I’ll never forget the time when I overheard a few guys in their early 20s giving their friend shit for sleeping with a 40-year-old-woman. One of them had walked in on the couple the morning after and copped an eyeful of the woman’s bare thighs as she slept. God forbid, the woman had visible veins and a touch of cellulite on her legs — and that grossed him out.

I get it. These dudes were young and inexperienced, but the way they critiqued the woman disturbed me. As if it was acceptable to judge her as a person based on her age and physical appearance.

Sound familiar?

I started to shut down when they joked about sagging breasts, aging skin, and crow’s feet.

But the conversation stayed with me.

Unsurprisingly, my internal response was to size up myself. I started to feel more inadequate about my own body — my breasts, face, figure, and thighs, and I wondered if my boyfriend noticed similar faults.

I was 21-years-old.

It was nothing new, though. Just more layering on top of what I had already been exposed to from the get-go. We all are. Every day, movies, magazines, and ads show us that we aren’t beautiful enough, thin enough, smart enough, or outgoing enough.

By twenty-one, I had already been torn down by the unobtainable media-driven image of the ideal woman, and that was before the internet gave rise to the social media sex-nymph. Whether consciously or not, just about every guy I knew seemed to uphold that same impression of beauty — the flawless face, perfect figure, and so on.

Take any attractive woman. You might not see it, but she has spent a good portion of her life wrestling with an internal relationship with beauty. Often, it can become a deadly game of psychological warfare that results in eating disorders, depression, and other health problems.

She deals with judgment, comparison, and sexism daily. She’s slammed with the body-beautiful woman at every turn and brainwashed into believing she is less worthy if her face doesn’t exhibit perfect symmetry or her body is shelving too many curves. Never quite feeling good enough unless she resembles a softer, more refined Kim Kardashian look.

Every woman navigates a life of battling herself to some degree because of the impossible beauty standards we’ve created. She faces death by a thousand cuts to her self-esteem and self-worth, and as she ages and her youthful beauty begins to fade, it has the potential to consume her.

Author Kathy Lette elaborates:

“Age to women is what Kryptonite is to Superman. Inside every older woman is a younger woman screaming, ‘Get me the hell outta here.’”

I am now in my 40s. I love being here. I may not be as young as I used to be, but I have that much more appreciation for the experience of living, learning, feeling, and loving.

The years bring a freeing quality to life.

You’ve done time and earned your battle scars. You know who you are and accept yourself that bit more. You’ve learned how to control your emotions, realize you don’t know everything, and hopefully become more flexible with life and people. You begin to see through the beauty perception bullshit and reject its adverse effects on your younger self.

Still, the transition from the fertile, overtly sexual woman she had been to the still sexual but increasingly invisible woman she feels society and men especially now view her can be painful for a woman.

It’s a paradox of fading beauty.

The Paradox

A paradox combines contradictory features or qualities. In that case, the stigma of fading beauty is undoubtedly a unique riddle every attractive woman must one day solve and come to terms with.

Young women can get used to receiving a lot of attention.

She’s used to the world yielding to her smile, men falling at feet, and opportunities landing in her lap. So she is familiar with how she affects people and how her youth overshadows her life.

Someone older probably once said, “Enjoy it while it lasts, sweetheart.”

That seemed far off.

She’s got the ideal face and body, for now. But the fountain of youth isn’t everlasting.

We get older.

We grow gray hair, lose bone density and elasticity in our skin as it becomes thinner. Our breasts begin to respond to gravity. We feel creaks in our bodies where we didn’t previously. We wake up one morning and notice deeper crow’s feet shadowing our eyes.

That’s when some of us might scramble to get a series of anti-wrinkle injections to ease ourselves through the difficult transition.

Because we know that if you take a group of random women in their 30s and a group of random women in their 40s or 50s and ask a middle-aged man which group is more sexually attractive to him, he’ll say, “Why are you asking? Isn’t it obvious?”

We hear the noise telling us that we have nothing more of value to offer society or men because the spidery veins showing on our thighs signifies that we’ve passed our prime.

It is different for mature-aged men. They are not as invisible. They still hold the reins of power when deciding who we see projected back at us through media.

I mean, the minute a woman of a certain age sticks her head above the umbrella, disgrace rains down on her. In her sixth decade, Madonna attracted particularly negative flak for the crime of daring to think she is still hot — and worse, flaunting it publicly.

It’s the invisibility phenomenon.

But that’s why getting older terrifies the very beautiful in particular.

They will have so much more to lose if they’ve bought into the unrealistic standards of the beauty industry and believed in men with shallow viewpoints of women, pinning her self-worth more on her outer appearance than the value of her inner substance.

The Invisibility Phenomenon

The pain of feeling unattractive stems from the stories we tell ourselves about those we deem beautiful. When we buy into the beauty obsession culture and the definition of what makes for a perfect woman media companies continue to shove down our throats.

We can change it by —

• Rejecting the impossible media-driven standards telling us what’s beautiful, the deformed human-created delusion of beauty that promotes negative self-image.
• Stop building up our worth based on our outer appearance.
• Focusing instead on the beauty of our inner world and connection to life-force energy.
• Broadening our concept of what beautiful is to encompass the charm, soulful scars, and inner wisdom of getting older.
• Rehumanizing beautiful women as less enviable, just as flawed, and not apart from the rest of us.
• Realizing that true beauty is what radiates from within.

But I think the best way a woman can overcome the paradox of fading beauty is to accept that she can’t defy time or the process of aging. And while that means change, it certainly doesn’t decrease her value or make her any less of a full-bodied, beautifully graceful woman.

Woman.

The most effective way we can refute the invisibility nonsense is to be upfront and out there as women, proudly and loudly proclaiming that we may be aging, but we’re still here.

And we’re not going anywhere soon.

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