I Am So Fucking Tired of Listening To Women My Age Complain About Being Old and Washed

In honor of my recent birthday at the end of Aries season, here’s an essay about the pleasures of getting deeper into your thirties and the pernicious obsession with female abjection in cinema.

Midway through April, at the tail end of Aries season, I turned thirty-six. I never imagined getting to this age. Not from a fear of aging but an inability to be so forward-thinking. Until turning thirty, I genuinely believed I would have killed myself by this point. After last year was marked by heartbreak and hard-won growth, I greeted this new year of life brimming with desire and my eyes trained toward new horizons. My work-related travels to New York and San Francisco were resplendent with fresh oysters and champagne, long walks through verdant new places as spring made her gentle appearance, enlivening conversations over French 75s, mended friendships, deliriously fun late nights, and a renewed excitement for this ragged state of being we call life. Even when conversations turned toward the existential fears of climate disaster and America’s metastasizing fascism, none of my pleasures were shadowed by a fear of being or looking thirty-six. Since entering my thirties, it is as if everywhere I turn there’s another woman around my age—and sometimes considerably younger—publicly and loudly demeaning herself for having the temerity to still be alive after turning thirty. There is a question that hangs like a scythe over the exposed throat of every woman: What could age ever offer a woman beyond invisibility and psychic pain? Far too many women I know agree with the answer patriarchal forces have provided for us: nothing.

Growing up in the hothouse environment of 1990s and early 2000s Miami, I was lucky to have a mother who told me consistently, “Your thirties and forties are your best years as a woman. That’s when the fun truly starts.” She also modeled this for me, fluttering from her downtown office to Miami’s nightlife with a bevy of other fabulous black women — some Caribbean, some West African, others Southern-born like my mother herself. They modeled a version of black adulthood that was bristling with vivacity, discovery, and, most importantly, pleasure. I completely understand the vexation women my age feel about getting older, even if I don’t share it, because this is exactly how we have been taught to regard ourselves. We live in a world where we are bombarded by our own technologically-mediated visage in ways human beings never had to contend with before. I’ve never wanted marriage and kids, so I blessedly don’t have that clock ticking away as a reminder of supposed lack. I’ve never felt that by being single something fundamental was missing from my life. But parsing your own desires from what you’re trained to want by an individualistic, youth-obsessed culture is a difficult and lifelong task. You have to want to push back against these forces for that to have a glimmer of possibility.

In American cinema, there is a false dichotomy for women. You’re either an ingénue or an auntie, grandmother, or sexless mentor who supports the story—but the story is rarely yours. There are exceptions, of course. I can name the white actresses that American cinema offered compelling roles to after turning thirty-five like Meryl Streep, Glenn Close, and my personal queen, Rachel Weisz. But broadly, women are rarely afforded dynamic examples of what middle age can look like for them — especially when they don’t have kids or a more traditional-looking romantic partnership. This fear is bound to no genre. Babygirl, X, and The Idea of You, just to name a few, definitely qualify. When I watched The Substance — writer-director Coralie Fargeat’s body horror excursion into Hollywood, aging, and obsessions with symmetry — I couldn’t help but recognize that this wasn’t a treatise tapping into a fear women share, but a work specifically attuned to white women’s anxieties.

The continuing trend of middle-aged white women in cinema being punished for staying alive long enough to be considered old, or finding sexual fulfillment with exceedingly young men while still feeling downtrodden for being their age, is in fact white women unraveling at no longer being placed on the pedestal that their youth and conventional beauty once afforded them. Black women have never, in the history that has been written since slavery and its attendant structures reshaped the world order, been respected as women. We have not been afforded the full possibilities associated with this gender. So, the dynamics of aging cast a different hue over our lives. Think of the stringent belief that black don’t crack while people point to celebrities like Angela Bassett, all of whom get work done to halt the inevitable and intractable advance of time.

When I see a woman I find attractive and cool reveal a pit of despair on her Instagram stories over the fact she doesn’t look like her 28-year-old self now that she’s in her mid-thirties, I wince. When I witness a young woman who just turned thirty write a preening Instagram caption about being brave in the face of aging, I start to wonder what the fuck is going on with women and why they default to believing what the social forces that seek to keep them powerless dish out. When I witness women in my age group eager to be seen as cool by Gen Z and those coming up behind them, I wonder when exactly they lost their own sense of self—if they had one in the first place. When I hear a woman degrade another for the mere fact of being old, or crowing about their lack of collagen in public discussions, online comments, and pithy posts, it is evident that the performance of vulnerability is its own currency in the modern age. Yet, I am left to wonder, who and what does such public self-flagellation benefit?

Far too many people believe that this is what middle age means for women — you’re decrepit and vengeful toward those that remain youthful. People can’t imagine the full possibilities that age affords women.

