If Justine Bateman is “brave” for aging naturally, we’re all in trouble

When my son was 4, he asked my mom how old she was. She reluctantly shared the number. His eyes grew wide and shiny with delight — he had recently learned to count that high — and replied: “Wow! You’re so …” I remember thinking to myself in that instant, please, please don’t say “old.” He finished his thought excitedly: “You’re so tall!” (He was still confusing height with age.) We all laughed with relief.

“Nobody wants to be told they’re old,” I later instructed him after we had a passed an elderly woman sitting on a bench and he had cheerfully declared “She’s very old, Mummy!” loud enough for her to hear and for me to be mortified. I should add here that, in his eyes, teenagers were basically middle-aged. And to him, “old” wasn’t pejorative; his comment was an emotionally neutral observation. “Why is it bad to be old?” he asked me with the innocence of the very young. This was, now that I think of it, an excellent question. I answered clumsily, inadequately, coming up with something surely developmentally inappropriate about the march of time, the confrontation with death, etc., careful to spare him a discussion about our ageist culture that is bent on shaming us all for having birthdays after the age of 35.

I thought of all this when I recently watched 57-year-old actress, filmmaker and author Justine Bateman talk about her aging face on “60 Minutes Australia.” The television segment was ostensibly a celebration of the current “Age of aging,” hailing 50-plus celebrities Michelle Yeoh, Jamie Lee Curtis, Paulina Porizkova and Bateman as its pin-ups.

In the interview, Bateman recalled how, sometime in her early 40s, she Googled herself and an autocomplete popped up: “Justine Bateman looks old.” She channelled the experience into her forthcoming book “Face: One Square Foot of Skin,” which takes aim at our dysfunctional, self-punishing relationship with aging, squaring off against framing looking older in a narrative of loss, as something that requires intervention and correction.

“I was taken aback to find that quite a few people had taken to internet chat sites to passionately complain that ‘Justine Bateman looks horrible now,’” Bateman writes in her book. Its cover shows a pair of hands drawing lines under and around her eyes; on Instagram, she went further, posting a close-up of her face superimposed with a map of a plastic surgeon’s extensive suggestions, with the hashtag #TheresNothingWrongWithYourFace.

This has proved to be an inflammatory stance. When I mentioned to my husband that I was writing about Bateman, he said: “Yeah, I saw a headline about her. Was there a scandal?” “The scandal,” I heard myself reply as if I was relaying the punchline in a New Yorker cartoon, “is that she has not had plastic surgery.” If it might once have passed as news that a celebrity went under the knife, it now passes as scandal if they don’t.

Part of the collective uproar over the natural state of Bateman’s appearance is that she doesn’t look young. More provocative, though, is that she isn’t trying to look young. “I just don’t give a s — t,” she said about people’s reaction to her looks. “I think I look rad … I think my face represents who I am. I like it, and so that’s basically the end of the road.” Her comfort with her own appearance is in itself a middle finger to a youth-fetishizing culture, a refusal to submit to the rules of the game.

I will now age myself and admit that I grew up with Bateman as Mallory on “Family Ties.” Watching the Keatons muse over life’s disenchantments over pints of Häagen-Dazs at their round kitchen table was as tangled up with my childhood as Alex P. Keaton was in the coiled cord of the set’s wall-mounted telephone.

I’ll also admit that when I saw Bateman in the aforementioned “60 Minutes” clip, I was stunned that she did not look like the fresh-faced, teenage Mallory I remembered. I was then promptly stunned at my own idiocy — I mean, the woman is 57, not 16. But I was no more alarmed than I am when I behold my own face in the mirror and am reminded that I’m not 25. This, I think, is the point: Bateman’s un-Botoxed visage throws up a magnifying mirror to our own aging selves — and nothing is as unacceptable to us than our own weathered, wrinkled, sagging faces.

“For those in the spotlight, a panic can develop to surgically alter the aging face in an attempt to escape this ‘older, terrible face’ criticism,” writes Bateman in Face. “For those out of the spotlight, there can be a bit of horror in watching those who were once lauded as some of the ‘most beautiful people’ among us, publicly ripped to shreds when their faces age.”

It wasn’t always like this. In the old days, celebrities were allowed to age, both publicly and privately. Without access to injectables, or sunscreen, Audrey Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, Katharine Hepburn and Mae West all began to look older as early as their late 20s and early 30s, and while they may have lost the power they had in their full bloom of youth, the public didn’t hate them for it. But we have become so accustomed to seeing lifted, frozen, lasered and filled faces on our big and small screens that animate features and wrinkled skin now seems shocking.

Continuing her book promotion way, Bateman took her unfrozen crow’s feet and uninjected lips to the morning talk-show couches. Host after manicured host leaned in sympathetically, furrowing their brows (well, some more than others) and commended Bateman for her bravery. And this is valid praise, because today, letting yourself age naturally is a radical act of courage. “I am brave in a lot of ways. But not in that way,” Jane Fonda (Jane Fonda!) told the Telegraph in 2015. Fonda has been open both about having plastic surgery on her jowls, eyelids and under her eyes, and about her fear of letting herself be seen to age naturally.

“Face: One Square Foot Of Skin” by Justine Bateman (out April 16), $36, amazon.ca SHOP HERE

In a culture obsessed with self-optimization, a refusal to partake in exhaustive, exhausting and expensive appearance labour is viewed as an act of self-abandonment, self-betrayal even. Somewhere along the way, we drank the Kool-Aid (or injected the botulinum toxin, as it were) and bought into the fantasy that aging is within our control, that the difference between looking fresh-faced and as well-used — and useless — as a crumpled Kleenex is a plastic surgeon on speed dial. Changelessness became the goal. It makes me think of a quote from Anaïs Nin: “Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it.” But let’s face it, that story is getting old.

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