You Know You're a Formerly When...
1. You've even once pulled the skin of your face back and slightly up to see what you’d look like with a facelift
2. High school kids are now wearing what you wore in high school.
3. You count calories in mixed drinks.
4. Your ass is starting to need a bra.
5. You suddenly prefer interior design magazines to fashion magazines.
6. A supermodel could give you one of her kidneys and you would still kind of hate her.
7. Whereas you used to be grossed out by obscene catcalls, you are now relieved first, grossed out second.
8. You have a doctor devoted to a single part or function of your body (your patella, your endocrine system) other than your vagina.
9. There’s a decent chance that the doctor is younger than you.
10. You need to pre-caffeinate before meeting someone for a morning coffee.
11. Your adolescent nieces and nephews are starting to regard you as a potential narc.
12. You let your mother friend you on Facebook because you have that little to hide.
13. Besides, moms is cooler than you ever gave her credit for
14. Conversations about mortgages and 401Ks, while not exactly interesting, are no longer stultifying.
15. You have heard of Death Cab for Cutie, but couldn’t ID their songs on threat of waterboarding.
16. You freeze bread. Like there won't be another loaf at the store when you need one
17. You still think “hook up” means “let's meet up for a drink”
18. You have been ma’amed outside the Deep South
19. You can't fathom why they would remake such classics as Fame and Melrose Place
20. Cosmetic surgery that you once considered deeply anti-woman is now “a woman's personal decision.”
WELCOME! I started Formerly Hot after my sudden realization that I was no longer who I'd always been-a pretty girl who navigated the world partially aided by the advantage of her looks. After 30 some odd years, Spanx had found their way into my lingerie drawer, and men who asked me if I "had the time” really just wanted to know the time. Imagine!
I had crossed a line into strange, uncharted life territory, one in which I no longer felt like me. I joked to friends that I was "formerly hot," and clearly I struck a nerve. There are many women like me, bitchslapped into a new category of person: adult "tweens," not quite middle-aged, but no longer our reckless, restless, gravity-defying selves.
Thankfully, I learned life is so much more satisfying on this side of young--and I wrote a book about it, coming in August 2010! Click here for more
Regular readers will forgive this rerun, but I’m hoping a bunch of fresh eyes are on the site today after the TODAY Show appearence. After watching the book trailer (above) and this and this video (oh, and maybe this one, too!) you probably know whether you’re a Formerly. But just in case…here’s one more!
PLUS!
20 SIGNS YOU’RE A FORMERLY
1. You’ve even once pulled the skin of your face back and slightly up to see what you’d look like with a facelift
2. High school kids are now wearing what you wore in high school.
And y’all better listen up, because he’s PISSED! I posted his comment in its entirety here, but I couldn’t resist giving BB a bit more prominent a spot. One or two of you must have gone on a date with him back in the early ’90s and totally broken his heart, because he’s still smarting. He reserves special vitriol for Oprah–perhaps she’s the one who didn’t call him back or suggested they “just be friends.”
Seriously, though, I think it’s not a bad idea to listen to people like BB, if only to affirm your own truth. I’d refrain from calling him a “sexist pig,” (I have a feeling having women scream that at him is his Viagra) but I’d love to hear what YOU have to say about women and power and beauty. Here’s BB:
“Ladies, listen up because I’m about to drop some truth on your Oprah-obsessed minds. Please pay attention because you will rarely hear anyone tell you something so real and honest. Ahem.”
Totally listening, BB. Lay it on us. Oprah? You paying attention? Stop helping people and being a role model and making millions of dollars, because BB is speaking. Read the rest of this entry »
August 14th, 2010
StephanieDolgoff
1,100 views, 21 Comments »
Remember in junior high, how you’d carry your cardboard lunch tray through the gauntlet between cafeteria tables, warily looking for a place to eat your mystery meat and drink your milk out of the carton? The definition of a dork was the girl who plopped down wherever there was a spot open with a peppy “Hi, girls! This seat taken?” heedless of the vibes that were emanating from those already seated that screamed “Don’t even think of bringing our cool table property values down!”
The whole pre-publication experience (the book isn’t out until Tuesday, but there’s been a lot of debate about the topic and the message) has been an exercise in wedging my Formerly butt in wherever there’s a seat, in any media that will write about the book, and letting the vibes and the comments fly. Read the rest of this entry »
August 12th, 2010
StephanieDolgoff
300 views, 1 Comment »
This photo idea is kinda cool! I’m also thinking all you Formerlies should send in current pix showing how you are still hot–just differently hot. I dunno…many of us look better now.
Anyway, in the spirit, this is me with former Baywatch bo-hunk David Chokachi, back in my pre-Formerly days, circa 1997. He’s way hotter than I ever was, but whatev.
