Why Don’t I Feel Hot Anymore?

I’m staring at myself in the mirror and something is off.

I study the landscape of the face that has been looking back at me for almost thirty-five years, and nothing appears radically different. Same eyes. Same nose. Same mouth. I scan for the usual infractions—the things I am trained to maintain: no blemishes, no stray eyebrow hairs, no renegade upper-lip sprouts. Everything seems in order. So what exactly is wrong?

Maybe it’s the subtle shifts that feel louder now. The shadows beneath my eyes darkening like bruised fruit. The faint lines on my forehead carving themselves a little deeper, as if they’ve decided to stay. The once-cute white hair that felt whimsical—like a single thread of tinsel in my dark tresses—has multiplied. It has gathered reinforcements. And they are not delicate. They are coarse and unruly, springing up with a kind of defiance my younger strands never had.

I’ve gained weight that won’t seem to come off. I think I have jowels or pre-jowels or something. I can no longer contort my face and body into clever angles that soften the inevitable: I am getting older.

Well, obviously. We all are.

But for years I managed the illusion of youth with surprising skill. I felt a strange flicker of pride when someone guessed I was younger than I am, and a quiet sting when someone landed on the correct number. Why wouldn’t I? Nearly every beauty ritual is engineered around the promise of turning back time. Every serum and powder and cream I smooth onto my face whispers the same seduction: return to before. Before lines. Before gravity. Before evidence of too much living having been lived.

At this point, targeted ads are basically begging me to inject the pharma goo into every crease—or even into the places a crease might dare to appear one day. Preventative, they call it. As if aging were a leak in the ceiling that could be patched before the first drop hits the floor.

The younger we look, the better we look. That’s the thesis. And as I round the corner into my mid-thirties, I can feel the water circling. I am chum for the beauty industry’s sharks—ripe, impressionable, and statistically anxious.

Youth is a powerful currency, and my stock is slipping.

Social media has kindly expanded my vocabulary of concern. Marionette lines. Lower blepharoplasty. Hip dips. Terms that once lived exclusively in surgical consults now live in my algorithm (and in my head). Apparently there are dozens—no, hundreds—of things wrong with my face and body. Flaws I would have carried peacefully to my grave had TikTok not performed the public service of alerting me. Thank you, TikTok.

Can you imagine? Moving through life unaware of the insecurities you’re meant to obsess over? Existing in blissful ignorance of your hip topology? How mortifying.

And yet, standing here in the mirror, I can’t help but wonder if what feels “off” isn’t my face at all—but the story I’ve been told about it.

Not sure if you’ve heard about the Epstein Files…

(How was that transition, everyone? Don’t worry, here comes the point).

Les Wexner, the billionaire behind mall meccas for preteens and teens—Limited Too, Bath & Body Works, Abercrombie & Fitch, Pink—has been named in connection with Jeffrey Epstein, who led a child sex trafficking ring. Allegedly he is a key co-conspirator in his operation.

So maybe it’s time to name the darker thing.

Maybe our society’s beauty standards don’t just happen to skew impossibly young. Maybe they are shaped—funded, amplified, and sold—by men who sexualize youth itself. Maybe the relentless pressure to erase every marker of womanhood—ripping out our pubic hair, starving away our hips and thighs, smoothing every wrinkle, softening every angle—is not accidental. Maybe we are being groomed, culturally, to look less like women and more like girls.

Little girls. Innocent. Moldable. Impressionable. Defenceless.

I hate thinking about it. That some sickos may have engineered my beloved “Sweet and Flirty” body spray. That the low-rise jeans I yearned for as a teen were made for the pleasure of these monsters. That the discovery of my burgeoning womanhood, which was such a precious and special time of my life, is somehow tied to the inherent evilness of the most despicable people on earth.

It is not a comfortable thought.

But neither is the alternative: that we are spending thousands of dollars and countless hours trying to reverse a process that is both inevitable and, frankly, miraculous.

Aging is a privilege. Not everyone gets to do it. So why are we so allergic to it? Because we are told to be. Our girlhood was tainted by men trying to fuck us, and our womanhood is soured by the constant reminders that we are not supposed to be aging.

And, to be honest, I am tired. Mentally, physically, emotionally and spiritually. Everyone please just leave me alone.

Why does flicking on my curling iron—something I used to do daily without a second thought—now fill me with dread? My usual makeup routine suddenly looks wrong on me. Everything feels harder to maintain, harder to conceal. More expensive. More invasive. And for what? For WHO?

Maybe you can see the stress of the divorce on my face. Maybe you can see each sleepless night pooled beneath my eyes. Maybe you can trace the lessons I learned the hard way in the fine lines around my mouth.

But maybe that’s not decay.

Maybe that’s evidence.

Evidence of a life lived. Evidence of survival. Evidence that I was here—and that I am still here. That I am no longer the little girl I once was, and that is a very good thing.

And perhaps what feels “off” in the mirror isn’t my face at all.

Maybe it’s the moment I stopped trying to make it look like it never belonged to a woman.