No Wonder Women Feel They Must Have Face Lifts

Why do white American women line up in large numbers to subject their faces to knives and hypodermics filled with poison?

Why are they willing to spend approximately $400 every few months, risking drooped eyelids and frozen features, for a four-month sabbatical from wrinkles?

The answer is simple: power and anxiety.

Aging women are among the least powerful segments of the population.

One must look long and hard to find women older than 50 leading the way in business, academia, medicine, media or entertainment. Thumb through a history book, literary anthology or film library and elder female wisdom and image are hard to find.

Despite the many achievements won by women in the United States over the past 30 years, youthful beauty remains the ultimate form of power for women.

“Elder” and “beauty” rarely appear within the same sentence; when youthful beauty fades, personal and professional options usually narrow.

As a result, American girls and women spend billions of dollars each year to achieve, enhance and maintain the youthful standards of beauty so clearly defined and marketed by our culture.

And for good reason.

Lurking just beyond those wrinkles are troubling social and medical statistics that serve as a warning about being old and female: Nearly 75% of the nation’s elderly poor are women; advances in research on female diseases such as osteoporosis and low bone mass are relatively recent.

Female disintegration from the inside out was long considered a normal part of aging.

The drive to maintain cultural standards of beauty begins very young and lasts for a lifetime. The 8-year-old worried about being fat travels through her teen years and into adulthood piercing, purging, plucking, painting, perming and pumping iron.

By the time she is in her 30s, 40s or 50s, the slice of a plastic surgeon’s knife or a needle pushing poison into her face seems acceptable, a natural part of a lifetime of anxiety about personal beauty.

Where money is no object, these medical interventions become even easier.

So no one questions why Barbie might want Botox. Or why television’s Greta Van Susteren would go on the cover of People with her new face lift.

Appearance junkies are made, not born.

Our economic system and the mass distribution of female images work together to make the body the primary project in the lives of too many American women and girls.

When our culture ascribes power to women on the basis of their wisdom, moral character, creativity and strength--and not just appearance--8-year-olds will stop worrying about their thighs, and the 50-year-old will no longer view plastic surgery or poison as a rational or necessary personal choice.

Joan Jacobs Brumberg is a historian at Cornell University and author of “The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls” (Vintage Books, 1998). Jacquelyn Jackson is executive producer of the documentary “The Body Project” and is a women’s health advocate in Washington, D.C.