The Best Part of Aging: Giving Up

Aging freed me from beauty culture / Illustration by Marisa Dengate

The strangest things can get the young folk on the internet going. I was reading up recently on the “heated debate” that has apparently broken out over a British woman, Georgia Peck, who posted a video online about why she stopped shaving her legs. In the snippet, which garnered half a million likes, Peck explained that she quit the hirsute un-adornment game six years ago after deciding it was simply too much of a hassle:

I used to shave on a very regular basis for years, and it did feel like a chore, but it also felt necessary, too, as a woman to feel beautiful and hygienic and attractive. But over time, I did wonder to myself, “Why am I doing this?”

And she called out the peculiarity of society’s shaving double standard: “Why is it considered totally normal for men to have body hair but for women it’s considered unattractive and unhygienic?”

Good question, and one I’ve often pondered myself, especially since I, too, have given up on shaving. Of course, Georgia is young and attractive, whereas I am old and, I’ve come to recognize with some shock, invisible. No one is likely to even realize that I’ve relinquished the razor, because nobody sees me these days.

It’s true. It’s like something out of Harry Potter — I slip among the throngs of humanity at the beach or on the streets or at a Thanksgiving parade without a single soul so much as glancing at me. I can wear the same pair of baggy sweatpants for a week, leave the hair on my head (or what’s left of it) uncombed, go without a single lick of makeup, and it doesn’t matter. No one rolls their eyes at my ratty store-brand sneakers or pointedly glances at the 30-year-old dress I have on. I could go to the supermarket in a fright wig and cheerleader uniform and not evoke so much as a flinch from the bored checkout girls. I am old now, and as a result, to the youth-obsessed world at large, I no longer exist.

And you know what? I’m okay with that.

One day a week, I visit my daughter’s house to pick up my granddaughter from school while her parents are at work. While I’m there, I try to make myself helpful, frequently by folding the massive piles of clean clothes mounding up in their laundry room. (My son-in-law was reluctant at first to have me pawing his undies, but convenience prevailed.) And I am here to tell you that I am positively bewildered by the array of Spandex instruments of torture my daughter dons voluntarily. I have a hard time even trying to figure out where, exactly, some of these so-called undergarments go. No thanx! As a proud veteran of the pre-pantyhose, dangling-strap-garter-belt days, I never again intend to be constricted by elastic in any way, shape, or form. I mean instead to let it all hang out.

Which, incidentally, is what said son-in-law notes in amazement about what he calls “the old guys at the gym,” as he mimes one of these ancient creatures sitting sprawled naked in the locker room by putting one leg up on the coffee table and extending the other on the sofa: “They just … they just …” Words fail him, and he shakes his head. Me, I’m on the side of the old guys. Why be constrained by false modesty when you’re 70 or so and still hitting the gym? Our bodies may be saggy and wrinkly, but they’ve gotten us this far. You kids should be so lucky someday.

I guess I have to admit that for most of my life, I was extremely, extremely concerned about my appearance. I come from the era of home-ec classes, in which we girls were taught how to wash and iron clothes, sew from patterns, apply makeup, assemble a becoming outfit, and perform other womanly tasks. I was also overweight and highly self-conscious about it, thanks to well-meaning parents who nagged me ceaselessly. No wonder Marcy’s “shapewear” so horrifies me. But I grew up just on the cusp of women’s liberation, with one foot in the “Burn the bra!” camp and the other planted firmly in “Find yourself a man!”

And finding a man — let’s face it — involves a whole litany of sacrificial acts we girls would just ignore if we had our druthers, most of which are, frankly, absurd when considered rationally. Applying hot wax to our bodies? Pouring acid on our skin? Sucking fat from our bellies — or, worse, plugging it into our bums? Not to mention all the fasting and dieting and exercising and yoga-ing required to make us presentable to the world.

And that’s even before we get dressed, in those constricting undergarments topped with carefully curated and coordinated wardrobes, including shoes and accessories and jackets and scarves and a handbag and hats … These days, when I get up in the morning, I stare into my open jewelry box, then look in the mirror to consider the plain gold hoops I’ve now been wearing for approximately 563 straight days, and I go on my way. I don’t have to choose something prettier or dangly-er or more high-fashion, because nobody is looking at my ears. Nobody’s looking at me! I’m the opposite of those cringey Big Pharma commercials in which perfectly normal people are scared to take off their sweaters or go swimming in public because they have a few scabs on their elbows. Honey, you want to see scabs? Take a gander at what life’s done to me!

