Aging & Wisdom Quote by Catherine Bell

There’s a careful kind of permission embedded in Catherine Bell’s praise: the permission to be admired without being airbrushed into sainthood. By calling out that “she’s not perfect and wasn’t perfect,” Bell is pushing back on the old celebrity bargain where a woman’s public value is tethered to flawlessness - moral, physical, emotional, all of it. The repetition matters. “Not perfect” (present) and “wasn’t perfect” (past) signals that imperfection isn’t a temporary scandal to survive; it’s a continuous human condition, and that continuity is what makes the admiration feel earned rather than marketed.

The choice of “great” is telling too: this isn’t reluctant tolerance of messiness, it’s celebration. In a modeling-adjacent media ecosystem that profits from unattainability, Bell’s framing subtly reframes “perfect” as suspect, even boring. Perfection reads like branding; imperfection reads like biography.

Then there’s the audience she foregrounds: “young girls and different people.” It’s an intentionally broad coalition, but it’s anchored in girls - the demographic most aggressively trained to equate worth with polish. Bell implies that Mac’s appeal isn’t despite her imperfections but because of them: imperfection becomes proof of authenticity, and authenticity becomes a form of authority. The line “respect her even more” reveals the moral economy underneath: vulnerability, mistakes, and visible growth can generate credibility in a culture exhausted by curated personas.

Contextually, it lands as a defense and a recalibration. Bell isn’t just complimenting Mac; she’s trying to change the terms of what role-model status looks like when everyone’s life is content.