A Face Earned, not Deserved

Sometimes I write to exorcise unpleasant emotions, and this is one of those times. What I will write about is an experience that neither Oprah nor Dr. Phil have created a catchy piece of jargon to identify. It is about the feeling of judgment in the beauty pageant of life most women participate in without ever having signed up for.

Except it isn’t really a pageant. A pageant is staged. It is lit, posed, entered, rehearsed. A contestant chooses her angle. What happened to me was none of those things. It was an unplanned ambush, and an ambush is worse than a pageant, because there is no entry form, no consent, no control over the frame.

Here is what happened.

I have sat in the same Zoom meeting, with the same group of men, for years, camera off. I am a voice among them, a name in a small window, a set of ideas spoken into a room I never had to physically enter. That arrangement suited me. It was not hiding, exactly — it was simply the terms under which I had agreed to be present. And then one morning I forgot to turn the camera off, and there I was, full colour, close up, unrehearsed, unguarded, unwarned. Old. Wrinkled. White hair doing whatever it wanted that day. In a room of men roughly thirty to fifty years old, every one of them at the exact professional and physical peak that this culture is built to reward.

I felt exposed. I want to be precise about what kind of exposed, because it is not the kind people assume. I am not vain. I do not require anyone’s approval of my face, and on any ordinary day I would tell you, truthfully, that I do not care what strangers think of my wrinkles. But I believe that something in that room shifted the moment my camera came on, and I have spent some days now trying to name it rather than simply feel it.

I think what unsettled me is this: I was not merely seen. I was reclassified.

For years, I had existed to that group as an unmarked entity — colleague, voice, contributor, mind. The moment my face appeared, unguarded and undefended, I suspect I stopped being unmarked. I became, instead, a category: old woman. And older woman, unlike older man, is not a category this culture has historically been generous toward.

There is an old line, one I have always half-remembered as Orwell’s, that at 50 a man has the face he deserves. I went looking for the actual wording and found something more interesting than the tidy attribution I’d been carrying around. The line does not belong to any one individual. Coco Chanel published a version of it in Paris Vogue in 1938, three tidy clauses — nature gives you your face at 20, life shapes it at 30, and by 50 it is yours to have deserved. Orwell said something similar, later, in his own notebooks. So, apparently, did Mae West, in her 1959 memoir[1], where she observed that a man’s face carries more character at 40 than at 20 because he has suffered longer.

And underneath all of them sits an older story still — Lincoln, in a 19^th century recollection, refusing to hire a man because he did not like his face, and being told by an aide that the poor man was not responsible for his face, and Lincoln’s Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, apparently disagreeing on the general principle that a man of 50 is responsible for his own.

Four separate people, a century apart, converging on the same idea. Except read them again and notice who is doing the deserving. Lincoln’s story is about a man’s fitness to hold a government post. Stanton spoke of a man’s character being legible in his features. Mae West’s is about a man’s suffering dignifying his face with age. Chanel’s is the only one spoken by a woman, and then she frames it as effort, as discipline, as something built rather than simply arrived at — telling, I think, that the one woman in this lineage felt the need to insist that a woman’s aging face is a labour rather than a lapse.

Because here is what nobody, in roughly a century and a half of variations on this same aphorism, ever wrote down: a companion line for what a woman at 50, or 60, or 70, has earned.

Look instead at what the language actually offers men. Weathered, craggy, grizzled, distinguished, lived-in — these are the words reserved for a man’s older face, and every one of them takes the evidence of age itself and calls it admirable.

A woman gets no such vocabulary.

She gets graceful, or ageless, or, at best, well-preserved — a phrase that, if you sit with it, describes a jar of pickles rather than a person, and that quietly congratulates her for having successfully hidden the very evidence a man is praised for showing.

The positive vocabulary for an aging man rewards the visible fact of age. The positive vocabulary for an aging woman rewards its concealment.

And when the concealment fails, or was never attempted, the language turns considerably less polite. Hag. Crone. Witch. Battleaxe. Old bag. Words with real weight behind them — hag and crone in particular carry the residue of actual persecution, actual women burned or drowned or hanged for the crime of having unsettled somebody. My own second language, Italian, offers the same pattern, more nakedly. Strega. Befana. Megera. Arpia. Direct borrowings from witch-trial vocabulary and ancient folklore, applied casually to any older woman who irritates someone at a dinner table. Set beside them, the equivalent words for an old man — coot, geezer, codger, old goat — are almost affectionate by comparison. Pitiable, perhaps. Mildly ridiculous. Never monstrous. Nobody was ever burned at the stake for being an old goat.

So when I say I felt reclassified in that meeting, this is the machinery I mean. Not that any one of those men consciously thought hag when my face appeared on their screens (I hope). I have no evidence they thought anything at all, and I want to be honest that the certainty I felt at the moment — that they all recoiled — was a story I told myself, not a fact I observed.

But I did not build that story out of nothing.

I built it out hundreds of years of a language that has a rich, admiring vocabulary for what time does to a man’s face and almost nothing but euphemism or insult for what it does to a woman’s. I built it out of a room where every man present was, by the culture’s own accounting, at the age where his face was becoming more interesting, more authoritative, more earned — and where I was, by that same accounting, simply… old.

The conciliatory phrases such as “inner beauty” or “she has such a great personality” or “she’s really quite smart” seem like consolation prizes or participation ribbons — the things you hand a woman once the vocabulary for her actual face has run out. Nobody tells a distinguished, weathered, craggy-faced man that he has a great personality. He doesn’t need the consolation prize. His face was never disqualified from the competition in the first place.

I want to be clear about one more thing, because I can already hear the reflex, the one that gets handed to women who point at any of this: that I am being sensitive, that I am reading too much into a Zoom camera and an old expression, that I should simply relax about my own face the way I generally do.

I am not whining. I am not complaining. I am not being too sensitive.

I am observing. I noticed a pattern that has a paper trail running back through Lincoln’s cabinet, through a 1938 fashion magazine, through Mae West’s memoir, into the raw material of two of the languages I speak — and I am therefore calling it out.

I did earn this face. Every line in it was paid for honestly, in years I would not trade back. But notice that I reached for earn instead of deserve on purpose, and I know why. Deserve summons a panel of judges, and hands them the verdict before I have said a word in my own defence. Earn requires no judge at all. It is a fact about what I did, not an opinion about how I am seen. I do not need that room, or any room, to ratify a face I already built myself, one unglamorous, unguarded, entirely undecorated day at a time.

[1] Mae West quote from her 1959 autobiography “Goodness Had Nothing To Do With It”

A man has more character in his face at forty than at twenty. He has suffered longer, and the more love, the more suffering, the more character.

Despite that quote, I still quite like her.