I Am An Old Woman. Be Afraid.

Anti-Aging and Ageism, March 17, 2024

Top ‘o the morning to you! Happy St. Patrick’s Day! Last week’s blog on Biden and ageism hit a chord for many of you and, as you will soon read, it stirred a chord in me as well!!

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“I am an old woman,” I say in a matter-of-fact tone, a tone I might use to say “I’m a Mainer” or “I’m a gardener.” I say it because I hope this time, 9 months shy of 80, the other person will reply with something akin to “Yes, isn’t it cool you’ve forded all those streams, have so much history behind you, so much you could teach us.”  I want their face to mirror kindness and curiosity and a bit of respect.  But sadly, nothing has changed.  At the very mention of the word old, they step back, their eyes widen, their voice rises.  “No, you’re not old,” they insist, practically stamping their feet in an effort to reassure me.

But there is nothing reassuring about these words. Being old must be so shameful and vile people need to deny the very fact of it. 

In all these months of rethinking the venomous effects of capitalism and colonialism on how we value all forms of life on this planet there is a topic I’ve never considered, a topic which all this time has been staring me right in the face: and that is the question of how I value the self who peers at me from the mirror, the one with all the wrinkles, the one who surprises me when I catch a glimpse of her in a shop window, or see a recent photo.  In the last year, those wrinkles have multiplied like rabbits, but unlike rabbits, they don’t remind me of daffodils and moss-green fertility.  Instead, this face scares me.  And I can see from the look in others’ eyes that my dear old face scares them too.  And nowhere in the massive media blitz called advertising do I see a face that resemble mine.  Nowhere. I and all my wrinkled friends are invisible.   

I am an old woman and my wrinkles are beautiful. 

How did we get here, to this place where I can’t be old, where I have to dissociate not only the word but the entire experience of the reality of being…this far along?  In 2020, the American Psychological Association adopted a new Resolution on Ageism (PDF, 127KB) which named ageism as one of the last socially acceptable prejudices and documented its many and diverse negative effects on the physical and mental health of old people.  As this study, and many other reports on ageism have noted, ageism is so pervasive in our culture that most of us, old and young alike, have so internalized our negative beliefs about old people that we have no awareness of them as discriminatory biases or prejudices which need to be examined.  

In this terrific paper, (which I urge all of you to take a look at) Ryan Backer and E-Shien (Iggy) Chang, Ph.D., at the Boston University Antiracism center, report that age stereotypes have become:

increasingly negative over two centuries. As early as the 1880s, age stereotypes switched from being positive to being negative. This phenomenon was in part due to the historic and economic contexts. Modernization of medicine further exacerbated the negativity of images and stereotypes related to aging. This increasing negativity was further perpetuated and exacerbated by media portrayals, popular culture representations, and marketing industries. For instance, researchers in visual representation of aging have found that the representations of older adults have gotten progressively worse since the 1950s. This trend was drastically reduced in the early 2000s only because some older adults were being represented as models of successful aging by appearing ‘younger’ and wrinkle-free in their looks and actions.

Becca Levy, Professor of social and behavioral sciences at Yale School of Public Health and author of the book, Breaking the Age Code, also documents how rampant negative beliefs about old people in our country rise from a wide range of societal sources, such as traditional and social media, and are absorbed without our fully realizing it. Levy’s research indicates that negative beliefs about aging are associated with a higher prevalence for all the eight most expensive health conditions among Americans, which include heart disease, lung disease, diabetes, musculoskeletal disorders, and injuries. The cost of ageism in the United States, she calculated, is $63 billion per year—one of every seven dollars spent for those eight conditions.

I am an old woman and my wrinkles are beautiful and aging is living. 

Just try telling the beauty industry that!  Here’s a great quote from Jessica DeFino who writes the fine Substack blog about the beauty industry called “The Unpublishable” and is the author of The Guardian’s Ask Ugly column:

Anti-aging is the beauty industry’s most enduring promise and most lucrative marketing claim.  In the United States, anti-aging alone is a nearly $5 billion dollar sector.  Anti-aging is a beauty standard that…that goes back centuries, it stems from systems of oppression, Patriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism for sure.  Anti-aging is the ultimate capitalist goal because it can never be met…to try to anti-age is to be a consumer for life. 

And this ideology—that ageing is bad, that it is something to dread, has taken completely over the industry. 

But the beauty industry isn’t the only enemy my face and I are up against in this culture. I can list four other big ones right off the bat: our idealization of independence and autonomy over interconnection and care; our focus on unlimited growth rather than regeneration and limits; capitalism’s prioritization of profit over well-being; our subjugation of nature and our false narcissistic belief that we are Above Nature and have harnessed her forces.

And what is being OLD but facing the limits to our growth, both economically and physically?  And what is being old but accepting care and giving it?  And god forbid we might use some of that corporate profit to support the old people who aren’t producing and carrying their own weight!  And what is being old but accepting nature’s cycles of birth and decline and death as part of her grand, mysterious cycle?  We all are born, we all bloom, we all fade, we all die and from that cycle, more abundance rises. 

I am an old woman. Be afraid, be very afraid.    

I have one last sneaky suspicion about why ageism is such a force in our culture, why media and corporations invest so much money producing images of old people as negative and shameful. I think they are afraid of us, not of our wrinkles but of what we might say now that we are looking back down the long road we’ve travelled because here, at the end, we have both the time and the freedom to ponder, to reevaluate, to question. Just what was all that striving for? Just how important is all this stuff I’ve accumulated? What does really matter?

I think they are afraid that we will call them out, challenge the status quo, seed doubt about the injection of that Botox shot and worse, the cost to our planet of the consumer lifestyle we so eagerly embraced.  We’ve caused a lot of harm in the last 80 years.  And we continue to cause harm with every unexamined move we take, and they don’t want us to take ourselves and our role as elders seriously enough to do what elders do: reevaluate, guide, make sense of things, warn about the wrong turns we ourselves took.

Sometimes you have to walk all the way to the end
before you can see 
the path
behind,  
behold the violence 
and the dying, 
lock eyes with the ghosts 
murmuring in the shadows, 

observe the once-green body 
of this stolen place
scarred now by superhighways, 
by subdivisions rising 
from mud-sweet
saltmarshes, by industrial farms
sprouting on dead earth
(lines from my poem “A Grandmother’s Warning”)

If I speak up about these wrong turns I won’t lose a job, or be rejected from some swish club, but maybe, just maybe, if I internalize all those negative images about old people being unattractive, forgetful, unproductive, frail, maybe I just won’t stand up at a Town Council meeting and challenge assumptions about the town’s relationship to a certain corporation in our town, maybe I won’t stand on a street corner holding a sign asking Chase Bank to divest from new fossil fuel infrastructure, maybe I will just sit down and be quiet, like a sweet wrinkled old woman.