The Ways Women Age
I’d love to know what you think about this book as many of you on my Facebook seem to be comfortable with themselves. I love this as I do believe us sixty year olds are more at ease in our own skins, and if not learning to become so!
What is it like to be a woman growing older in a culture where you cannot go to the doctor, open a magazine, watch television, or surf the internet without encountering products and procedures that are designed to make you look younger?
What do women have to say about their decision to embrace cosmetic anti-aging procedures? And, alternatively, how do women come to decide to grow older without them? In the United States today, women are the overwhelming consumers of cosmetic anti-aging surgeries and technologies. And while not all women undergo these procedures, their exposure to them is almost inevitable.
Set against the backdrop of commercialised medicine in the United States, Abigail T. Brooks investigates the anti-ageing craze from the perspective of women themselves, examining the rapidly changing cultural attitudes, pressures, and expectations of female ageing. Drawn from in-depth interviews with women in the United States who choose, and refuse, to have cosmetic anti-ageing procedures, The Ways Women Age provides a fresh understanding of how today’s women feel about ageing.
The women’s stories in this book are personal biographies that explore identity and body image and are reflexively shaped by beauty standards, expectations of femininity, and an increasingly normalised climate of cosmetic anti-ageing intervention. The Ways Women Age offers a critical perspective on how women respond to 21st century expectations of youth and beauty.