Issue #24: Valerie Monroe knows how not to f*ck up your face
On aging, friendship, and face lifts
Welcome to part five of six of our Body Image series.
Heads up: this issue talks about women’s beauty standards, aging, and Botox.
“We definitely thought you were, like, twenty four!” a group of younger women said to me and my friends. We’d met them two minutes earlier in the women’s restroom. I was exuberant; I rushed out the door to find Sam and give him the good news.
This month, I (Aliza) will turn thirty three. And, inevitably, conversations with friends that once revolved around “how to look older” (to get into the bar/nail a job interview/come across more seriously/etc.) have morphed into, “Do you think my face has changed?”
The answer is, and should be (because, c’mon, perspective), an emphatic and grateful, “Yes!”
But much like the unattainable beauty and motherhood standards I’m still trying to let go of, I feel an enormous pressure not to change, not to age.
It’s hard to square this with what I appreciate about others’ faces. Personally, I miss the days of Hollywood when actors had facial movement and imperfect smiles. When there weren’t entire Instagram accounts dedicated to “Did she or didn’t she get [fill in the blank]?”
Jia Tolentino’s 2019 article for The New Yorker, The Age of Instagram Face, is the seminal explanation of what’s changed.
Jia writes, “In a world where women are rewarded for youth and beauty in a way that they are rewarded for nothing else — and where a strain of mainstream feminism teaches women that self-objectification is progressive, because it’s profitable — cosmetic work might seem like one of the few guaranteed high-yield projects that a woman could undertake.”
Especially as Botox has morphed into the widely accepted (and adored!) powerhouse that it is today, shifting beauty standards to zero flaws or wrinkles, I feel myself facing a choice: How long will you delay the inevitable?
If you’ve seen Barbie,1 you’ll remember the scene where Margot Robbie, as Barbie, sits down on a bench next to an elderly woman. She turns to look at the woman. “You’re beautiful,” Robbie says.
Robbie, of course, and the other women represented in the film, have no wrinkles. What does this tell us about everyone in the middle, anyone between the ages of 25 and 65? About the legitimacy of Robbie’s compliment, if it wasn’t coming smack-dab in the middle of a movie bankrolled by a profit-seeking corporation? If the lines of life experience make us beautiful, why are even the so-called “evolved” beauty brands like Glossier and Merit peddling us Perfecting Skin Tint ($26) and Great Skin Instant Glow Serum ($38)?
I don’t have answers; I haven’t had Botox — and as of now, I don’t plan to — but my medicine cabinet is overflowing with these “age-defying” products, promising the same dewy, unwrinkled glow. There’s a pattern. I order a new product in a moment of insecurity; several weeks (or days) later, when I discover (spoiler alert!) this $30+ product doesn’t reverse the aging process, it begins gathering dust on my shelf.
Last weekend, my mom and I found ourselves lamenting similar experiences, then trying to explain ourselves to my dad.
“Have you ever scrolled through old photos of yourself to compare your appearance to today?” we asked.
“Hm, no,” he said. The thought had never occurred to him.
“There it is. You’ve made our point,” I said.
’s newsletter, , is the remedy we actually need. Her writing and no-holds-barred approach to discussions of aging and beauty are a powerful reminder you can’t win the beauty game (especially as the multi-billion dollar industry grows and grows while targeting younger and younger women.) Unless — until! — you can see yourself uninhibited by objectification.As Valerie says, we (women) are “stuck in a damned if we do, damned if we don’t dilemma.”2 We talked to Valerie to learn more about her experience.
Valerie knows what she’s talking about. For nearly 16 years, she was the beauty director at O (The Oprah Magazine!) where her monthly “Ask Val” page was followed by thousands of readers.
Aliza and Aja: When was your first moment of body consciousness — a moment you learned the world might see your body as imperfect?
Valerie: I was a very thin child. By first grade I hated my skinny arms and wanted to wear long sleeves to hide them.
My mother was a model and voluptuous; in my mind, her body is what a female body should look like. I wrote more on that here.
I matured late — I didn’t start menstruating till I was almost 17 — after which my body changed completely: from small, thin, and flat-chested to tall and proportioned in a way that was very near our beauty culture’s ideal. From that point on, I experienced my body as a vessel of enormous pleasure.
I realize this experience is unusual, but I didn’t know that then.
You’re now in your 70s. How do you think about your body in relation to aging?
I don’t think about my body more or less as I’ve aged, but differently. Though it still gives me pleasure living in it, looking at it, the changes are challenging.
I’m no longer as concerned with how I appear to others as I am with my health, for example. The inevitable wear and tear of aging causes an abundance of little problems that feel to me like the harbingers of bigger ones more likely as the years accrue, which is something I rarely thought about till after I turned 70.
My body feels much more vulnerable now than it ever did — because it is.
Tell us more.
As an adult, I’ve always had a healthy body image, which I think made it easier for me to navigate the challenges of living in a culture that prizes hyper-sexuality and youth. I’m not unaware of the privileges I’ve had as a cis white woman who, on the face of it at least, has conformed with our culture’s limiting definitions of beauty.
But as I’ve aged, I’ve had more experience with the deleterious effects of those limits — and I’m determined not to let them define me. That’s part of the reason I started writing HNTFUYF.
What role does body image play in your friendships?
My friends and I are careful not to spend an inordinate amount of time talking about the ways our bodies are challenging us at our age; someone said she tries to avoid “organ recitals” with her friends. What hurts, what’s stopped working, fallen off, etc., there’s a lot of that.
And a few of my friends who’ve chosen to have facelifts have talked with me about their feelings about it; three out of five of them are happy with their choice.
I love how you’ve written about that for HNTFUYF. For example, you mentioned hearing from readers who find any mention of fillers misogynistic — and others who want to be accepted for having a face lift.
Is there any additional content on body image or related topics you’d recommend to our readers?
Science/speculative fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin had wise thoughts about beauty. One of my favorite quotes from Le Guin is:
Beauty always has rules. It’s a game. I resent the beauty game when I see it controlled by people who grab fortunes from it and don’t care who they hurt. I hate it when I see it making people so self-dissatisfied that they starve and deform and poison themselves.
And I know you know about
’s Substack, . She’s brilliant.
We hope you enjoyed these candid reflections and insights from Valerie as much as we did. For more, follow along and check out
on Substack.Bonus Content:
🎙️Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ Wiser Than Me, a limited-run podcast series in which Julia sits down with older women like Jane Fonda, Isabel Allende, and Fran Lebowitz is phenomenal. If you haven’t yet, add it to your listening queue!
💪 In a recent Q&A with
, author of Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture from the K-Beauty Capital, 3 and Hu delve into some of the insidious beauty practices that exist in South Korea and the United States — and what that means for their own identity, but also for parenting (especially of young girls).
Finally, the most-clicked links on Monday were Aja’s new wool skirt and my everyday fall boots — although I’m back in sandals because it’s hitting 80 in Boston today!
Platonic Love is an entirely reader-supported, affiliate-free publication. Your support means so much to us, and we’d love to hear from you in the comments: reactions, feedback, questions? See you next week for the final feature in this series. Love, Aliza & Aja
(Aja: Anyone here who hasn’t? I finally saw it a week and a half ago — felt like I was the last one.)
At-Home Devices: The “Everything” Answer? by Valerie Monroe
Thank you for the shout-out!