Hosts of the podcast “Binchtopia” Julia Hava and Eliza McLamb regularly add feminist perspectives while they drag their listeners through our social media cultural hellscape — and they dissect anti-aging trends in their Feb. 28 episode, “My Year of Prolonged Suffering and Decrepitude.”
The hosts’ signature wit and intellectualism are fully on display as they delve into the absurdity of looking young, one of many unrealistic beauty standards women face.
Hava said aging feels “much scarier for women, obviously. Men are like, ‘OK, gray hair, salt-and-pepper king.’”
This episode will strike a chord for any woman who feels constantly “bullied” by beauty expectations.
While they recognize these expectations’ harms, they’ve succumbed to anti-aging trends.
“It makes me feel safe against the existential rush of life, knowing that we are all heading toward death. At least I got my red-light mask, and that allows me to have the deluluness to think that I’m combating it,” Hava said.
McLamb responds that that’s the episode’s thesis: “The world is crumbling, and death is approaching at a rapid speed, and you just clutch your little retinol cream, and everything’s OK for you.”
Hava reflects that as a young girl, you’re supposed to “hate yourself because you have acne, and you’re oily, and you’re awkward and a teenager — oh, now you’re old.”
The hosts discuss how it seems like men gain social power as they age, whereas women lose that power when they’re perceived as less desirable.
Hava said beauty brands have capitalized on these fears, co-opting self-care and feminist language to present maintaining youth and beauty as empowering.
“If it’s based in fear and shame, is it really self-care, or are you doing it because you’re terrified of what the alternative is?” Hava asks.
“If you do look really young, your whole life has just been dedicated to preserving yourself. You didn’t do anything else. Kim Kardashian’s life is dedicated to preserving her youth,” she said.
McLamb revisits Susan Sontag’s “The Double Standard of Aging” to bring a class perspective to the expectation, arguing worrying about aging is a privileged problem.
“The poor can’t afford expensive skin care treatments; they don’t have access to high-quality nutrition. They have much higher levels of stress that they experience that shows physically on their body,” McLamb said.
McLamb argues the image of a forever-young girl “is an ideal that is created by marketing, and then is marketed to,” and discusses how the anti-aging industry has mushroomed in recent years, from being valued at $3.9 billion in 2016 to $37 billion in 2021.
Hava points out that some cultures, especially collectivist ones, have also appreciated the wisdom and beauty that come with age throughout history.
“In recent centuries and decades in Western culture, old people have been seen as valueless,” Hava said.
Hava regrets that people view aging as a disease rather than something natural, making small changes like wrinkles and gray hairs a horrifying reminder of mortality.
Aptly, she brings in how this notion is a product of industrialization — “old people are bad for the economy; they’re not productive members of society” because they can’t generate capital anymore.
Through their humorous interrogation of ageist beauty standards, McLamb and Hava encourage their listeners to embrace every stage of life.
“Binchtopia” can be streamed on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.