The Age of Algorithmic Youth: Why Women Are Pressured to Stay Young in Body and Mind
From beauty standards to mental and social expectations, explore how algorithms perpetuate misogyny while keeping women in a state of arrested development.
Before I begin, I want to clarify that this piece specifically explores how algorithms promote and reinforce misogynistic attitudes. This is not meant to encompass the totality of the human experience. But if you want to understand the countless ways women are pressured to stay young in body, mind, and soul, keep reading.
We’ve lost the art of aging gracefully.
Not just physically—due to thousands of cosmetic procedures and new insecurities conjured up by our Algorithms—but mentally and socially.
Apps like TikTok, Instagram, and X have made it possible for virtually anyone with internet access to tap into the collective consensus of any given day. But because these platforms thrive on user engagement, they prioritize the most extreme, sensational, and emotionally charged content. As a result, we don’t just consume information, we’re trained to react to it in the most immediate and visceral way possible. And who tends to engage with the world in the most extreme and emotionally charged ways?
Teenagers.
As I’ve discussed in a previous article, there seems to be an eternal adolescence here. According to Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development, adolescence is a time of heightened emotions, black-and-white thinking, and an intense need for social validation.
I should clarify that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with this behavior when present in teenagers, as these are natural developmental traits. However, since algorithms have been proven to elevate content that meet these characteristics, these traits unintentionally become solidified as the standard for online and offline discourse, resulting in a culture where even adults are conditioned to think and react like adolescents.
This problem doesn’t exist in a vacuum. I see it as a reflection of our culture’s deeply rooted fear of aging, a recycled fear of fading into oblivion, reflected by decades of unnecessary skincare serums, botox treatments, and filler procedures. If you go further down the mental rabbithole, the problem sprouts within our culture’s elderly-repellant soil—that is, devaluation and often neglect of the elderly. And with the power of the internet, it has significantly amplified. In this way, Algorithms are mimicking humans’ ideological consensus of aging, only this time, it’s not just aesthetic manipulation.
Women and girls online are constantly flooded with images of artificially preserved faces and bodies, but now they’re encouraged to literally perform behaviors and cognitions of ‘youth’. Not only does this leave adult women feeling afraid of their own bodies’ natural evolution, it also reinforces the idea that aging in every capacity is something to be fought off at all costs. The booming cosmetic industry, from preventative Botox to invasive surgeries, thrives on the same insecurity that keeps us scrolling: the fear of becoming obsolete, irrelevant, and ‘out of touch’.
I first became aware of this awkward, algorithm-created expectation while watching Ilana Glazer’s Microdose Democracy ad. You can watch it for yourself below:
Though framed as an on-brand silly monologue that aligns with her quirky Broad City persona, I couldn’t shake the feeling that it reflected a larger theme emerging from internet culture—especially on TikTok. If you haven’t deleted your account yet, you can easily find hundreds of videos of Millennial women desperately pandering to Gen Z trends, almost as if they’re asking for permission to still be perceived as ‘cool’.
Ditch your side part for a middle part, it makes you look old.
Skinny jeans are so 2018, only Millennials wear them.
Shamed into abandoning their personal style, made to feel irrelevant simply because their favorite looks have fallen out of favor with the zeitgeist.
To be fair, this pedestalization of Gen Z is about 80% rooted in Millennials’ own experiences of being overlooked and dismissed by Boomers. In many ways, our generation wanted to give the youth two things we never got:
A listening ear and an open mind.
I get it. The intention was noble. But I think the downsides of this overly accommodating attitude are wildly overlooked. Parallel to the ethos of ‘collective liberation’, Millennial women are expected to put our own experiences aside to make space for an allegedly more disadvantaged generation.
Yet, despite the fact that it was Millennials who popularized mental health awareness, made feminism cool, showed up at the polls to legalize marriage equality, and fought for so many cultural shifts, we were told by the algorithms that Gen Z was the generation to listen to.
Gen Z, who reaped the benefits of everything we fought for.
Gen Z, who, contrary to popular predictions of being the social revolutionaries of our time, ended up showing a more balanced voting pattern, as seen in the last election.
And now, women’s rights remain set back 50 years, with abortion still inaccessible to most American women, and a convicted felon in The White House. Women aren’t just pressured to look young, they’re expected to act like teenagers, to stay naive, malleable, and easily influenced. And somehow, freeing Palestine sparked more mobilization and outrage among young American leftists leading up to this past election than any of those issues combined. How convenient.
So, I’ve decided my new goal is to become reasonably out of touch. I want my clothing to be cringey. I don’t need to know what “based” means, nor do I care to keep up with the 24-hour meme cycle. I want to return to a time when political extremism wasn’t the default, when a woman’s right to basic healthcare wasn’t dismissed as an afterthought, when we prioritized the working class and improving actual material conditions, rather than just spouting ideology on TikTok. And most importantly, I want women to be allowed to age physically, mentally, and socially, without a tidal wave of algorithmic and cultural pushback.
If this piece resonated with you, I’ll be exploring these ideas further in my second blog called Ghost in the Feed. It’s a space for rediscovering life beyond the endless noise of social media algorithms. You can check our my first post below, and stay tuned for more to come.
