The Subtle Heartbreak Of Female Aging

One of the most famous photographs in history is the “Afghan Mona Lisa”, a pic taken by a National Geographic photographer in the 1980s of a 12 or 13 year old Afghan girl on the cusp of womanhood. In the pic, you can see her nascent, striking beauty beginning to assert itself. Many years later, that girl, now a grown woman, was tracked down and another photograph of her at approximate age 30 was taken. Here are the two pics side by side:

Tragedy. Beauty is but a flicker in the quickly brightening and fading light of a woman’s lifetime. If you think women don’t feel stress competing in the dating market, look at this photo for a helpful reminder of the Damocles Sword of sexual expiration that dangles over the head of every woman. Unlike men whose urgency centers on relieving the pressure valve in their gonads, women are inextricably bound to a powerful, implacable emotional urgency centered on the need to capitalize on their beauty before time runs out. Women have made a pact with the devil — in return for the promise of exquisite beauty, their window to this world of lavish male attention is woefully brief.

But the reason for this post and the inclusion of the photo above is to draw your eye to the nearly imperceptible changes in a woman’s face as she ages a mere 15 years. These changes — so subtle in their alterations — can produce an effect upon the male eye and penis such that she is rendered sexually invisible to him, if not outright repulsive. A tiny droop here, a blotch there, a shadow cast at the wrong aspect — minute changes to facial composition that one would be hard-pressed to pinpoint and elucidate will nevertheless, taken on the whole, turn a woman from a glorious sexual and feminine creature to a sorry bag of undifferentiated human flesh.

For example, let’s closely examine what exactly has changed between the 13-year old Afghan girl and her 30 year old self that she should now look like a witch instead of a blossoming beauty. This will be harder than you think.

– The lips are generally the same shape, but now the corners droop ever so slightly, as can be seen by the diagonal shadow extending from lip to jowl.

– Her skin, while free of acne and disfigurements, has become blotchy. Various hues of crimson compete for real estate on her cheeks and chin.

– Her nose, while still mostly the same shape and size, has acquired a barely perceptible downward tilt and a bonier countenance, cursing her with the aforementioned witchy visage.

– Her eyes have gotten relatively beadier, though this diminution is so tiny as to be measured in units smaller than millimeters. Yet the male brain and eyes, wired and honed to lacerating, and cruel, perfection by millions of years of evolution ensuring that only the most fertile women stake claim to his resource and emotional investments, has no trouble at all judging the tiniest millimeter differences in female facial composition for sexual worthiness.

– Her eyebrows, a little bushier, though again the change is small. But small changes make all the difference.

– The orbs of her eyes themselves have dulled, the glimmer of youthful vitality and emerging sexuality faded after a twinkle in time of only 15 years.

– Her chin has become bulbous. It has added perhaps no more than a half centimeter in the horizontal from her former chin size.

– She has grown incipient jowls, but we cannot tell this from any fat accumulation, which appears minor at best. Rather, we can tell by the “greater than”-shaped shadow that runs jagged from her cheekbone to her jawline.

– There is an ever-so-slight band of darkness under her eyes. The fat pockets that puff out the underlids of the orbital sockets are typically the first to waste away from the ravages of aging.

***

This was a brutal assessment, and the goal was to demonstrate that aging takes its toll on women in ways so subtle, and yet so deleterious and frighteningly fast, that the signs can be easily missed by a woman who has become accustomed to male attention in her late teens and early 20s, and in fact has become inured to the degradation in her sexual value by staring at her face every day in the mirror.

Naturally, some of you will say that Afghanistan is a tough place, and any woman living there would age faster than her pampered Western counterpart. You would be correct, as far as that goes. But the same unstoppable forces — like a tide of horrors — that have ruined the gift of this Afghan woman’s face to the world are at work ruining the faces of millions of Western women blowing away their prime years on mimosas and cock hopping. The only difference are the high tech cosmetics and treatments available in the West that helps stem the tide for a few years.

But that is all it is: a few years. A lucky American woman blessed with good genes and healthy living might be able to put off the withering Afghanistization of her face for perhaps five, or maybe even ten, extra years, holding the witch at bay until age 35-40. Sadly, for most American women, the malignant obesity epidemic has guaranteed that they will lose their beauty long before it is fairly taken from them, if they ever had it at all.

Men, when you remind yourselves of the unimaginable torment that women must experience as their number one asset abandons them with a fury to the cold, uncaring apathetic eyes of the sexual market…

be thankful that you are a man.