Excerpt: Popular media and our 30s

Please enjoy this excerpt from the Introduction to 30 Isn’t Old.

Popular media and a celebrity obsessed culture imply that movie
star standards apply to the rest of the nation. Since celebrity culture can
be in our homes every day through television, computers and even our
phones, there is an assumption that they represent the norm. Waiting in
line to check out at the supermarket there are racks of magazines that
tell who is doing what with whom and what they were wearing when
they did it. These magazines are not full of educational or entertaining
articles. Instead they are full of pictures, images to show us celebrities
from multiple angles, in various wardrobe and states of embrace.
Celebrities influence women’s hairstyles, clothing and our notions of
beauty.

Hollywood is a place of youth. There the most cutting edge treatments
are available to protect youth – from personal training and crazy
cabbage diets to toxic injections and face lifts. There is little about the
human body that cannot be changed by a skilled plastic surgeon. With
the plastic bodies and beauty obsession Hollywood is the only place in
this country where thirty is considered old.

For the rest of the nation, this concept is ludicrous. Sometimes it
can be easy to get coerced into feeling lacking when bombarded by
celebrity images and concepts of beauty. Stick thin, big breasted and
perfectly symmetrical faces are hard to come by outside of celebrity
magazines and plastic surgeon waiting rooms. Once you step away
from the television and put down the magazines to look at the women
living in reality, the view changes. Real women in Atlanta and Minneapolis
are not all size zero or perpetually twenty-five.

So I’m suggesting we toss out media and celebrity views of thirty.
As women we have an expected lifespan of eighty plus years and
plenty are left after thirty. We can continue to have children for about
a decade, depending on health and medical circumstances. For working
women there are at least thirty-five more years of expected work
before retirement. If you choose you can be as active at thirty as you
were at twenty, possibly even more so.

There is nothing about thirty that makes a woman old or used
up. Such a notion was only valid in past centuries when the average
lifespan was less than forty years and by the age of thirty women
had given birth multiple times. Then, childbearing was an exhaustive
and wearing activity that aged women quickly. Medical science
and modern convenience have slowed our aging process so the antiquated
notions are irrelevant. For the average American woman,
thirty is far from old.