Justine Bateman is getting candid about younger women feeling the need to get plastic surgery to alter their appearance.
During her appearance on “Today” on Monday, Bateman, 57, said that the desire for plastic surgery in younger generations boils down to one thing: fear.
“I think that everybody has a completion to this sentence: ‘I’m afraid if people think I look old then therefore …,’ and for different people, it’s different things,” she told co-hosts Savannah Guthrie and Hoda Kotb.
“Some are afraid they’ll lose their job or never get a job or not get a mate or no one’s going to listen to them or whatever,” Bateman continued.
“My position is: That fear existed before your face started changing. So, it’s an opportunity to take care of that fear so it’s not leading you around by the nose and making you make other decisions that are not you, taking you off track,” she said.
Bateman said that younger women who are considering having work done on their face might not specifically be trying to avoid looking older but rather trying to avoid feeling how some older people may feel about their looks.
“They see all these older people going, ‘Oh, I’ve got to change this, I’ve got to change that, I’m so afraid, I’m so afraid,'” Bateman said. “And I think the young women are going, ‘I don’t want to feel like that. I don’t want to feel terrified that my face is getting older.'”
In March, the “Family Ties” star was a guest on “60 Minutes Australia” where she said she feels “sad” for younger women who feel the pressure to change how they look.
“When you say, ‘Is there beauty in aging?’ aren’t you really saying, ‘Do you think it’s possible for other people to find aging beautiful?’” Bateman said. “And like, I just don’t give a s—.”
During the appearance on the Australian show, Bateman discussed the temptation women face to have plastic surgery.
“Sure, you can do all of that, and then I feel like I would erase not only all my authority that I have now, but also I like feeling that I am a different person now than I was when I was 20,” Bateman said of her own experience with aging naturally.
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In an interview with Fox News Digital in October, Bateman discussed her book, “Face: One Square Foot of Skin,” which is a collection of stories from 47 women who Bateman interviewed regarding how they feel about aging and the pressures to continue to look young as they age.
Bateman was inspired to write the book after she Googled herself to find some old comments that were made about her, and the Google auto-complete function assumed she was searching “Justine Bateman looks old.” This shocked her because she never thought of herself that way.
“It affected me more deeply and for a longer period of time than I expected it to,” Bateman told Fox News Digital. “I dug in and had to understand why that affected me like it did, and then once I did, I thought, ‘Why do we even have these ideas in society that a woman’s face is broken and needs to be fixed?'”
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During the interview, Bateman, whose brother is actor Jason Bateman, hypothesized that people fear that if they look old, they risk not getting the job they really want or losing the job they already have, and essentially be passed over for opportunities for someone who looks more youthful.
In her opinion, this could stem from different children’s stories such as “Cinderella,” “Snow White” and “Sleeping Beauty” where “most of the villains are old women.” She thinks these stories subconsciously planted specific fears surrounding aging, a fear she thinks is important to understand.
