Is it Aging or Ageism that Causes the Pain?
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Posted by Margaret Morganroth Gullette October 18th, 2006 |
Recently I wrote an online essay called “What’s the Matter with Nora Ephron’s Neck?” People who read reviews in the New York Times etcetera know that Ephron doesn’t “like” her aging neck or the “wattles” of other women. The media gave her book exceptional attention. (If a man wrote a book describing how ugly men get as they age, would so many newspapers have favorably reviewed his book for its “honesty”?)
People who read my essay on www.WomenseNews.org know that many of my friends and I, also around 65, live in a “feminist country of later life” where we don’t hide or bemoan our necks or get plastic surgery. We adorn our necks with jewelry, we like our bodies well enough (we’re women, after all!); we recognize middle ageism when we see it, and we try to resist.
I received a lot of supportive email. But there was one equally passionate one that accused me of ignoring and worsening the sufferings of older women around body issues.
The main problem, however, is in setting up such a dichotomy in perspectives–either you are a nonfeminist who hates her neck, or you are a true feminist who loves every wrinkle. . . Aging is a difficult experience, and not just because youth is prized in our culture. . . .
The “main problem” in the body-image context is not aging but ageism. As sociologist Mike Hepworth points out, wrinkles don’t hurt and are not a symptom of illness. Yet some targets of ageism and middle ageism do suffer from them.
One part of resistance is a concept that could be called “our excess suffering.” Cutting down on excess suffering is one of my main motives for writing.
Ageism, the keyword you never read in the mainstream, is the true target of age-criticism. Ephron is fair game because she is making money from the internalized ageism of her own gender. Sexist ageism.
Age-criticism is not otherwise an attack on individuals, male or female, who are caught up in ageism’s vicious riptides, struggling to keep their heads above water by using the alleged life rafts–Botox, surgery, laser treatments, fad dieting–that the commerce in aging malevolently, out of self interest, recommends.
Can You Become an Anti-Ageist Feminist in Later Life?
Ephron and other self-described “aging women” can move into the feminist country of later life any time they like. No passport, no visa required. Feminists don’t police the borders. On the contrary, we are looking for all the new citizens we can inspire. It’s not even a country, of course. It’s a state of mind or a culture of feeling. You can flip into it with one experience of relief.
You don’t have to “prize your wrinkles” as a result. But you ARE going to see them less or with less pain.
Here’s the reason why.
When you look in the mirror as a feminist, you don’t just see your own neck. You see the giant systems that we all live in, sending us a constant daily stream of propaganda that shapes our behavior and our feelings and, yes, the way we see. You see these systems with increasing sharpness. And you get angry, which is a very useful emotion in this context. “Political anger provides focus and attaches us to the world. It is antithetical to the mood of sadness [that comes from] political helplessness,” Kathleen Woodward, a brilliant age critic, wrote in her essay, “Against Wisdom” . Political anger would not be directed at feminists. Rather, at the people and institutions that make money from ageism.
Fashion magazines, advertisements, tabloids, and the lifestyle pages of major newspapers, on and offline, deal out pain with page after page of youth-adulation: young celebrities, young fashion models, articles about “staying” young or looking “younger.” (This is not good for girls either. As girls age from nine to eighteen, more and more report that they worry about their appearance. The percentage of anxious “Supergirls”–according to a new report from Girls Incorporated–rises from 54% in elementary school to 76% in high school.
The Scene of Confession
Even some of my feminist friends complain at times about signs of “aging.” On cue, women–surprisingly young women, these days–are liable to drop into a sorry list of what they don’t like about their skin, their weight, their hair color, their muscle tone. “I don’t look the same,” they assert, as though that were prima facie bad. What am I to say?
I used to say, “Give the sadness its due.” Commiseration is a common way of conversing among friends, as my dear friend Andrea reminds me, and that’s usually a good thing. But not where looks are concerned in middle-ageist America.
This becomes the obligatory Scene of Confession. It is supposed to elicit a similar depressing confession from me, in which I too complain about my own skin or my own weight–or, if I can’t, some other body part identified publicly as “aging.” Then we’re all lamenting together. Each of us is building up her self-hatred, which is bad for us psychologically. We are reinforcing ageism, defined here as “stereotypes that aging is overwhelmingly a decline.” And we are reinforcing the System that wants to sell us products.
