Girls need to look like women and women need to look like girls: The erasure of aging
I’ve always been told that I look younger than my age. I have been stopped by TSA multiple times because they believe I’m a minor. At this point, I expect the question to every time I’m in O’hare or LAX. I have been asked my age by a flight attendant and by random people on the street. My coworkers and friends would assume I was 15 or 16 years old if they didn’t know how old I was. One day at work, a lady came inside to get an item. She saw me and the first thing she said was, “Omg you look so young”. I didn’t know how to respond, and the comment caught me off guard. She then said, “It’s a compliment, that’s a GOOD thing”. Even my friend Maria tells me, “Osarumwnse that’s a GOOD thing, you are aging like Anne Hathaway”.
However, I want to unpack that statement. Why is it a compliment for women to look younger than their age? Why is it that when you tell a woman she looks older than her age, she interprets it as an insult? They are both statements, yet women react differently to both. The fashion industry and pop culture are the main culprits behind this. They have fetishized youth. The fashion industry and society have conditioned women that it’s only acceptable to look young and youthful no matter their age. However, there is more nuance to this conversation. Because at the same time, society is telling older women and young adults to look youthful, they are sexualizing teenage girls. In this paper, we will go through examples of both phenomena. It will display how society contradicts itself when it comes to the intersection of aging and womanhood