August 12th, 2010
StephanieDolgoff
164 views, 5 Comments »
I was just down in the gym in my building, trudging forward to nowhere on the eliptical and spacing out to the wall TVs. I was plugged into my iPod, so I couldn’t hear exactly what Maury Povich was saying, but the chyrons (those little blurbs that appear under someone’s face as they speak) were cracking me up.
One read, “Says he didn’t cheat, hickey came from dog.” The other, something like “Swears he didn’t cheat on Heather with best friend Steven.” The most baffling one read (and I’m getting the names wrong), “Tests prove David had sex with several of Kim’s family members.” I cannot imagine what kind of test (except maybe a DNA test on resulting offspring) could prove such a thing. Did they submit to rape kits for Maury Povich? Really, really not worth it.
But it got me thinking about what my Formerly chyron would read if we all had them floating under our chins as we walked around and living our lives. Here are a few that came to mind for me, so far today:
“Is banking on crease on face from pillowcase fading before book interview”
…between not dignifying certain posts with a response, and showing up at the authors’ doors, chaining them to their radiators and having Kristin Chenoweth read aloud to them in her squeaky little voice until they swear that next time they’ll at least READ THE BOOK THEY’RE CRITIQUING before they critique it. After that, toss it, trash it, shred it and use it to line your Guinea pig’s cage if you think it sucks. I’m as environmental as the next gal.
I may be merely a women’s magazine editor (which the author of this piece on Salon.com seems to rank just above those who typeset supermarket circulars and right below those who redact classified government files on the print media hierarchy of respect) but even dumbass I know that in order to comment on the content of a text, one must take the time to run one’s eyes across the actual text, and not just an article about the text.
“Don’t call me “formerly” anything,” Mary Elizabeth Williams, with whom I believe I discussed assigning a story a few years ago when I was at SELF, a–gasp!–women’s magazine where I used to work, says. “Because I’m not ready to assume my best years are behind me. And I don’t ever want to define myself by what I’ve been.”
Yeah, me either. Lighten up. The term “Formerly Hot” is a joke, mainly on me. I prefer to laugh at the pressures of aging. It’s fine if you don’t think it’s funny. But at least read the book before you snark. I think you’d find that we agree on many, many points.
August 9th, 2010
StephanieDolgoff
371 views, 17 Comments »
This is Carla Birnberg, one of the incredibly together women I’ve met in doing this blog and trying to get the word out about the book.
A few months back, I did a podcast with her and her friend Shauna (they comprise Two Fit Chicks). It was over the phone–Carla is in Austin and Shauna is in Scotland–but was so taken by their BREATHTAKINGLY SANE attitude about fitness and body image and just plain enjoying your life without making yourself crazy that I sat there nodding like a bobble head, as if anyone could see me, and breathing “yeah!” into the phone. Do yourself a favor and check them out, as well as Carla’s blog, Mizfitonline.com.
In any case, Carla says in her video that she didn’t consider herself a Formerly–she is her best self now, at 41, and doesn’t think of herself as Formerly anything. I can understand that. I, too, feel I’m my best self at 43, although I do get a kick out of sifting through the past, what I’ve learned and that which I am no longer. It’s all what you choose to do with your allotted 24 daily hours. Carla, obviously, uses more of that time for bicep curls than I do, while I prefer gazing at my navel. When I can find it within the folds of my mom belly.
Whatevs. Carla is a “Finally,” which it turns out you can be without considering yourself a “Formerly.” Labels only matter if they’re meaningful, and “Finally” works for me.
August 9th, 2010
StephanieDolgoff
127 views, 1 Comment »
Insane. Hilarious. I’ve never had haters before. OK, maybe in junior high because I did finally convince my mom to spring for the overpriced Sassoon jeans and those, naturally, inspired jealousy. I can’t say that I love the rage or the trolls sitting in their basements commenting that I need a nose job, but I suppose it’s the cost of doing business. I do love the many valid points people have been raising and the debate the articles about the book have been inspiring. There’s also quite a bit of love, and for that, I thank you.
Still, though, everyone might want to simmer down, at least until the book comes out (nine days from now, August 17.) All the noise is about what people think I’ve written (based on The New York Times piece, along with the excerpt in SELF), and opinions are flying fast and furious. Jezebel did a post yesterday about how there’s something “defeatist” about my alleged message, in which I am “waving the white flag” at society’s obsession with youthful beauty being the only kind of beauty there is.
Yeah, no, that’s not what I’m saying. To clear up that and other misconceptions about what this whole Formerly Hot thing is all about, I’ve complied a list of FAQs. Feel free to submit more. I will try to answer the ones that don’t comment on my nose.
