The only real solution to aging is, of course, death, but our central mode of dealing with that inevitability is to delay and deny it. “In an era in which people actually live longer and longer,” Susan Sontag wrote in the 1972 essay “The Double Standard of Aging,” “what now amounts to the latter two-thirds of everyone’s life is shadowed by a poignant apprehension of unremitting loss.” In this culture, to age is to be erased — to be deemed irrelevant, disappear from magazine covers and popular films and get tucked away into facilities, managed and cared for. For women, it also means being turned from a coveted object into a disposable one. We spend our lives fighting our own disappearance. [...]
These campaigns framed women as desperate, waiting helplessly for a product to save them from the humiliation of age. The past few decades, though, plunged us into a very different way of thinking — the Golden Age of “anti-aging.” The ads shifted from cautionary tales to stories of inspiration, in which plucky women successfully race against time to take charge of their own looks. Social shaming was sublimated into an aggressive personal narrative. Militarized language became chic: Advertisements started instructing women to “tackle,” “combat” and “fight against” aging, to stage an “intervention” on their skin. Revlon’s Age Defying makeup told the consumer, of her advancing age: “Don’t deny it. Defy it.” In this model, age is a war waged on a woman’s face, and it can never be won — only “slowed” or prevented from “advancing,” like an occupying force. [...]
Marketers are adapting accordingly. Allure’s anti-anti-aging campaign is just one part of a bigger cultural wave, advancing past the combative mode and toward the assuaging language of personal acceptance. In 2007, Dove — always ahead of the curve in “empowering” marketing trends — introduced a product line called Pro-Age with a campaign featuring models in their 50s and 60s. (The double entendre in “Pro-Age” is masterful: It sounds as if it’s about embracing the advancing years, while also hinting that you wouldn’t want to age like some amateur.) These days, the beauty industry is preparing to transcend the wrinkle entirely: The new scheme is obsessed with coding products as all-natural, eco-friendly and wellness-promoting elements of “self-care.”
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