ice-cream flavour.

But what happens when people decide to implement this ‘nothing is impossible’ credo in their private lives as well? When they start to believe that they only have to want something hard enough and work at it long enough to get it? When they begin to think: I want it; ergo, I must have it.

What happens when we all become victims of a culture of entitlement, in which wants become needs, and needs turn into necessities? And we start to adopt extreme means to fulfil these, no matter what the cost.

Take the recent reports about IVF mums, who keep getting older and older with every year. First it was the 30-somethings who went in for assisted births, then the age limit went up to 40-something, and now even 50 and 60-somethings have breached this barrier.

Apparently, a baby is now a lifestyle choice; something that every woman has a right to. Her personal circumstances simply don’t come into it. And you are a politically incorrect bigot if you even dare to enquire into them. Every woman, whether she is married or single, straight or gay, young or old, rich or poor, has a right to bring a child into the world.

Fair enough. The maternal instinct is a very powerful one and is not to be denied at the worst of times. My problem is with the kind of medical interventions that are brought into play to make this dream possible.

Does it really make sense to make babies for women who have already reached menopause? Are these even their babies in the biological sense in that they are conceived with the help of donor eggs? If these are not their genetic children, then why not just adopt? And if you are going to adopt, then why not do it early enough so that you are more statistically likely to be around for your child’s college graduation?

But no, none of this is an issue. It is enough that a woman wants a baby that she can carry to term and give birth to. I want it; ergo, I must have it.

So what if the oldest IVF mother in India – in her 60s when she gave birth – died a mere three years after her triplets were born? Some of you may well say that at least she proved that nothing was impossible before she died; she fulfilled her dream of becoming a mother.

But seriously, is every dream meant to come true? Is every prayer meant to be answered? Is every desire meant to be fulfilled?

Or are we just setting ourselves up for disappointment, disillusionment, desperation – not to mention early death – when we start to believe this? And whether we admit it to ourselves or not, we are starting to believe it.

We believe that we are entitled to look like those pictures we see in glossy magazines. If our noses don’t match up, we’ll get a plastic surgeon to fix them. If our breasts fail the test, we will get them artificially enhanced. If our complexions are not good enough, we will apply bleach, whitening creams, glycolic peels and God-alone-knows what else until they are as fair and lovely as that of the models.

If our brows are beginning to get furrowed, it’s time to bring on the Botox. If our cheeks are losing that youthful bloom, then a spot of Restylene would not go amiss. If our arms are too flabby and our waists more jelly than belly, we will hit the gym for hours on end to become just as toned. If that doesn’t work, well then there’s always liposuction.

When it comes to personal improvement, we will stop at nothing no matter what the cost to our health – both mental and physical. And it’s only a matter of time before other areas of our lives are just as infected with this ‘nothing is impossible’ spirit.

It’s already begun to spill over in our expectations of our loved ones as well. Our children are expected to be models of good behaviour, acing exams at school, doing well at sports, playing one musical instrument or other, helping out with chores at home. Our partners and spouses have to bear the burden of our romantic fantasies in which no couple ever rows, husbands remember every anniversary and birthday, and wives never ever have headaches when it’s time for bed.

It’s no wonder really that we are all beginning to collapse under the pressure. Which is why I have a new credo to live life by: I don’t have it; ergo, I don’t want it.

I think this one will work much better for me.