I can’t honestly agree with them. I’m not Ephron, telling other women how awful they would look to themselves if they only stopped denying it. It’s not only that I see the propaganda systems. I think some of them look better than they used to.
And our stories of our own aging can notice that decline is not inevitable. When I was younger–17, 25, 30, before I came to feminism–I really didn’t like my body, and in my forties and fifties and sixties I came to be much better satisfied with it. I’m only 65. I can’t start complaining, it would be ahistorical and untruthful and misleading.
Never Confess
But my bigger insight is this: We don’t need masochistic empathy here, reinforcing women’s supposed ugliness in the guise of friendship. That’s Ephron’s form of “commiseration.” If a friendship really exists, one of the newly feminist women needs to stop and say judiciously, “Isn’t that a product placement speaking?” Or, “Isn’t ‘I’m not the same’ just what a plastic surgeon wants to hear you say?”“If the perfection industries didn’t make billions on your misery, would you be worrying so much about your hair, your abs, your waist?”
I spoke of the “excess” suffering that comes from ageism. We can anticipate that much less suffering would arise from “aging” if we let our anger seethe just for a few conscious seconds every time we saw a printed or online page of youth-adulation. If we left off buying those damn rags or recklessly riffling their pages in the checkout line. If we wrote anti-ageist letters to the editors. If we consciously tried to eliminate youth envy and nostalgia from our hearts and eyes. If we taught girls feminist truths about the body.
Who knows how much lovelier the peopled world would look, how much less “difficult” aging would seem, and how much more resilient we would feel? Well, I for one know how much good feminist anti-ageism has done for me.
Margaret Morganroth Gullette is the author most recently of Aged by Culture (U of Chicago Press) / Search “Gullette” ] which was chosen as a Notable Book of the Year by the Christian Science Monitor.
References:
This essay uses some material from my essay, “Take Another Look,” www.womenseNews.org, published August 3, 2005.
OurBodiesOurselves: Menopause has a good chapter on Body Image
The chapter on women’s body image and ageism from Gullette’s Declining to Decline: Cultural Combat and the Politics of the Midlife is called “Face Off” : / Search Margaret M. Gullette
© 2006. This essay is copyrighted by Margaret Morganroth Gullette. Fair use gives very limited rights to quote and no right to reprint. For permission to reprint, write to mgullette@msn.com
October 19th, 2006 07:17
What a strong, smooth piece of writing!
Love,
D
October 19th, 2006 11:20
RE: Ageism, today’s (10/19) New York Times has an article on the front page about the technical and other challenges of the new electronic voting machines. It has several sexist comments in it, including a quote from some expert about confused “gray haired ladies” and mention of how older people can’t wrap their mind around computers.
October 19th, 2006 14:25
Today I was dismayed when I went to see my Family Medicine physician about a respiratory infection. There was a large poster hanging outside the office announcing that now this Internal Medicine/Family Practice group that I have been seeing for 20 years does laser work. There were flyers in the examining room with pictures of before and after all over the walls, and there were adds for Botox! I thought of the work of my cousin, Margaret, and sighed. I want my family doctor to be focussed on the important issues of my health not on cosmetic repairs. I guess I should have protested while I was there instead of simply sighing and bemoaning the fact that they, too, have given in to trying to get richer on their patients’ vulnerabilities.
Judith
November 2nd, 2006 11:19
Very soon I will look older than my mother-in-law. She tells me “Aging is horrible. It’s awful. You’ll see.” She has already begun to buy me anti-wrinkle creams. Her solution has been surgery. Dr. Becca Levy’s research on negative self-attitudes toward one’s aging is important here - she clearly showed negative impact on health and longevity with negative self-images of aging. I wonder if wrinkle creams and cosmetic surgery and hair dyes should come with warning labels…warning: negative self-images of aging can lead to a shortened life. This product is not guaranteed to improve your attitude toward aging - only to hide the markings of the aging process.