Though, come to think of it, I might look even worse if I hadn’t gone to all that trouble over the years.

Lucky for me, our societal low expectations for the elderly make life so much easier, so much simpler. I’m now the anti-influencer.”

Speaking of what gets people going, there was a recent flurry of publicity about actress Pamela Anderson, the buxom babe of 1990s Baywatch fame, who’s apparently no longer wearing any makeup — not even mascara. She was doing the rounds on late-night TV this summer thanks to her role in the Naked Gun remake, and damn, she looked great despite the facial-enhancement moratorium. I watched her on Late Night With Seth Meyers, and what struck me was how much more approachable and relatable she seemed without the perfecting armor of eyeliner and foundation and rouge and the like we’re accustomed to seeing stars decked out in. Also? She’s reportedly hot-and-heavy dating co-star Liam Neeson, so it’s not as though she’s going begging for male attention. Maybe he’s just more evolved than most guys. Or maybe — and this is a definite possibility — Anderson’s plain-faced self is just much, much hotter than most of our maquillaged selves. Even so, it’s a bold move for someone in the cutthroat showbiz game to renounce the conventional trappings of beauty. This is a woman who got her start as a Playboy cover girl, after all.

America’s youth preference would seem to fly in the face of what studies show about age as it relates to happiness. In Arthur C. Brooks’s essay in the July 2019 issue of the Atlantic, fetchingly titled, “Your Professional Decline Is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think,” he cites a review of relevant research noting that our so-called “prime” 30s and 40s are pretty miserable, overall:

Almost all studies of happiness over the life span show that, in wealthier countries, most people’s contentment starts to increase again in their 50s, until age 70 or so. That is where things get less predictable, however. After 70, some people stay steady in happiness; others get happier until death. Others — men in particular — see their happiness plummet. Indeed, depression and suicide rates for men increase after age 75.

Gee, guys, I’m awfully sorry for you but, well, happy for me. And I can’t help thinking: Maybe women outstrip men in elder happiness precisely because of the phenomenon I’m experiencing — the sudden decline of self-care duties we no longer feel compelled to perform. It reminds me of a piece I read in the New York Times about the We Do Not Care Club, founded by influencer Melani Sanders to “celebrate women of a certain age who have stopped trying to please everyone.” Hundreds of thousands of women around the world, the Times reported, have enlisted in her call to publicly share what they no longer care about, a list that includes arm fat, “what you want for dinner,” stains on a nightgown, and chin hairs. “It feels liberating,” Sanders told the Times, “just to free my mind from caring so much about things that don’t truly matter.” Right on! Where’s my membership card?

Or take Botox. Really, do — take it out with the trash, please. Here’s the Washington Post on the topic a little while back:

It’s the same with Lindsay Lohan, who has been the subject of a rolling tide of plastic surgery rumors since she stepped out looking remarkably youthful for the Our Little Secret movie press tour in late 2024. This past May, Lohan did an interview with Elle magazine in which she attributed her flawless complexion to skin care, ​juicing and pickled beets. Oh, and Botox. “Everyone does Botox,” said Lohan, who turned 39 this month.

She’s 39 years old, for chrissake! And then I happened upon the news that 44-year-old (how positively decrepit!) Kim Kardashian, whose good sense can be inferred from the fact that she had four children with Kanye West, has invented a nifty new contraption for her Skims shapewear line that’s modeled after the compression garments doctors give patients to wear following “intensive cosmetic surgery,” according to the former president of the American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery. The idea is you don it while you’re sleeping, to prevent unsightly sag. This so-called “facial wrap” sold out instantly, thanks to a fervor driven, according to the Times, by feminine pursuit of something called “snatched face,” a condition that I have no fear of ever possessing. (I suspect the mask also serves as a prophylactic.) The Times quoted despairing beauty critic Jessica DeFino as noting (somewhat incoherently):

What that says to me is that this pressure to look beautiful has become so consuming that there is not even a moment of our day — while we are sleeping — that has not been commodified for the project of becoming more beautiful.

