In early January, the author Emmeline Clein asked if I’d like to talk with her for a story she was working on for The Cut. It was “about Bot
The above is a brilliant article and a very welcome riposte to all the hyper-defensiveness I've seen against women who speak up against Botox and facelifts, presenting abstention as needless superiority, hypocrisy, wishful thinking, or so rare an occurrence as to not even be worth accounting for. Things like this:
"At some point we decided that ‘aging gracefully’ meant aging without any interventions. Or at least, without any interventions that have been deemed… too illiberal. There is a list of body modifications that are tacitly fine if you’re a woman who cares about democracy: moisturizer, tattoos, piercings, religious use of sunscreen, wild colored hair. [...] And yes, I also use Botox. I use it pretty lightly, because I don’t want my face to be frozen. Instead I use it to make my face look familiar to me, and I’m super happy with the results."
"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."
"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."
"I’m not sure in what universe the author of this piece thinks the movie star Anne Hathaway owes it to her, personally, to eschew cosmetic enhancement [...] We can simply sit and wait for the inevitable follow-up personal essay that will appear when the author decides actually maybe yes regarding whichever beautification for herself, and invites her readers to learn why, in her case, it is actually empowering."
"All the women I spoke to for this story argue that many of the people who criticize facelifts wear makeup and jewelry, use skincare, dye their hair, and work out so their asses look better. Winslet has benefitted from Photoshop and professional glam squads. So women who get facelifts often ask, Aren’t they doing the same thing, just using different modalities to manage their insecurity about aging?"
"Winslet said “the secret to aging at any age is accepting who they are and accepting you can’t fight change” I think that these issues get conflated. I don’t see a direct link in accepting who I am and deciding to age without any intervention."
Idk. I think about my lovely grandma, who was round in the way Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle is, and something in me feels bereft at the idea that, by refusing to ever become someone like her, we just make that kind of woman extinct. The idea that your face should look 'familiar' to you is not something any women had access to in the pre-Botox age. We will age out of our current bracket and into the next one. That's just life.
Haley Nahman in the above article nails this when she writes:
"Our impression of what “everyone is doing” shapes our view of society at large, and by extension, our place in it. Emmeline described a feeling of being left out: “Friends’ casual mentions of Botox … provoked a familiar sensation: of missing a memo or being excluded from middle-school strategy sessions.” And later: “Cass, a 31-year-old friend, said that while she sees her Botox purchases as ‘a failure to enact the political convictions that I hold,’ that is ultimately ‘a pretty common experience if you’re living in the U.S. in 2026.’” Another said that while she opposed rationalizing Botox as feminist, “she wondered whether it’s really fair to make it ‘our personal responsibility to look fucked up so that we can uphold our values?’” These women are describing peer pressure. [...] if mainstream women’s media—no matter how supposedly critical certain titles would like to be—are constantly suggesting that women who don’t participate are a dying breed, that approaching mid-life is like “heading for a cliff,” it’s possible the myth of ubiquitous procedures will edge closer to reality. The repeated assertions are a form of soft coercion."