November 2nd, 2006 17:43
I am 59 and holding out on having anything “done” to my face. I read Nora’s book w/some understanding of how she felt, but horrified, too, that she (who I tend to think of as a feminist), also conscious of aging - then there is no hope. I live in a very conservative area where women seem to be getting cosmetic “help” at 30. I wanted to age w/grace and find myself instead torn between the ageist fears surrounding me and my more sensible wiser self…what’s missing here that the writer obviously has is a support group of women who are simiarly tuned in to middle ageism. I don’t know any woman who isn’t wanting to look younger or feel younger or be younger than she is and the height of a compliment is to be told that…where do you find these people in a “red” state in the south…I suspect that many women are like me - torn between old and recurring tapes in their heads and the desire to be rid of it all and just BE wiser, older and Real.
November 2nd, 2006 18:59
Thank you for speaking the truth. Ageism hurts. It hurts more when we do not recognize it as the problem and ascribe it to ourselves. I was recently thinking that I should give up dancing because I am getting too old and I look strange. After I read the article I realized that I was internalizing all the nonesense about ageing women. Wanna dance anyone? Joie de vivre is great at any age.
Thanks for reminding me to safeguard my freedom.
Alexandra
November 3rd, 2006 10:44
Alexandra, thank you so much for confirming how important it can be to call attention to the negative images of women in media — and how powerful feminist media critique can be in improving women’s self esteem and, indeed, our lives. I’m thrilled to know that you’re not going to stop dancing — I’ll dance with you anytime. Keep dancing, and keep challenging media norms.
November 8th, 2006 04:38
I loved this essay. It reminded me of how important it is for us to take collective kinds of action. Every time we succumb to plastic surgery etc. we are not only complicit in reinforcing negative images of ageing, but also in “upping the ante” for other women. There are also power and equality issues here, for not every woman CAN invest a small fortune in pursuing the illusion of youth.
December 9th, 2006 20:29
I absolutely agree. I was acutely aware of “aging” in my early 50s, but now am –most of the time–happily wrinkled and silver-haired. It doesn’t hurt, either, to be in a lesbian relationship with another 66-year-old.
December 11th, 2006 15:36
wonderful, wonderful post. especially enjoyed how it inspired commenters to write about their own ways of saying, “this is who i am: a woman at a particular time in her life. i like it!”
January 17th, 2007 22:59
Seems to me that worrying about the aging body has something to do with mortality - like the lettuce in the refrigerator getting brown around the edges, I too am mortal. And even if the purveyors of creams and surgery cease and desist, there’s no getting around the fact that we ultimately die.
So,if as Mark Twain says, “all humor is rooted in sadness”, well, maybe there’s a place for wrinkled neck humor, since death is sad, and more to the point, inevitable, unlike our earlier struggles against social constructs, which in fact have been changed.
April 11th, 2007 17:49
Today, i saw in mirror my own ageing face.What a face , brown, soft, and lots of sun light on this aging face. So, what is this elder face looking at? ah, the lines of life on the skin of my old face. elders women faces we need to see with our eyes. Where are the old women,where? Lets look at our faces and see the old women , old women, come to me, come and stay with me. Let me know the pain and life of old women.
visions of older women, elders , yes celebrate her body and her spirit. Let’s all do old/elder women circles every where.
that is empowerment. full circles,come full circle daughters of the earth. blessings to all women and older/elder women. clairemarut
May 9th, 2008 11:33
I found your site on technorati and read a few of your other posts. Keep up the good work. I just added your RSS feed to my Google News Reader. Looking forward to reading more from you.
March 23rd, 2010 12:12
I understand what is being said, but what about the realities of not getting a job because you look older and don’t dress fashionably or the fact that if you let your body go your husband leaves you for the 23 year old secretary. These are some of the fears I have. I am in my early 40s and I eat well, exercise, not only to look good but preserve my health. Recently I had juvederm to correct my tired looking eyes. I know I don’t look 20 something, but if I start ageing in ways that just look weird and disproportional I don’t see anything the matter with correcting it. Just because it’s natural and part of ageing doesn’t mean it looks good.