Madonna has been winning Grammys since the ’80s, but this year it was her face, not her voice, that made headlines.
She walked onstage at the 65th annual Grammy Awards to introduce artists Sam Smith and Kim Petras, and the internet burst into shame flames. She had a new-to-them face, and people were in their feelings about it.
They compared her to a Muppet and a monster. They speculated about her procedures.
“She’s lucky the climate activists in the crowd didn’t come after her for all the plastic in her face,” Fox News host Jimmy Failla commented.
“Fans ‘so confused’ by Madonna’s ‘new face’ at Grammys 2023,” a Page Six headline told us the next day.
Confused that she noticed the water she’s been swimming in her whole life?
Confused that she picked up on the persistent, toxic ageism and sexism that make women feel like there’s an expiration date on their worth, their appeal and their earning power? Confused that she might attempt to push that expiration date back a little?
Or just upset she didn’t hide it better?
We live in a culture that would like women to age slowly, gracefully and secretly.
A few outrage loops ago, it was Renee Zellweger’s face confusing us, and writer Sarah Seltzer introduced me to a term I’ve never forgotten.
“My theory is that if Renee Zellweger really did get work done, we’re not mad that she did it,” Seltzer wrote in a 2014 Flavorwire essay. “We’re mad that we think we can see it so clearly.
“She’s broken the invisible pact that women are supposed to make,” Seltzer continued. “Be beauty ducks, who look tranquil and eat hamburgers above the surface but are paddling beneath: working out, dieting, plucking, nipping, tucking and buffing all the time just out of sight, so we can appear this perfect.”
Beauty ducks. Brilliant.
It’s optional, of course, this invisible pact (prison?) that has us paddling like mad. And who better to bust out of it than Madonna? She’s made a career of bucking convention and disrupting norms and complicating our assumptions about gender, power, sex, beauty.
Why not bring that same energy to aging? Why not blow up the system that pressures women to nip and tuck and buff?
I don’t know. Maybe she doesn’t want to play a game of chicken with the entertainment industry, when the stakes are her livelihood.
Maybe because Sally Field was cast as Tom Hanks’ mom in “Forrest Gump” even though she’s only 10 years older than he is. Maybe because Leonardo DiCaprio keeps dating teenagers. Maybe because people lose their ever-loving minds when Paulina Porizkova, a whole model, continues to post photos of herself showing skin, even though she’s 57.
“When I was in my twenties and thirties, the less I wore — the more popular I was,” Porizkova wrote on Instagram. “In my forties, I could walk around practically naked and elicit nothing more than a ticket for public indecency. At fifty, I am reviled for it. ‘Put on your clothes, grandma. Hungry for attention, are you? A little desperate here? You’re pathetic.’”
Maybe because when Nicole Kidman, 55, posed on the cover of Perfect magazine looking like a gorgeous CrossFit instructor, the Guardian devoted a whole article to shaming her: “Fab abs, Nicole Kidman. But this frantic effort to look half your age is frankly demeaning.”
In other words, aging is a game women can’t win. Do too much to hide it, you’re debasing yourself. Do too little to hide it, you’re a relic.
So why not play by your own rules?
Dye your hair. Stop dying your hair. Get Botox. Don’t get Botox. Get fillers. Don’t get fillers. Try electromagnetic therapy to reduce fine lines and excess hair and saggy jowls and all the other things that none of the Kardashians have. Or don’t.
“I will never graduate from collagen,” Dolly Parton once quipped.
Bravo.
Because despite all indications to the contrary, women’s bodies are more than just vessels to host babies and people’s opinions.
They are power and beauty and pleasure and pain and memories and adventures and frustrations and illness and recovery and a lifetime of knowing someone will say you’re too much and someone else will say you’re not enough and at the end of the day — all of the days — your best bet is to be your own Goldilocks and decide for yourself what’s just right.
And then give the people around you that same latitude.
And maybe that, in the end, is how we truly grow old gracefully.
