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In a recent New York Times editorial about the face-and-neck-lift she received at age 47, Molly Jong-Fast asks a rhetorical question. Did the surgery, a capitulation to a worldview—one she herself deems misogynist—that sees aging women as molding fruit “make me a bad feminist?”
Her answer comes easily. “I don’t think so,” she writes. Reasoning that her career as a TV commentator would suffer if she didn’t redo her face, Jong-Fast paints the choice as clear-cut: Get the surgery and remain in the sphere of cultural influence, or keep her natural face and be silenced. From this perspective, it seems almost anti-feminist to reject plastic surgery. Don’t we all want women to be heard?
Jong-Fast’s essay comes amid a surge of recent pieces that find recipients of cosmetic procedures wringing their hands about their choices and, ultimately, justifying them. Anxiety about the political implications of cheating the aging process is a common through line. Rosie O’Donnell published a poem of sorts on Substack, writing of her eventual face-lift, “I thought it was a betrayal. Of feminism. Of aging. Of our team of women worldwide.” One woman, writing for the Cut, worried that her faceful of surgeries would be obvious and that other women “would know that I had failed this most virtuous feminist litmus test.” Another piece in the Cut quoted a woman who cried in her car after her Botox appointments as she “grew frustrated with herself ‘as a feminist and an intellectual.’ ”
As plastic surgery has risen in popularity over the past few years, it stands to reason that growing numbers of wealthy women who consider themselves feminists have made increasingly drastic concessions to new aesthetic norms. Faced with an apparent disconnect between their values—aging women are worthy; true beauty lies within; the male gaze is toxic—and their actions, these women are contorting their intellects to make their decisions make sense. The result is a new genre of plastic surgery apologia, in which cosmetic procedures are not just acceptable in polite feminist society, but feminist deeds unto themselves.
The woman who worried about the litmus test? After she healed, she realized that getting a face-lift made her “someone with agency” who did what she wanted rather than “craving anyone’s approval but my own.” The woman who cried in her car is “no longer interested in ‘punishing myself’ ” for choosing to improve her own life. O’Donnell concluded that not getting a face-lift would teach her teenage child that their body is not their own, that feminism is “just a different authority telling you what you’re allowed to do with your own face.”
In the Times, Jong-Fast yearns for an end to plastic surgery shaming, for the advent of “a culture where we celebrate women’s bodily autonomy.” Here, she co-opts a phrase more often used in the fight for abortion access and gender-affirming care to rebrand plastic surgery as a feminist right, or at least a value-neutral option that should be affirmed with as much vigor as the choice to refuse it.
This reframing may help Jong-Fast and the others rationalize their quest to “cater to the male gaze,” as Jong-Fast puts it. But it ignores one of the reasons why face-lifts and Botox initially seemed suspect to these women, and why they now feel the urge to explain themselves: because cosmetic procedures set artificial, unattainable standards of appearance, which can have tangible and emotional consequences for the non–surgically modified women who inevitably fall short.
The defense of the face-lift marks a return to the era of “choice feminism,” a strain of thought that rose from the third wave in the 2000s. Through the lens of choice feminism, anything a woman decides to do is empowering: flashing the camera in Girls Gone Wild, spending thousands of dollars on beauty products, abandoning one’s career to support a husband’s aspirations, letting him screw around in a skewed rendition of nonmonogamy. Never mind the social pressures that influence these behaviors, or how enacting them affects the broader project of gender equity. Feminists could not judge any of it if a woman was choosing it for herself.
Many of us who lived through the height of choice feminism cringe at the memory. I’m not sure I can stomach another round of pretending our actions have no effect on the world; neither am I eager to return to the policing of the early 2010s, when we journalists who cut our teeth in feminist blogging brought out our gavels to judge each new entry in the cultural discourse as either good or bad for womankind. But there is a self-congratulatory, self-delusional tone to these pro-face-lift narratives that I haven’t been able to shake from my brain. I expected to see some outspoken feminists like Jong-Fast and O’Donnell cave to the pressures of their moneyed, image-obsessed circles. I did not expect them to marshal the intellectual dishonesty required to spin it as an act of liberation.
