Facing the Future
Mary J. Loftus

When I was a young reporter, just starting out at a Central Florida daily, Marcia was my editor and mentor. A former flower child who had been a teenage mother, lived on a sailboat for a year, and left an abusive marriage with two young daughters in tow, Marcia had an inner strength I admired—and envied. She overcame her easy-going nature, blond hair, and blue eyes to work her way up the corporate chain of the New York Times newspaper group.

Her strong work ethic and constantly churning mind gained the respect of the hard-news male editors, and her raucous laugh and nurturing ways (she once bought me a spa certificate after I wrote a depressing series about hospice care and living wills) endeared her to the reporters.

When Marcia was young, she looked like Kate Hudson in Almost Famous. At fifty, she was still just as beautiful: Goldie Hawn meets Diane Keaton. So I was shocked when she announced last year, at age fifty-two, that she was getting a facelift. Boomers love looking a decade younger: fifty is the new forty, ad infinitum.

“What? Why?” I said into the phone. We had both left the paper years ago—she moved to California and I to Atlanta—but we kept in touch by cell phones and AirTran flights.

“I want to, that’s why. You should see Liz. She looks wonderful. She looks ten years younger.”

“Right,” I said. “I wouldn’t mind that myself, but I’m not sure I’d let someone peel the flesh off my face and staple it back onto my scalp in order to achieve it.”

“Oh, everybody says that until they get to the age where their face starts falling down,” Marcia replied.

With almost nine million Americans a year getting their faces tuned up, fat sucked out, or breasts plumped up, plastic surgery is downright commonplace. Several of my friends have had one procedure or another and say—unanimously—that they would do it again in a minute. Is this female empowerment or mass hysteria? Are we “just saying no” to aging or denying our mortality? Is undergoing cosmetic surgery accepting conformity or fighting anonymity?

“There came a point when I realized I had stopped turning heads,” said Evelyn, another fiftysomething friend of mine who had breast implants and does yoga daily. “No one wants to become invisible.” Yoga and plastic surgery? Didn’t those lifestyle choices used to be mutually exclusive? Is there
a whole new holistic way of looking at cosmetic surgery?

“Our culture is highly individualistic,” said Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, director of graduate studies in the Department of Women’s Studies, about the proliferation of plastic surgery. “We feel now, more than we did a hundred years ago, that we have to be the captains of our own fate by working hard not just at developing what used to be called character but also in developing a self-presentation that enhances our life chances. Our commercial culture has more of everything, and that includes more arenas for the enhancement and presentation of self. This is both exciting and disturbing.”

I knew these motivations were propelling Marcia. After the unexpected death of her husband, she was dating again and had discovered that mingling and mating in Los Angeles is a high-stakes competition for men who are single, sane, straight, and not solely committed to dating several decades down. Liz, one of Marcia’s closest friends, remarried after her face-lift.

So Marcia went for it. She gathered all her disposable income for the year and put herself in the hands of a female plastic surgeon in Seattle known for her ability to produce an “age-appropriate” look. Marcia was sold after talking with the office manager, who pulled her own before-and-after photos out of her desk drawer to show that she did indeed look ten years younger.

“She looked refreshed and not tight,” Marcia said. “Completely natural.” Not “natural” as in, say, wrinkles and a sprinkling of age spots but natural as in not looking tightly stretched and perpetually surprised. I remember a profile about Helen Gurley Brown, the Cosmopolitan editor and cosmetic surgery devotee, which began, “Helen Gurley Brown doesn’t look seventy-six. Of course, she doesn’t look completely human, either.”

Looking back on her face-lift now, a year later, Marcia said the recovery wasn’t bad. I have seen the pictures, though, and think that was the synthetic morphine talking. Her face was so bruised and swollen that she looked like an overmatched boxer. I must admit, however, on my last visit to LA just a few months after her surgery, I was waiting for Marcia at a small table in The Ivy; when she walked in, she looked radiant.

“I would do it again tomorrow,” Marcia said with conviction. “People have started commenting on how well-rested I look. My eyes looked so tired and worn out before. I’ve got a totally bright, new look. Like it or not, how you look on the outside affects the way you feel about yourself on the inside.”

That line of thought is pretty much the inverse of every adage I have heard since I was a child: it is what is on the inside that counts; looks aren’t everything; beauty is only skin deep; you can’t judge a book by its cover. In fact, I tell her, I am almost looking forward to the day when my appearance isn’t a primary concern—think how much time that frees up for less superficial endeavors. Why would I spend thousands of dollars and take the risk of elective surgery just to ward off the inevitable for a few more years? But Marcia, who recently became a grandmother, just laughs, and adds another old saw to my list: “Never say never.”

Mary J. Loftus, associate editor of Emory Magazine, also has been a newspaper reporter, editor, and family/parenting columnist for the New York Times news service.

Reprinted with permission from the Center for Women at Emory University. This article first appeared in Women's News & Narratives in Spring 2005, Volume 14, Number 1.