Meredith Lee Staff Writer

For centuries, people have been searching for a mythical cure-all to combat the thief that is time, but now in the 21st century people have pivoted to manufacturing their own fountain of youth. Instead of tedious quests across the seven seas, the exploration is happening on a much smaller level; a microscopic one. Across cultures eras there have been numerous theories as to why humans crave youth; could it be biological, or perhaps it is social? It is unlikely that the root cause of this fixation will ever be truly understood or identified, but it does raise many questions about human nature, ethics, and societal biases.

The concept of ‘aging gracefully’ has been around for decades but has recently taken on a new form. People seem divided on what it means to age gracefully: is it to accept your age and look your best or to reverse it and look as young as possible? Women are frequently marveled at for their ability to remain youthful, with commentary often focusing on how smooth their skin is or how toned their bodies are.

The latest season of American Horror Story (AHS) (Murphy and Falchuk, 2011) has highlighted Jessica Lange not only as a versatile actress but also as a woman who is not fighting against time. The actress, now 77, has been receiving praise for allowing herself to age naturally on the latest press tour for AHS. Lange has not shied away from discussing the intersection of aging and sexism, especially in Hollywood. In a Rolling Stone interview she remarked that she feels her career is coming to a close but that she is still interested in exploring Marlene Dietrich’s later career as she wants to discover “what happens when an actress gets to a certain age and they’re no longer viable.” Lange goes on to note the prevalence of such mentality saying,

“That is a recurrent theme for a lot of women, especially of that period, and in this case, it’s Dietrich and what she did, where she moved on from when Hollywood was kind of finished with her.”

This behaviour raises the question: why is younger so much better? There have been many explanations for the phenomenon, but one of the most compelling arguments was outlined in a study examining human attraction. A 2017 study suggests that the reason humans are so fixated on age was once vital to the survival of the species, boiling down to the factor of fertility (Antfolk). Now with advancing technology the fertile window for women is much larger and no longer strongly favours a woman in her early to mid-twenties, but the biological signalling lingers. Dataclysm revealed that the most attractive age of a woman to men aged 20–50 ranges from 20–24, comparatively the most attractive age of a man to women aged 20-50 ranges from 23–46 (Engel, 2014). Both these studies reveal an almost bulletproof reason for the sex-based biases labeling them as evolutionary and biological, but that then raises the next question: how unfair is it to expect women to stay young forever?