The moment came for my friend, Julia, a 42-year-old accomplished writer of children's fiction, when she went to pick up her five-year-old son from school.

我的朋友茱莉亚是一位42岁的才华横溢的作家，她撰写的是儿童科幻小说。但她有一次去学校接她5岁的儿子时，这一“不幸”的时刻降临在了她的身上。

One of his classmates stared fixedly at her brow and asked: 'Why has your forehead got stripes on it?'

她儿子的一位同班同学，紧盯着茱莉亚的额头问道：“为什么你的前额上又好多小细纹呀？”

For Sophie, 50, a successful PR executive, the feeling of revelation came when she caught a sudden glimpse of her burgeoning rear in a changing room mirror.

而同样的经历也发生在苏菲身上，她是一名50岁的公关主任，当她在试衣间的镜子里瞥见了自己后背上“展露头角”的细纹时，她也感到了一阵慌张。

'I looked at the reflection and thought: "Is that fat, middle-aged woman really me?" ' she confessed.

她说，“我看到镜中的自己，我问到‘那个胖胖的中年妇女真的是我吗’”？

Why are we women in mid-life so obsessed with losing our looks?

为什么中年女性经常为她们逝去的青春容颜困扰不已呢？

For a start, we live much longer lives: at 40 we can, perhaps, look forward to nearly half a century of living with our relentlessly declining physical attractiveness.

首先我想说，我们现在可以活得更长，于是在我们40岁的时候，我们也许可以继续向前看到50年，我们逐渐逝去的迷人外表将陪伴我们度过剩下的岁月。

Moreover, our culture and the media convince us that unless we hold on to our youth at all costs, we will face terrible losses.

而且，这个时代的文化氛围和媒体让我们相信，我们必须要以任何代价让青春永驻，不然我们将失去很多。

We're warned that our jobs and husbands will be usurped by younger women. We face the dreadful prospect of our own 'invisibility'.

它们警告我们，我们的工作和丈夫很可能会被更年轻的女人抢走，我们将会面临一个很可怕的未来，那就是我们将被彻底无视。

What's more, we feel guilty that we are worrying about our declining looks, because feminism has taught us to be above such trivial preoccupations.

女性主义教导我们不要太过把精力放在这种小事儿上，因此当我们为自己逐渐消逝的青春所烦恼的时候，我们会有一些负罪感。

We were the generation raised to believe that beauty is skin deep.

我们是被新观念调养出来的新时代女性，我们相信美丽是深藏在皮肤之下的。

Vocabulary:

obsessed with 为...而困扰不已

dreadful adj.可怕的