In February, social media was ablaze with criticism of how bad Madonna, who turns 65 this month, looked on the Grammys. In the past week, we’re hearing that the four supermodels on the cover of September’s Vogue—Linda Evangelista, 58; Cindy Crawford, 57; Christy Turlington, 54; Naomi Campbell, 53—look too good. This intense focus on how women are aging–whether celebrities or not–has gotten extremely tiresome and infuriating.

With Madonna, the “problem” was that she looked worse than what we expect of a woman in her mid-60s. “Madonna looks good for her age… if her age is 2,700-year-old vampire who eats babies and small animals alive,” a critic on social media wrote. She really f–ked up her face,” another person wrote.

[The airbrushing] doesn’t serve the women on the cover.

The issue with the supermodels, who reigned supreme in the 1990s, is that their lines and any legitimate sign that the clock has been ticking have been smoothed out by Photoshop or AI or whatever for the cover photo, which is accompanied by the headline, “Greatest of All Time.”

That headline was countered with another in the New York Times: “Do Supermodels Age, or Just Get Airbrushed?” In the ensuing article, Vanessa Friedman reported that a Vogue spokeswoman admitted to “minimal retouching and minimal lighting” on the photographs. But she wisely noted, the definition of “minimal” is a relative issue and further muddies the water. “[The airbrushing] doesn’t serve the women on the cover, who broke through back in the day because they had character and were willing to show it,” Friedman writes, “because they didn’t want to be blank mannequins, as models had generally been before them, but individuals with personalities and attitudes and opinions of their own. The kind of personalities that involve expressions, which over time etch years and experiences—joy, sorrow, laughter, fury—onto the topography of a face.

And it doesn’t serve the women who look to them as role models.”

Those women had much to say, as well, on social media: “If we cannot allow these iconic goddesses to show their genuine, authentic beauty without an absolutely obscene amount of identity-erasing Photoshop,” one commenter wrote on a post about the cover, “what the hell hope do the rest of us have?”

Read More: Madonna’s Face: Ageism and Misogyny Are the Real Issue

On the Flipside

This level of scrutiny seems to be the flipside of fading into invisibility. Great stars of the past didn’t have to endure this dissection because they stopped working, stopped appearing in public, so that nature could take its course in private. Greta Garbo comes to mind. The way Garbo and other prominent women made their way through the calendar is reminiscent of how pregnant women once spent their days: “in confinement.” The message was that what happened to your body and skin was not fit to be viewed by the light of day.

The message was that what happened to your body and skin was not fit to be viewed by the light of day.

Of course, we’d rather not disappear and at NextTribe, we encourage women to take on the march of time with fists raised. However, we don’t want every choice, every wrinkle or non-wrinkle to be the subject of commentary or criticism.

There has to be a neutral zone here. Where we get older and we spruce up our face (and hair) with a little help from science or NOT and no one cares either way. We know that this possibility exists. We witness this laissez faire, what-will-be-will-be approach every single day. On men.

Read More: Ageism on Social Media is Rampant—Even Martha Stewart and Helen Mirren Are Targets