1. Am I saying older women aren’t and cannot be hot.
No. I am mocking myself for caring that I don’t look as I once did now that I’m 43, and questioning the idea that hot and youth are inextricably linked. Read the rest of this entry »
August 8th, 2010
StephanieDolgoff
972 views, 19 Comments »
A few years ago, all-around hot chick Stephanie Dolgoff started to notice that salespeople in trendy boutiques—the ones who “used to swirl around me like bees over a puddle of orange soda”—no longer bothered to pitch her their skinny jeans and spiky heels. What’s worse, guys on the subway—the very ones who had been hitting on her so relentlessly for the past two decades—barely glanced in her direction. Life was otherwise swell—good job, great husband, beautiful kids, loving friends—but she’d become, in her own estimation, “Formerly Hot.”
What’s the Big Deal?
It’s not like Dolgoff and her age-mates are the first people ever to hit 40—but for them, the Formerly transition is new and strange, the source of revelations both frustrating (”my upper arms have recently begun to flap in the breeze like Grand Opening flags”) and sublime (”When you’re younger, you feel so alienated, you try so hard to fit into a group … now my friendships give me community, but I don’t need them to give me my identity.”) Dolgoff soon finds that her pals are going through all sorts of Formerly shifts of their own—Formerly Wild, Formerly Arrogant, Formerly Fat, Formerly the Prodigy—and these inevitable changes might just be leading to new identities even more meaningful than the ones they left behind. READ THE WHOLE THING HERE
August 7th, 2010
StephanieDolgoff
136 views, 3 Comments »
SHARE YOUR STORY
You're formerly something, but you're no doubt finally something you've aspired to, too. To share your FORMERLY/FINALLY story CLICK HERE.
She’s not a fan DENISE IN SF WROTE: I would say your little gimmick is pretty stupid. Anyone, anywhere who feels the need to pigeonhole women into tidy little categories is adding to the problem.
Happy birthday, Sweet Adult Tween NOELLE WROTE: I have two precious things in my life, one that makes me feel "hot" - the perfect little black dress - and one that makes me feel "formerly hot" - a 15 year old daughter. Her friend had a "club-themed" Sweet 16 party and the next thing I know my Little Black Dress walked out the door on my Little Girl. My clothes are going to parties I'm not invited to!
Fashion forward, people! KIMBERLY WROTE: I teach fashion students and when they show up to class dressed like they're on their way to a OMD concert I shutter and resist the urge to tell them they have stolen that outfit from my high school closet. Also, jealous that I'm NOT on my way to an OMD concert. SO I continue to wear my Ray-bans with love, nostalgia, baggage and all.
Suddenly the oldest K WROTE: While my other friends are now on their second children, thinking about whether they can still wear short(ish) skirts, and getting divorced or remarried -- my younger friends are still spending their summers going to 1st weddings and amazed that their other friends are old enough to purposely get pregnant.
Finally just right I'm a mom & now I can't remember why I thought life was so great before. My all nighters & the bottles in the pantry are completely different now, but I wouldn't change a thing. I have so much more confidence & peace & satisfaction & love. I wouldn't trade a mountain of dirty diapers for my old life ever! I love every stinking one!
Formerly cool FORMERLY HIGH CQ WROTE: I went to parties, museums, restaurants, bars, sporting events, the theatre, the ballet, . . out with friends, out making friends. Now I am 'Uncool'. A 'fun ruiner, party pooper' say my children.
Formerly not “a mother figure” MAY POPPS WROTE: When a cute 22 yr old guy @ work asked me a questioned about payroll tax withholding "since I was a mother-figure around here" I was crushed! ...But driven to work harder to look even better, lost more weight, & actually wore a 2 piece to the beach in Florida, without embarrassing my kids.
Formerly quarter-aged ROBUNDLE WROTE: Wow, that is the first time someone has ever called me "Middle-aged". Not sure that I liked it, but I guess it means in a way that I have arrived and can now demand a certain amount of respect. Out of my way...you youngsters!
Formerly an Overachiever NICOLE WROTE: My scary next step...I am seeking a lower paying executive level position with a large non-profit that works with kids. Something that I have always wanted to do, but could never give up the income. I still can't afford to, but I have to have a happy next 20 years!
And y’all better listen up, because he’s PISSED! I posted his comment in its entirety 
Remember in junior high, how you’d carry your cardboard lunch tray through the gauntlet between cafeteria tables, warily looking for a place to eat your mystery meat and drink your milk out of the carton? The definition of a dork was the girl who plopped down wherever there was a spot open with a peppy “Hi, girls! This seat taken?” heedless of the vibes that were emanating from those already seated that screamed “Don’t even think of bringing our cool table property values down!”
This photo idea
I was just down in the gym in my building, trudging forward to nowhere on the eliptical and spacing out to the wall TVs. I was plugged into my iPod, so I couldn’t hear exactly what Maury Povich was saying, but the chyrons (those little blurbs that appear under someone’s face as they speak) were cracking me up.
…between not dignifying 
Insane. Hilarious. I’ve never had haters before. OK, maybe in junior high because I did finally convince my mom to spring for the overpriced 
This is my daughter Vivian. And I quote: “Beautiful red bra on the book cover. Actual bra. Boring.”
