Happy 1997, everyone: Christina Aguilera is 17 again. On Monday, Carcy magazine debuted a cover that featured the 44-year-old looking remarkably not 44, apparently Benjamin Button-ing.
Which is to say: Xtina looks young—extraordinarily young. Suspiciously young. Her cheeks sculpted, her buccal fat forgotten, her body snatched. Online, guesswork erupted as to how the “Dirrty” songstress attained her timeless physique, beyond makeup and retouching and Skims. Is it the work of a deep plane facelift, said to yank subterranean muscle skyward? It it fat replacement with a fat matrix donated from, erm, corpses? Some other mysterious, price-of-a-condo procedure? Her ’90s nachos are fresh out of the oven.
The stumbling block for me isn’t how Aguilera looks, but how much it matters to us. The feminist in me doesn’t think we should even be commenting on the appearance of a Grammy-winning pop juggernaut, but one’s image is such an integral part of pop stardom.
I don’t want to either blindly glorify the effective work she’s (seemingly) had done, nor do I want to join the legions of tweeters dunking on a woman’s looks (is this day and age!?). Is Xtina a fine wine, or another victim of our lookist culture? Neither answer feels quite correct. Aguilera’s body is her own damn business.
We’re all a little responsible for a culture that hums at the surface level of womanhood, seldom bothering to go much deeper; we observe, we assess, we swipe onward. We love and celebrate people looking amazing, but if we really dig into what “amazing” means to us, things can start to get murky. A woman looking great is begrudgingly synonymous with heterosexual arousal and signifiers of her fertile prime—eyes and lips enlarged, mimicking an orgasmic state; supple breasts; childbearing hips. I’m not saying that you have to look like a fertility doll in order to look good, nor that social or sexual approval is the ultimate goal for self-representation, but these ideals have long permeated our standards of beauty. Under the patriarchy, it’s virtually impossible to separate female beauty from the male gaze.
A woman’s right to lean into, or away from, these social codes is absolutely her choice, that goes without saying. But the problem with the Xtina discourse is that we are not talking about her singing, her next album, her rich inner life. We’re not even really talking about the fashion, and we love to talk fashion. We’re much more hung up on how 2025 Xtina mirrors the Xtina we all agreed was hot in 1997; how she has maintained the visual cues that made her arouse a whole planet.
