Am I Still Pretty?

BY Odelya Kalmanofsky

We have been prompted, pampered, and ready to seduce the patriarchy since we learned its language. Reduced to our physicality – the attraction men bestow upon us ultimately becomes our worth. As plastic surgery becomes normalized, our already skewed perception continues to warp itself - accumulating in the reliance on medical procedures. With the added torment of social media, women are fighting an elevated brand of societal pressure. The new generation of "influencers" provided a whole new brand of fame reliant on being attractive and swapping out makeup brushes for injectables. If we can change our faces and lie about our age - where do we draw the line? We have forgotten the message to love ourselves and skipped straight to the physical alteration of our faces and bodies. There is an unequivocal need to embrace natural beauty again collectively. 

To tackle the monster, we need to know its name; "the male gaze" is the notion of viewing our world and our standards in the perception of the heterosexual man, the depiction of a woman as an object for male enjoyment. Living in the male gaze doesn't mean you don't have free reign over what you wear or how you act, but rather, the subconscious unknowingly appeals to what men are taught to find desirable. My first encounter with self-sexualizing happened in middle school (as it always does); I distinctly remember my first push-up bra and all it came with. I was not empowered by my new body but blinded by the knowledge that this bra was going to take me places. If I wanted validation for my character – THIS WAS THE WAY TO DO IT. And while I could lie, stating I quickly grew out of it, understanding my worth to be separate from the attention of men, the reality remained: I was chained to those push-ups till my junior year of high school. The "desirable" nature of a young woman reflects the imposing ideals of our patriarchal society; we are at our sexiest – therefore our prime - from ages 16-22. Old enough that we have a woman's body, yet impressionable enough to be "protected" like a child. When women start to age, even by 25, we are no longer the "hot new toy." We spend the better part of our lives giving up our childlike innocence just to long for that freedom later in life. You look back on that 13-year-old girl and beg her to slow down, understanding you were robbed of your innocence when you hit puberty, and no amount of money or injectables can bring it back. 

But we cannot simplify stereotypical attraction to our age - we must mature faster, keeping up with the world's pressures. We internalize the male gaze to appear "sexy," wearing clothing that accentuates the characteristics men are generally attracted to, i.e., cleavage. Still, with the new ease of plastic surgery – young women aren't just extenuating their appearance; they are changing it. Beauty trends are not new concepts; throughout history, people have experimented with some of the most outrageous approaches to enhance one's "potential." Products such as foot-binding, waist trainers, and tapeworms held status in the beauty realm, so why should we care that a lip flip is the new craze? The current trend of plastic surgery has reached new levels, accumulating in a 57.67-billion-dollar industry with the potential to reach 75.20 billion by 2030. The toxicity of plastic surgery is more than its physical dangers; it's the reality that we really can change everything. 

From posting before-and-after photos to positive testimonials, these surgeries are the hot trend fueling filler to be a young girl's new best friend. Personally, I always imagined my first big girl purchase would be a nose job. As a young Jewish woman, our noses (my nose) became a comical reality, a generational joke, if you will. It wasn't until I watched Sex and the City that I changed my perception of my features. In all her beauty and captivation, Sarah Jessica Parker was not the typical look. Her confidence was the persona I needed to look up to. Ultimately, the desire and ease of plastic surgery isn't going away – but our representation can. Current celebrities and influencers who openly discuss their plastic surgeries normalize these procedures, further contributing to their prevalence. With the ability to change everything – we have formulated into one single "look" we deem attractive. We need women who aren't afraid to be natural again, to fight against the grain – women who feel comfortable being human. Our standards of normalcy cannot come from a photoshopped bikini picture; we need a voice of reason to break these incessant mental games. 

Everyone should be able to do what they want if it doesn't hurt another person, but we are hurting. The male gaze erases our individuality and imposes heightened consequences on us as women. Every part of our lives and body has changed for it. Our role models, our ideals, and our passions have all been misconstrued to fit into a system that will never benefit – or at the very least work – for us. We should love ourselves and our bodies, especially as we age. Our body keeps us alive, the machine that allows us to be. Our face represents our lineage; our features make "us" us. We need to be kinder to ourselves; we are not reduced to our appearance and the opinions of others. We are much more than that. 

We are so willing to see the beauty in our children and friends but never within ourselves. It all starts with the people we look up to; it's not as if only celebrities are subjected to hiding their age – most women over the age of 40 routinely inject their faces with Botox or dye their gray hair. Approximately 50% of women over 40 dye their hair, with hair color being the first indication of aging – people start to go gray from the ages of 30 and above. Being the youngest in my family of four, my mother was 37 when she gave birth to me. I do not remember life without my mother's salt and peppered hair; she has always embraced going gray with no shame. "It might have been a choice to age naturally, something I never saw as a weakness. I've always been friends with older women my whole adult life; my friends were going gray while I had a newborn," she laughs with deep smile lines. The lines on her face soften as she whispers, "I saw their acceptance of age to be beautiful. I looked up to it." Would she feel shame if it wasn't for the conversations celebrating aging? While my mother had the individual decision to go gray, she did so with the power of community. The more women who embrace their gray, the more comfortable we feel to do so. It takes one person to break the norm, one person to make you feel comfortable in yourself – one person to redefine beauty.