Aging and postpartum bodies could quickly go down in history as scarier than the boogeyman. People everywhere are terrified of both, and honesty means I also place myself in that category. According to a 2024 survey by Talker Research on behalf of NEOSTRATA, 47% of women say that aging causes stress. Another 54% are worried that people will notice them aging. We don’t need studies to tell us women struggle to have a positive body image after giving birth. I, for one, am a case study.
Shortly after weaning my now 7-year-old off breastfeeding, I remember bending over and seeing my breasts swing back and forth like two steeped tea bags. At that moment, I felt two things: horror and shame.
Shame is a word synonymous with both postpartum bodies and aging women. I see one entrenched in comment sections under posts of celebs who have just given birth or are aging. While lurking in the infamous Lipstick Alley, I encountered several threads about Rihanna at the 2024 British Fashion Awards. Commenters were going in on our Bajan queen, saying she’s ‘lost her spark’ is ‘looking old’, and is now giving auntie. Meanwhile, my girl has two kids under two, is running a multi-billion dollar company, and is loving on her man. The comments rubbed me the wrong way because women being shamed for minding their business and existing generally pisses me off.
After skimming the comment sections on those posts, I wondered why people feel the need to point out the obvious regarding aging women and postpartum bodies. I was even more curious about why they felt the need to leave negative commentary. I’ve concluded that it’s simply a projection.
A quick 101 on projecting: it’s when you subconsciously place your thoughts, feelings, or beliefs about something on someone else. To put that into context, people are terrified of aging or miserable in their bodies. Hence, their knee-jerk reaction is to comment on others to make themselves feel better instead of doing the inner work to feel better.
For anyone wondering why I’m grouping two separate issues (aging and postpartum bodies), it’s because they intersect, and the underlying theme is the same: women being held to unrealistic beauty standards when experiencing regular changes. If we want to take it a step further, these unrealistic beauty standards are heavily rooted in misogyny. I don’t see any forums about aging men and their dad bods on Lipstick Alley or anywhere. It’s also ironic that I primarily see women driving these shamefests.
Aging is inevitable, and so is a shapeshifting body after giving birth. So why are we talking about the sky being blue? It is hard enough to silence your inner critic when youth is escaping you and equally challenging to embrace the new body you have to live in after giving birth. We don’t need the low vibrational comments about things we are already trying to reconcile.
The problem with these comments is that they aren’t progressive and fuel counterproductive conversations reinforcing the beauty standards we are trying to free ourselves from. How do we create a world where women are seen as beautiful at every size, visible at every age, and humanized despite our gender if we continue to have conversations motivated by shame?
We all must do self-work to explore our fears around aging, beauty, and our bodies. Beauty and youth are both commodities weaponized by capitalism; it is our job to unlearn the harmful, antiquated messaging around both and reclaim our humanity as women. That can look like relentlessly challenging societal norms and coming to a place of true acceptance of all that we are.
I am still on the journey to doing this very work, which is multidimensional. I’m still afraid of bending forward and seeing my breasts swing in the mirror. My attention has shifted to my slowing metabolism, the fight I’m losing against these gray hairs, and anxiously waiting for menopause to share her ETA with me as I approach the end of my mid-30s. I am challenging myself to see beauty in it all by staring at my grays a little longer, laughing at how my knees give out, and noticing how much softer my breasts are despite the sag.
However, it often feels like women are at risk of becoming invisible if we don’t remain youthful, which is also synonymous with beauty. And so, many of us pull, prod, fix, lift, and tuck, forgetting that we can delay aging and bodily changes, but we can not escape either. When women like Rihanna are brave enough to lay themselves bare and show up just as they are, they’re shamed for it, which can feel discouraging.
This may be a Panglossian view, but I’m hoping we can get to where we are enchanted versus revolted by aging women. We can see love handles on a postpartum body as symbolic of the love brought into the world. We can see that fine lines or wrinkles are just as riveting as the brush strokes on Kehinde Riley’s art pieces. I daydream of a world where we see pictures of a baddie-turned-tired mom and express gratitude for her service instead of pointing out the obvious.
Radical honesty is essential, and if we aren’t yet in a place where we can see aging and postpartum bodies as beautiful, a healthy interim until we get there is gratitude. As the gracefully aging Tracee Ellis Ross said during an interview with NPR in 2023,
“I personally have always loved getting older, like genuinely, I think it’s an honor to get older. Not everybody gets to get older, and I’m not sure why we don’t look at it that way.”
It is indeed an honor to age and evolve, and that’s a more productive conversation than one about someone ‘looking old.’ Likewise, if we can begin to see postpartum bodies as celestial vessels instead of objects that exist for our consumption, we may begin to see their divinity vs. imperfection.
