Over at Jizzebel, internet archipelago of misfit romantic rejects, a woman breaks the ogress omertá and bares her shiv-scarred soul for the world to leer at with morbid fascination. In a skin-thin confessional-cum-rationalization wrapped in a transparent gauze of self-protective snark, ur-femcunt Tracy Moore, sporting a testosterone-fueled gargantujaw that would be the envy of any excessively prognathic urban youth, unloads about the reality of women losing their looks, and thus their sexual market options, to the unrelenting tick tocking of father fuckyouupgood.
You will realize that getting older is not only NOT as terrible as you thought, but that it actually it confers untold advantages you couldn’t have even imagined when you were busy running around doing cartwheels staying up all night wearing miniskirts.
Ugly truth time: Old age is a horror show. The mind fogs, the body rots, the sex organs wither, the energy level plummets. And that’s if you’re lucky enough to avoid really shitty decay accelerants like heart disease or cancer. What about these facts of the toll of aging is not terrible? Old people have remarked to me that the only upside to their loss of youth was a growing sense of serenity, aka calm resignation to a total lack of power to do anything about one’s wretched deterioration. Here’s an easy question for platitude pusher Tracy Moore that will highlight the bankruptcy of her feminist feels: How many 80 year old women would instantly and painlessly shave 60 years of aging off their bodies with a snap of the finger if they could? My bet: A lot. About the same number as the number of parents-to-be who would instantly and painlessly cure a gay germ infection that was discovered in mommy’s fetus. (The following ‘heh’ directed at Andrew “Rawmuscleglutes” Sullivan:
Heh.)
Moore continues her psyche triage by quoting an advice seeker from an “Ask Polly” column:
“And so, the prospect of losing [my looks]—and I know I will lose it, everyone does—fills me with such crushing dread. I take care of myself as best I can in terms of a healthy lifestyle and sunscreen, but I know that every day that goes by, I am aging, and ultimately powerless to stop [the aging process]. (I don’t have much faith in the ability of cosmetic procedures to keep my face looking exactly the way it does now, so that “option” is of little comfort). It’s like I’ve been given this precious gift with the stipulation that it will be yanked away from me before my life is even halfway over. I don’t know how to cope with this. I have these horrible moments now in which I see older women around me and feel a visceral sense of disgust and pity—obviously a projection of my own fears.”
The fear of old people is real, because, of course, they aren’t a separate species, but a mirror of our future gnarly selves. This woman is expressing a real fear based on a real understanding about how the world, and the mating market, work, even if her worry borders on obsessively unhealthy. The correct advice to give her is not to impugn her character or chide her for her lack of faith in feminist boilerplate credentialism, but to tell her to stop worrying so much about something she has no control over and to get out and enjoy her boner-inspiring, beta-manipulating youth n beauty while she has it, because it is good. And then perhaps to recognize that, yes, the day will come, sooner rather than later, that her looks will be gone, and she should prepare for this eventuality by limiting her time on the cock carousel and extracting commitment from a worthy man before her carriage turns into a fatass pumpkin. A few tips about age-slowing eating and lifestyle habits wouldn’t hurt, either.
Tracy Moore, as is the wont of members of her subterranean sisterhood, imparts a distinctly uninspired take that vibrates with barely-concealed acknowledgement of biomechanical reality:
Obviously, we could make a lot of assumptions about where this advice-seeker has gone wrong — namely by being too caught up in her own appearance and the joy it brings her and others. But we would do better to remind ourselves of the double-edged sword beauty brings to those who posses it: great rewards, an often over-reliance on its door-opening magical powers to the exclusion of cultivating the self, an expiration date, being taken less seriously, etc.
An “expiration date”! A term so closely aligned with Chateau Heartiste that suspicions are aroused Moore is a secret reader.
Nevertheless, Moore’s laundry list of youthnbeauty downsides are feelgood pablum: There is not only no laboratory evidence that beautiful women don’t “cultivate the self” or that they are “taken less seriously”, there is hardly any real world evidence of these nostrums either. If anything, beautiful women are taken *too* seriously, and get a leg up in just about every aspect of life by obsequious men… until they hit the wall. And since beauty and IQ correlate, there is a better than random chance that a beautiful girl will be a more interesting personality than will be an ugly girl.
Sometimes the Thing You Notice About Aging Is Oddly Comforting
Even when these moments come — I can’t get drunk like I used to; What’s that popping sound in my hip every time I stand up? Must use more moisturizer — rather than feel bad, I actually feel good, good that I am alive and this age and still totally healthy, in spite of how much I wasted my youth, or rather, got wasted while young. Think about it: Your body says fuck you to gravity most days of its existence. Pretty amazing.
