no longer rising

main pop girls' early middle aged era

A brief note not related to the rest of this: I’ve set up the Evangelion posts in their own section. If you want to be able to opt out of them, you should now be able to do so. (Alternatively, if you want to be able to only read the Evangelion posts, you should be able to do so now.) You can do this by going to “settings” and then to your Notebook subscription:

example from my subscriber page for Rich Text

I did this mostly because it was sort of driving me crazy that the Evangelion posts were filling up the homepage and this way they are clearly in their own part of it. OK, on with the show.

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In one of her recent Wicked appearances, Ariana Grande tried to make a joke about her age while accepting an award declaring her a rising young talent:

“You don’t know how much it means to me,” Grande continued. “I’ve been performing since I was a child, so I never thought at the age of 31 I would be hearing the words ‘rising star’ again, so I wanted to start by thanking my two friends: Botox and Juvederm.”

“I thought I’d be hearing ‘slightly withering star’ or ‘drooping star’ by now so thank you,” she quipped as the room burst into laughter.

Despite People’s spin on it above, Grande did not pull this joke off.¹ She tried though.

Turning thirty is meant to be something you regard with fear and dread if you’re a woman whose job puts you in front of cameras. Actually, though, I think the point at which people start getting weird about ages happens when you turn 31. I can’t really justify this sense but I think when you turn 31 there’s some sort of feeling like “really? you’re going ahead with this ‘thirties’ thing?” and that’s when the old hag accusations kick in.

I don’t think this really happens in the same way to “normal people”—I mean normal people will experience anxiety (sometimes crushing, life-ruining anxiety) about age, their appearance, and so on, but their looks are not intimately tied into their profession, so the way it happens is different. An average woman who freaks out about being washed up at 31 is mistaken but a pop star who does so is reacting to something real. If you drift into one of the various Taylor Swift snark forums, for instance, what you will find is a lot of people who are fixated on her age and insist she’s clearly gotten so much plastic surgery she’s no longer recognizable, because that’s the only way you hit 35 and don’t look like this:

two month old shar pei crone

Embarrassing but true: I actually stopped reading these forums for “Taylor Swift studies research purposes” because I realized they were making me feel bad.² A lot of their complaints about Taylor essentially come down to “she’s 35 and a total failure in life, except for all her success and her money and fame and so on, because she isn’t married with a baby and retired.” I was like—damn. I’m not married with a baby and retired either, but I am 35.…