Pop culture treats this time in adulthood — from your mid-thirties into middle age — as a boring space defined by loss, routine, humiliation, and responsibility. But if you take a step away from what we’ve been sold, there is evidence all around to confer that middle age actually takes on a multitude of shapes and postures especially when you don’t have kids or you have approached life with a more radical bent toward cultivating community. This isn’t to say I don’t have fears around aging. They just have nothing to do with my looks or how many wrinkles I’ve garnered in the last year.

Instead, I feel a chill when I think of my mother’s growing frailty. Last week, she had a radio frequency nerve ablation to treat her spinal issues that a surgery a year and a half ago didn’t fix. She called me one morning only a few days after the surgical procedure to tell me she fell on the floor while she was sleeping. I felt my heart lurch. I worry about having the money I need to take care of her. I fear what happens internally to the body. I wonder how well my knee surgery will hold up over the years.

While working on this short essay, I came across a black woman peer jokingly sharing the Barbie meme I’ve used as the main picture for this essay. “I didn’t realize aging would happen to me,” reads the excerpted tweet over a picture of Margot Robbie embodying the supreme image of unending youth expected of women, her face crumpled as she cries in her impeccable pastel checkered outfit. When women share such anxious thoughts that root the issues in aging with looking old, do they think about how they are confirming the patriarchal belief that a woman’s worth is wrapped up in youth to everyone, including the generations coming up behind them? When a woman stumbles into public self-flagellation is she looking for truth or for someone to assuage her fear by telling her, “Oh my god, you don’t look a day over twenty-nine”?

This isn’t meant to denigrate women’s worries, but to remind them that these worries are inherited, not natural. In order to dismantle the misogyny that suffocates the possibilities of life for everyone, I implore women to take a good look at what scares them about looking their age. It says a lot that this is the fear I see arise again and again. Did being or looking young ever save any woman from the relentless cruelty of misogyny? When you torture yourself in public about looking your age as a woman beyond her early thirties, whose comfort do you seek? Our faces tell beautiful stories. Your single, precious life is worth honoring. Who and what does such public self-flagellation benefit? It merely affirms the vexatious forces of misogyny that seek to keep women entrenched in violence and fear. Looking young and fitting into the ever-narrowing parameters of what’s considered beautiful in our immediate environment is not a woman’s life purpose.

At thirty-six, I have never been sweeter, smarter, or hotter than I am now. Hotter not because I have winnowed myself down into the aesthetic image black women are encouraged to fill. I am hotter because my fashion sense has become impeccable and I feel a genuine comfort in this singular body I call my own. There has been a deepening of pleasure at my age. Perhaps, this is due to how my relationship with time has changed or the tenderness with which I treat life. When I ponder the new horizons my eyes have been trained upon, I think of the books I have yet to publish, the stories yet to grace the page, the decadent meals I have yet to devour, the beautiful people I have yet to kiss. I think of all the scintillating thrills and surprises life has yet to reveal to me. I think of evenings dancing under the stars in the embrace of someone I love; the raucous laughter of my friends when my carefully timed joke lands; the worn used-books I have yet to clasp between my hands on excursions far-flung from my current home of Chicago.

When I was in San Francisco, I had a perfect day full of movies and food and new connections. Whilst walking through the city I came across a jewelry store. A young Asian-American woman — she looked to be barely in her mid-twenties —wearing blood-red eyeshadow and working at the store helped me figure out what birthday treats to buy for myself. I decided on a thick, gold chain that hangs heavy against my collarbone. I always love the unexpected moments of intimacy that can happen in life. On that day, it was simply the young woman clasping the necklace for me because my manicure made that tricky. “I love your style. It’s sick,” she said with a warm smile. I adjusted my cropped hot pink fur jacket and chuckled softly before saying thank you. I walked out of the store with my head held high and the sun licking against my skin, before devouring a dozen oysters and a crab Caesar salad at a small restaurant nearby.

I am in awe that I have been able to craft such a life against the odds. Every pleasure I experience was fought for against the tides of mental illness, misogyny, racism, capitalism, and abuse. There is so much left to relish, you just have to reach out and grab hold. For as long as this yearning heart of mine beats, the taste of opportunity and pleasure shall rest upon my tongue.

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I just want to thank all my lovely readers for your continued interest and dedication to my writing. I’ve been a bit quiet on here due to traveling and being a touch too hard on myself to make this newsletter polished. Perfection is a trap. This is an important space for me as a writer. Going forward I am going to cultivate this space more holistically and just have fun experimenting with ideas. For paid subscribers, the new columns Movies That Fuck and The Feminine Grotesque will be premiering very, very soon this month.

what I’ve been up to…

publishing…For work, I reviewed Sinners, a film I found ambitious, bold, fun, but not cohesive.

talking…I got to chop it up with my boys on We Hate Movies about the mid-nineties classic The Craft. In a full circle moment, I was on the Bright Wall/Dark Room podcast discussing Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the lush 1992 film which will be an entry in the Movies That Fuck column which starts for paying subscribers later this week.