It’s only “oddly” comforting because Moore understands, past the confines of her well-manicured ego, that aging is not a comfort show at all. Yes, pretty amazing. You keep telling yourself that Tracy, because those wasted years not finding a beta husband to tenderly stroke your anvil mandible while you still had a semblance of sexual marketability are never coming back. May as well ease the pain with a stirring morning motivational that exults in your achievement of breathing air for another day.
Yes, There’s Regret, But Not Like You Think
Once I remember talking with a friend when we were in our late 20s, and she remarked casually that she wished she’d worn more cute clothes/risqué stuff when she was younger and had a “better body,” and I agreed reflexively, like, yeah, of course, who doesn’t. But then I realized that in order to have done that, I would have had to have been a completely different person. I have never really been the type of person to dress provocatively at any age.
Just like a feminist to wish she had been sluttier when she was younger. Hey Try-Hard, I got news for ya… younger women can wear a friggin potato sack and still look more bangable than a 40 year old in a cocktail dress.
What crazy person would trade that [life experience] for a slightly higher set of boobs?
False choice fallacy. But this is feminist-land, where logical fallacies are coin of the realm.
And if you so happen now be the sort of person who wants to wear a miniskirt, wear a fucking miniskirt and shut the fuck up about it!
This is not recommended for cougars and fatties, or does Moore believe that women should be exempt from feeling bad about any visual appraisals that aren’t sufficiently and simultaneously respectful and lascivious?
The Thing You Really Notice is How Little You Care
Sorry, I know it’s a bumper sticker at this point, but the hands-down, best motherfucking juice that comes from being older is how much better you know yourself, and what’s more, you like this person you’ve gotten to know, even when you accept her worst flaws. This is more liberating than all the fresh-faced ignorant bliss in the world.
You know what else would qualify as “liberating”? Admitting to yourself that you look shittier now than you did ten years ago. And then adjusting your man-sights accordingly.
Trying to appreciate where you are right now is the big triumph of life.
Feminism: The new tard olympics.
Knowing that wherever you are right now is where you are, and looking for the best thing in that, with an eye on how to keep it going toward wherever you want to be, is the point.
Has a sentence more devoid of substance and more burdened with vapid nonsense ever been written by a woman? It reads like a post-modern architectural shoebox of stacking “right now is where is right is now is point is where” clauses.
Your Looks Never Actually Bail
If so, where do they go? In the crawl space at your last apartment? Is there a dumpster in the sky where all the young, beautiful faces go, like some weirder, more mutant version of the movie Face Off? Duh, you always look like you! Because you are you! And you are an evolving thing, a thing that ages!
So Tracy, is the fact that this concluding paragraph of yours contradicts just about every stated and implied premise you made earlier in your article fill you with shame in your chosen career? Jes askin’.
So if you are young and terrified and reading this right now, I say, please, enjoy the shit out of what you’ve got, and spend the rest of your time building an exquisite bridge to the next phase of your life, so that you can enjoy the shit out of that, too. That is the secret to sheer magnetism, no matter how old you are.
Actually, men will be a lot less tolerant of your “sheer magnetism” when you’re old and ugly. But your fat feminist snarky BFFs will continue to lap up your runny shit, so there’s that.
Why else can we not stop drooling over Helen Mirren?
Newsflash: No one is drooling over Helen Mirren but deluded feminists fearing a crash impact with the wall, and their suck-up orbiter manboobs who secretly want to prematurely dribble a tepid spurt of their feeb seed all over your jungle bush.
PS: The following is *not* a valid example of an older woman having sexual market options:
PPS: One of the reasons, maybe the primary reason, why you’re seeing an uptick in these lamentations from aging beauties nowadays is because the loss of religiosity and the concomitant bracing realization of the illimitable lightness of youth and the infinite darkness of post-life encourages a mournful nihilism about one’s happiness beyond serving as a visually appealing cum receptacle. When hope for something more transcendent, whether real or imagined, is gone, the pistons of sex are all that’s left to power the motor.
Another reason for the wailing is the growing childlessness of the marginally-aware class of women. Fear of old age and regret for lost youth have always been with humankind, but never have they felt so acute as now, in our modern, pre-collapse society. Children, along with God, acted as decouplers that placed the sense of self at a safe, if still visible, distance from constant gnawing dread of one’s mortality. Being responsible for a child, and living through that child’s life, provides, I imagine, and especially provides for women, a distraction if not a redemption from sexual invisibility and the uglification of aging. But when you are a single and the city feminist tankgrrl with mimosas for blood, sexual invisibility is akin to an exorcism of your soul. You are shattered, empty, a nothing with nothing but regret to rapidly fill in your osteoporosing id.
[crypto-donation-box]