Anthony Hopkins, who so memorably played Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs while clad in an eerily similar mask to prevent him from chomping on fellow humans, promptly posted on Instagram a photo of himself wearing Kardashian’s sling thing, with the comment “Thank you Kim. Don’t be afraid to come over for dinner.” The absurdity really starts to pile up, doesn’t it, once you’re headed this way?

But lucky for me, our societal low expectations for the elderly make life so much easier, so much simpler. I’m now the anti-influencer; I sit on the front porch in an old T-shirt and garden-crud-stained leggings and sip coffee with my hair looking like a bird’s nest after a hurricane. I consider it my reward for having endured life’s vicissitudes for this long, just as any elderly person would. Unless said elderly person were a complete narcissist intent on demanding that the whole world constantly acknowledge his unparalleled superiority and importance in anything and everything, like — oh, hey, I don’t know. Anybody in particular come to mind?

And then there’s Martha Stewart. (Isn’t there always Martha Stewart?) She’s 84 now and just introduced her new skin-care product line, called Elm Biosciences. Because it’s all so scientific, see? I mean, it must be. The press release notes that her advisory board is made up of 350 dermatologists, scientists, and medical researchers, which, man, if she can get that many of those people to agree on anything, she really might be onto something. “Cells die. Skin ages,” she told the Wall Street Journal fatalistically in announcing the launch. “We’re aging the minute we’re born.” But that doesn’t mean you give up the good fight, she added, noting that her own mother had a facelift at the rather advanced age of 85.

What the hell is the matter with our society, that nobody would talk Martha’s mom out of that?

There are times, as I sit on the porch and rock, that I contemplate, sadly, the vast quantities of time we women have spent, down through the ages, on meaningless crap meant to alter our looks. Imagine the great novels that have gone unwritten, the brilliant musical compositions that will never exist, the kingdoms we could have conquered, and the inventions we might have concocted if we hadn’t been plucking our eyebrows and polishing our toenails in order to attract a promising mate.

We ladies are about to get our revenge, though. I’ve been reading a lot lately about these “tech billionaires” who made their mega-money inventing hellish new ways of separating us lowly humans from our humanity, and it seems they’ve all taken up the same new hobby: trying to live forever. If that seems a fool’s errand to you, that’s likely because you haven’t got billions to burn. It’s generally the filthy-rich dudes who are pursuing prolonged lives, not poor workaday stiffs trying to make their way through this one relatively intact.

Naturally, the New Yorker, which cultivates an elevated readership — both intellectually and financially — had a long, long article on these tech bros over the summer, one that went into considerable detail about what their quest for everlasting life entails. And I have to admit, it puts stiletto heels and eye shadow and Skims into a whole new perspective. For instance, there’s Bryan Johnson, founder of the Braintree payments platform and promoter of a movement he’s dubbed “Don’t Die”:

He spends a quarter of a million dollars a year in that pursuit. His regimen has included restricting calories to 1,977 a day, undergoing high-frequency stimulation of his abdomen to simulate the effect of twenty thousand sit-ups, and stimulating his penis with shock waves for some doubtless excellent reason.

Then there’s Peter Diamandis, a 64-year-old entrepreneur and founder of the Fountain Life longevity clinic. Here’s how he spends his days in the intense pursuit of an extended existence:

Diamandis rises each morning at five-thirty and assesses his overnight biometrics, gathered by an Oura ring, an Apple Watch, and a continuous glucose monitor. Then, as he meditates, he employs three red-light-therapy devices: one for healthy skin, one for lustrous hair, and one to kill oral bacteria. Along with a Ka’Chava shake, he consumes the first of five daily pill packs: this includes a GLP-1 agonist, a mitochondrial stimulant, a stress dampener, and a nootropic for cognitive enhancement. After using a toothpaste tailored to his oral microbiome, he begins his morning Zooms while pedaling a stationary bike. He also pumps iron and pins his daily protein intake at a hundred and fifty grams, one gram for each pound he weighs.

Oh, and there’s this re Diamandis:

He recently reduced his daily load of supplements from seventy-four to fifty-two, to spare his kidneys, but he’s still taking more than any other patient that his Fountain Life doctor sees.

The billionaire’s regimen makes pantyhose sound downright warm and fuzzy, doesn’t it? That life of his is going to seem long, that’s for sure.

Published as “Liberation Day” in the December 2025/January 2026 issue of Philadelphia magazine.