ABSTRACT
The briefest review of television advertising and women’s magazines will reveal the powerful concern in contemporary society with youth and the prolonging of a youthful experience/face/body. The media celebration and fascination with particular women such as Joan Collins, Cher and Joanna Lumley is bound up with their defiance of the ageing process. Age (which becomes unmentionable) and the resistance of ageing (which becomes increasingly commodified through creams, gels, pills and surgery) are set alongside the need to keep slim and healthy while incidentally propping up a multi-million-dollar industry. In Western societies, which are now ever more typified by ageing demographic profiles, there is a concern with attempts to control and reconstruct the body in an age-defying manner (Shilling, 1993). The reason for all this attention on youth/beauty, which centres on women, rests in part on valuing women in relation to their heterosexual attractiveness, while men are valued in relation to their employment status (Itzin, 1990). In this way, a woman’s value is sexualized regardless of occupation. For this reason there is a pressure to conform to the tyranny of youth through cosmetic surgery, dieting, clothing, hair-dyes and make-up. Overall then, there is a powerful ‘culture of youth’ which sits alongside a ‘contempt for age’ (Gutman, 1987).
