More and More Women Are Opening Up About Something That Used to Be Shameful. I Wish They’d Kept It All Secret.

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.

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.