Day: High noon
Mood: Apoplectic
Accessories: A bottle of gin and a gun
Age-ism is alive and well…everywhere. As an ageing woman, one’s value fades like poster left in a shop window too long, like the last slices of a stale loaf, like the browning banana in a bowl… I’ll stop massacre-Ing you with similes, but even, my friend, the Bard implies that the aged are useless “… the elderly have no worth!” Is this what we all think? Is this true?
On the train home, one day, I looked up from the novel I was reading and noticed:
1. I was the only person reading an actual book
2. I appeared to be the oldest (female) commuter there
3. Everyone else was ‘plugged in’ on their mobile phones, and tuned out
This made me feel a tad uneasy. Could it be that I was ‘out of touch’? Obsolete? Past my due date? (It wasn’t that I didn’t use tech’, it was that I valued the old-school feel of a real book – no batteries required.) But was it time to accept that I was from a different time? And that my time had come and gone?
I cogitated, that in other cultures, such as the Japanese, the mature are treated with respect, because most of us have paid our dues and walked the walk. Not so, in the western world, where to be old is to be perceived as irrelevant, out of sync and approaching obsolescence. Just look at how mature women are portrayed in the media (with a few exceptions):
- Gran, Nan or ‘Nonna’
- Witch or hag
- Lunatic or losing their minds
- Struggling, sad, lonely pensioner
The reality is so very different. After so many years of giving, of raising our families and running around like headless chooks, we women finally reach an age where we have time to be ourselves, to re-find and even redefine ourselves. Often, this is THE most productive period of our lives.
In the workplace, an older woman is armed with priceless skills that only time can give – wisdom and experience, even perhaps a bit of patience thrown in? But time and again, she is discriminated against purely on the basis of her ageing appearance. As if getting old was some kind of offence, or worse, that she should be ashamed to look her age.
Society of course, pressures women to go to endless (and often drastic) measures to look younger and preferably thinner; the whole cosmetic industry makes billions of dollars on that premise – notwithstanding female insecurity. We have been indoctrinated from childhood on, to evaluate our value with how we look. (All of this of course, has a disturbing, historical grounding in patriarchal, misogynistic beliefs that relate only to women’s reproductive or sexual uses.)
No prospective employer will ever say explicitly, ‘you’re too old’ – as we know age discrimination is unlawful, but it will be there somewhere, hidden in the subtext.
But what to do? Arm ourselves with a gun and a bottle of gin? (High-noon for Nanna?) