Too Much

by Rachel Vorona Cote

  The years have only slackened my grasp on what it means to be old, or too old—often the “too” is implied—rendering it a near-incoherent vagary. My mother was sixty-two when she died, an age that is certainly not young according to Victorian standards for women, or ours. Yet—although she would disagree with me—she aged almost imperceptibly until the last months of her life, when the twinned ravages of ovarian cancer and various scorched-earth chemotherapy treatments settled into her silk-soft skin, turning her gaunt and jaundiced. But even then, she did not seem old, only sick and weary. Queen Victoria, who died when she was eighty-one, lived nearly twice as long as her husband, Albert, and buried two of her children. If fortune favors me, I will know decades denied to my mother. Although we expect to outlive our parents, this possibility strikes me as both bizarre and not a little cruel. After all, my mother did not outlive hers, nor did she meet her first granddaughter, my niece. These conventional, temporal benchmarks, so often barometers of advanced years, eluded her. She endures in my memory as young because her life was vibrant and gingery and brimful until it was severely clipped—because, when death came for her, she was too young, and it took her anyway.

  Mom was several months shy of thirty when she gave birth to me; ushering in a new decade was, if nothing else, congruent with the unfamiliar terrain of parenthood. In my case, there was nothing so decisive; on the contrary, it was a keenly ambivalent birthday. I mostly felt young, but observed, with fresh vexation, how professional achievements lost luster in the public eye if they did not occur in one’s twenties (every “Thirty Under Thirty” list insinuated this, anyway). In my case, turning thirty meant a second go: the year prior I had married for a second time and, after long, diligent work toward a doctorate in English literature, I was grappling with the queasy excitement of new, burgeoning career aspirations and the realization that while I was proud of the work that I had completed on my dissertation, I did not want to finish it (abandoning my doctorate was, ultimately, more painful than leaving my first marriage). As a newly engaged twenty-three-year-old beginning her graduate studies, thirty seemed decidedly mature, and certainly too old for profound change: after all, that was when I had decided I would finish school. Perhaps I’d even have a baby or two in the process. Every scrap of cultural evidence suggested to me that my twenties ought to be my most productive years, and that they would absolutely be my prettiest.

  Imagine my surprise when, at twenty-five, I exploded my life and began ambling toward a writing career at twenty-eight. By thirty, I had almost completely reoriented, which should not have been cause for discomfiture, but was. Being a woman, I have learned, means that the world is always shrieking at you to hurry up, and harboring a viable uterus only exacerbates the duress. It’s somatic and dizzying, my lingering anxiety over whether I am too old for this or for that. Turning thirty meant that I began to question what I “ought” to wear, even though I resisted capitulating and in fact began a short-lived campaign in which I wore sheer T-shirts that purposely exposed my bra. Perhaps this sartorial choice was perceived as “too much,” particularly for a grown woman, but intellectually I knew such distinctions were sexist folly. To some extent, I was acting in protest: I have been hassled about my body more so now than in previous decades, and I seem always to face the question of whether its present size is acceptable or healthy.

  The combination of entering my thirties and experiencing weight-shaming has produced a restive concoction of humiliation and insecurity that often, despite my best efforts, sizzles in my gut, turning my body into something chafing and disconcerting, a suit I want to shed or, better yet, dematerialize. I check my roots for gray hairs, the scoops of my eye sockets for wrinkles and newly sprung crannies. I grab at the flesh of my ass. I think of the Greek goddesses and gods who transformed into flora and fauna. I dream of turning into Echo, a disembodied breath, but acknowledge that I enjoy talking far too much for that particular metamorphosis.

  Then I think of rapper Cardi B, who, on April 7, 2018, revealed her pregnancy while performing “Be Careful” on Saturday Night Live in a white crepe gown, her curves at once gentle and unapologetic. Attempting to draw likeness between myself and Cardi would of course be presumptuous. Cardi B is younger than I am, and a musical genius to boot. She also possesses a mesmeric sort of beauty, romantic and soft at the edges. I am not a woman famous for my face, or for any reason at all. But we are neither of us, strictly speaking, old, although we are aging the inexorable way anyone does when they tumble onto this planet. Still, every time I see a woman honor her body—whether pregnant, jacked, fat, or what we uselessly refer to as typical—particularly when it has manifested in a way that provokes cries of vulgarity and too muchness, it seems of a piece with this whack-a-mole question of “aging.” It calls to mind the impossibility of determining what “old” is when every woman is seemingly and, according to the more misogynistic corners of our society, hilariously, too old for something she should want to be.

  That said, the prejudice against and rigid policing of women who have entered into middle age, say, between the ages of forty-five and sixty-five, is specifically diligent. And while it is everywhere present, popular culture supplies us with our most visible examples. Madonna is perhaps the most famous example of a woman rigorously censured for dressing and dancing provocatively even as she has entered into her sixth decade. Famously and bombastically sexual in the 1980s, the most recent criticisms levied against her take the form of retroactive shaming. How dare she assume people still want her, especially when her brand of sexuality has always defied gentility?

  Madonna, people might argue, has taken her schtick too far. Her antics were permissible in youth; now her sexuality is regarded as pathologically excessive, as if desire should evaporate with every decade we age. “Much of the hand-wringing around her age focuses on her lack of dignity,” wrote Jancee Dunn in 2015.13 Dunn recounts some of this “undignified” behavior, which involves kissing singer Drake onstage—raising eyebrows, likely, because Drake is more than two decades her junior—and sporting an ensemble at the 2015 Grammys that featured her “fishnet-encased derrière.”14 Dunn examines her own mélange of discomfort and defensiveness—Madonna is, after all, waging a war against acute sexist ageism—but more often than not finds herself wondering whether Madonna is doing or being too much:

  Why does she have the seemingly compulsive need to shock and titillate, drawing from a playbook that is now three decades old? Yes, she is constantly reinventing herself, but is she evolving? “There comes a time in every Salome’s life,” Harvey Fierstein once wrote, “when she should no longer be dropping the last veil.” Has the queen of reinvention reached that point?15

  Perhaps Madonna does act according to a “compulsive” or imperious urge to resist social expectations; if she is, that would seem to be in keeping with the rest of her career. Why wouldn’t the woman who scandalized audiences with a cone-shaped brassiere, who filmed the softcore music videos for “Justify My Love” and “Erotica,” and who, amid flaming crosses, sexualized a black Jesus in the video for “Like a Prayer” bristle at the notion that reaching menopause demands a transition to sensible underwear? Madonna, after all, has always been aware of the misogynistic norms that she has condemned, and she has little patience for the notion that she should temper her dress and performance. Her Instagram account, like most belonging to celebrities, is riddled with selfies, her lips glistening with gloss and her long, kinked hair a beaming blonde. Her emoji usage is liberal, she enjoys a Snapchat filter now and then, and her captions generally include vocabulary like “slay,” “vibes,” and “bitches,” which almost certainly elicits criticism that she is exerting too much effort to matriculate among today’s youth.

  On May 20, 2015, she posted a substantially filtered selfie accentuating the ridges of her cheekbones, firm thrust of her jawline, and plumpness of her upper lip. The caption reads, “Shut up jealous bitches! I hope you are as fun loving and adventurous as me when you’re my age!!!!” Th
e hashtag “#bitchimmadonna” follows a smattering of emojis, from a goofy ghost to a trio of chickens, as if to defy detractors by doubling down on social media rhetoric deemed too young for her. A litany of adoring comments follows the caption, bespeckled with accusations of paying for youth, giggled references to grandmotherhood, and cheap shots about physical deterioration. Four years later, on June 6, 2019, Madonna did not post a selfie, but instead the image accompanying the New York Times Magazine’s cover story, “Madonna at Sixty.” A profile of the artist written by Vanessa Grigoriadis, it was published just prior to the release of her album, Madonna X. But Madonna was angered by the finished result, which she claimed was far more preoccupied with her age than with her work. Her remarks during the interview anticipate her later response—Grigoriadis attempts to engage Madonna in a conversation about aging, and the pop star refuses to dwell on the matter. “I think you think about growing old too much,” she tells Grigoriadis, “I think you think about age too much. I think you should just stop thinking about it.”16 These are pointed remarks, but they are restrained, too: on Instagram, Madonna posts a caption unearthing the full thrust of her anger. “The journalist who wrote this article spent days and hours and months with me and was invited into a world which many people don’t get to see, but chose to focus on trivial and superficial matters such as the ethnicity of my stand in or the fabric of my curtains and never ending comments about my age which would never have been mentioned had I been a MAN!” The profile does focus considerably on Madonna’s age, and it seems intentional, if a tidbit preoccupied—one of the article’s aims is to illuminate for readers Madonna’s sense of her own legacy, and it leans heavily into the expansive trajectory of her fame. But Madonna, likely weary of conversations that fixate on famous women’s maturity, was rankled by this approach. “I’m sorry I spent 5 minutes with [Grigoriadis],” she writes, adding the regrettable metaphor, “It makes me feel raped.” (Madonna argues that as a rape survivor, “I’m allowed to use that analogy.”) To be sure, Madonna’s long career is rife with missteps, generally ones involving cultural and racial appropriation, but when Madonna draws outrage for baring her middle-aged ass on a red carpet she is, more than anything else, laying bare cultural assumptions of how so-called ladies of a certain age should appear. Even the New York Times Magazine profile, written by a well-meaning female fan of her work, belies, through its avid praise, agitation over how older women should present themselves (of course, Grigoriadis absorbs this snakebit social prejudice just as the rest of us do and is necessarily influenced by it). Often, discomfort over Madonna’s enduring sexual provocations is dressed up in reproaches regarding decency and self-respect. We could debate the former matter at length, never uniting on a definition, and as for the latter, well, Madonna seems to be doing just fine.

  When it foregoes performative hand-wringing in the name of modesty, Western media makes a game out of assessing aging beauties, to crow at their thickening waists and creased skin as if it were a sort of patriarchal victory. Watching former models Pamela Anderson, Jenny McCarthy, and the late Anna Nicole Smith age has also become a media bloodsport (granted, McCarthy has also come under fire, quite reasonably, for her crusade against vaccinations, but that is another issue altogether). By stark contrast, sleazy business mogul Hugh Hefner lived cozily in his model-stocked Playboy mansion until his death at age ninety-one. Hefner was a filthy man, and he faced his fair share of criticism over the years, but his appearance was never pilloried with the vitriol Anderson and her ilk surely faced at a third of his age. Like Madonna, these women were boldly sexual, though perhaps in ways that were more palatable to the male gaze: Playboy magazine catered to it, after all.

  In the meantime, Jennifer Lopez’s name has become synonymous with physical immortality: again and again—it has become a game of its own—the public expels collective gasps at her age, eyes darting from her documented birth year to closeups of her immaculate skin and her astounding physique. To be sure, the boons of genetic favor and wealth have facilitated Lopez’s perennial youthfulness; it’s also the result of profound and unyielding bodily toil. We demand that women of color be exceptional, and so when the media purports to celebrate Lopez for appearing two decades younger than she is, begging her to disclose skin and exercise regimens, it registers as less celebratory than the byproduct of a larger imperative. Middle-aged women of color maintain visibility by astonishing us with their perceived agelessness—“Asian Don’t Raisin,”17 reads the headline of one celebrity roundup, naming Lucy Liu and Michelle Yeoh and Constance Wu (who is in her thirties) as exemplars of graceful aging. Often, lists like these are compiled by members of the community, which is how it ought to be. Latinx journalists explore the question—prompted by Jennifer Lopez, as well as women like Salma Hayek and Sofia Vergara—of “Why Latina Skin Ages So Well.”18 But the larger, vastly white media exerts implacable influence over who, from marginalized communities, is allotted space in the arena of fame. It is not enough that women of color perform the rites of aging with aplomb, they should, ideally, render the process invisible. They should be nothing short of biological marvels.

  If a famous woman does want to grow visibly older—somewhat—while still courting public approval, it’s a delicate endeavor. The aging beauty must learn how to maintain her fame without becoming a figure of fun. White female celebrities have sought to triumph in this arena by refashioning themselves into “gurus.” With her big-ticket lifestyle brand Goop, Gwyneth Paltrow markets herself as an elegant, accomplished, and worldly woman—witching her age into a sign of refined experience rather than a harbinger of obscurity. (We might even think of Goop, or any wellness brand, for that matter, as a modern-day conduct manual of sorts. Of course, for those of us with skimpier checking accounts, Goop is a convenient one to disregard.) Reese Witherspoon has followed suit with her clothing line, Draper James, drawing on the appeal of her Southern charm, and Kate Hudson has unleashed Fabletics, a line of fitness wear. Perhaps we might interpret the guru as the refined MILF: she positions herself above a term with such unseemly connotations, but the aim is not so different. Women entering middle age like Paltrow can still be regarded as desirable, but they must seem uninterested in the question, as if they have other, more age-appropriate concerns.

  * * *

  Feminine youth, as it is conventionally understood—blushing adolescence through one’s early twenties—is a potent and tenacious fetish. I am happier now than I’ve ever been, and yet, when I am confronted with various incarnations of early adulthood, whether in a film, or in the image of a musician, or in a television show’s rosily stilted manifestation of it, my reaction is a fickle one, a mélange of relief and covetousness. I’m grateful to have dispensed with years of agitated uncertainty and the eager willingness to rearrange myself according to others’ predilections. Ultimately, I have benefited from the toil and tangle of living with myself. And yet, I’m susceptible to depictions of young adulthood that place exhilaration and beauty alongside the angst. I try, in spite of myself, to recollect juvenile missteps: perhaps euphoria, or even the unremarkable lull of contentment might have been possible had I behaved with more abandon and not dodged the risks. Maybe—probably—I was too ensconced in my own head.

  According to a common lament, we can only discern the best parts of ourselves long after we’ve shed that skin. The most marvelous exploits glisten brightest once they’ve plunged into the cache of our personal histories. But moments cannot be so intoxicating and delicious if we are aware of them, if we appoint ourselves as characters in narratives of our own devising: either we retread these shimmering spaces by the grace of memory or they flee to a vast, unknowable archive littered with relics of time. Despite the reliable intensity of my feelings, I was pinned by an urgent impulse to editorialize every moment, not because I was especially profound, although I fancied myself so, but because I was terrified. If I had been more self-sure, I might have received murky obscurity as possibility. Instead, I tasked myself with rooting
out meaning in every catalogued experience, as if dogged interpretation could harness my prodigious fear and pave a path to a life that suited me. These were the consequences of being young and Too Much: upon self-diagnosis, I looked at the world and saw peril at every turn, in romance and in creative aspirations and in my every small and colossal hope. If I was going to survive in this inhospitable place, I required discipline.

  Now, at thirty-four—not aged, surely, but not especially young—I consider my Too Much youth with a flickering melancholy. In fearing myself, what did I miss? At my most vulnerable, I whip up recuperative fantasies: I imagine myself eighteen, unbound by the belief that I owe the world a more muted and stoic version of myself. I consider my future not with the timorous sense that I am unfit, but instead with exhilaration at my good fortune. I appreciate and honor both my body and my face rather than scowling at them with self-loathing. I come out as queer decades earlier. I have more sex. I spin this tale of an idealized and evolved girlhood because, in the thick of it, I’m fretting—about being too old and, still, Too Much.

  Enduringly, I am tantalized by the talismanic power of a good story, the notion that everything is solvable and salvageable if I plot it out, even in retrospect. A good story led me to marry the wrong man, to deny my sexuality, to wound others and myself. To seek out a good story as both an organizing principle and an emotional bridle is, at best, a red herring, and at worst, a powder keg. Nowadays, I resist the impulse of contemplating more pleasing origin stories, with the recognition that they hardly soothe, but rather reinforce the great falsehood lobbed at us by a culture dazzled by youth: that with every passing year, a slice of something quintessential and cherished is, necessarily, lost.