After she published her op-ed, Jong-Fast gave an interview to CBS Mornings, where host Kelly O’Grady—who boasts her own seemingly artificially smoothed visage—applauded her “normalization” of plastic surgery. Jong-Fast explained that as a public figure, she has the opportunity to “destigmatize” life events shrouded in secrecy, like battling addiction or dealing with a parent’s dementia. Getting a face-lift was just another experience she could bravely, selflessly demystify.
At one time, the words normalize and destigmatize described righteous efforts to eliminate the shame associated with common afflictions (acne, HPV, depression) and life choices that attracted unwarranted scorn (sex work, divorce, atheism). Now, they are being repurposed to valorize the beauty regimens of the ultraprivileged. But in a country in which a quarter of residents skip necessary medical care due to cost, elective cosmetic procedures are not normal. And as an effort to buy one’s way out of life’s inevitabilities at the expense of everyone else still subject to them, face-lifts may deserve whatever stigma they carry. If the effect of more people getting plastic surgery is more women feeling worse about their naturally aging faces by comparison, it makes sense that some of us wish to discourage the trend.
Yet a new refrain has taken hold, spouted by Jong-Fast and others, that it is an act of virtuous gender solidarity to be transparent about the cosmetic procedures you’ve bought, lest other women internalize an unrealistic model for how humans age. In the New Yorker, Jia Tolentino called this type of disclosure “a speech act akin to a land acknowledgment: something typically said before another act of perpetuating the system identified as unjust.”
In some ways, attempting to destigmatize the face-lift is worse than simply showing up to the function with new cheekbones and higher brows. As face-lifts become openly celebrated, more people will feel compelled to shell out for them, accelerating the arms race of the upper-middle-class face. For one material example of how this might play out: If we take Jong-Fast at her word that TV bookings are a zero-sum game won by the smoothest and stiffest, then as the number of pristine, freshly lifted faces available for screen time rises, it will be even harder for the remaining wrinklies to find work.
I agree with Jong-Fast on one thing: For generations, women have been urged into cosmetic modifications as a way to improve their social status, then ridiculed as shallow and vain when they’ve complied. This is a terrible state of affairs, for sure. But the answer is not to applaud compliance and continue raising beauty standards to unreachable heights. Instead of normalizing the wholesale revising of our faces, women in the public eye have all the tools they need to help normalize having a flabby neck and jowls—things that are still, by virtue of the fact that human skin loses collagen and elastin with age, actually normal.
Whether explicitly or by suggestion, the authors of plastic surgery justification narratives posit that cosmetic procedures are viable solutions to the problems that drew them to surgery in the first place: ageism, sexism, self-loathing, body dysmorphia, and the inexorable degradation of aging. Sadly, as every woman who has engaged in the beautification rituals of modern society knows, that’s not how it works. Hair grows back. Skin keeps drooping. Sex and age discrimination worsen. Self-criticism resurfaces and fixates on a new target. Despite our best efforts, our bodies will continue to betray us and our brains will continue to protest; this is evident in the fact that nearly half of cosmetic surgery patients are repeat customers. The more time and money we spend chasing eternal youth and sex appeal, the more it starts to seem like there’s something wrong with the way we naturally are.
I’ll admit, as a woman entering middle age, I have literal skin in this game, and it’s beginning to sag. Watching ladies of means set new, higher bars for how aging women should aspire to look fills me with sadness for myself and for everyone else trying to avoid hating their own faces as they age. This is no easy feat in an era of normalized injectables and plastic surgery, as the apologists readily admit. Look too long at the plasticized faces on TV or Instagram reels or at whatever ritzy social club you frequent, and your own facial Overton window will shift. The only way to realign it with reality is through exposure to the real faces (and necks, and bodies, and teeth) of people who haven’t absorbed the same noxious norms.
Like the U.S. education system, in which rich people can pay their way into private schools, thereby weakening the public schools their neighbors must attend, female aging poses a collective action problem that only some of us feel invested in solving. If you’re rich and want to look hot, and you make the most obvious decision by buying a new face, you’re opting out of the pool of women demonstrating that life with an aging face can be fulfilling, sexy, and fun. That’s your right to do, and it’s my right to judge you for doing it. Certainly, it’s no one person’s job to defeat ageism and sexism. But there’s nothing particularly noble about explaining why you didn’t want to try.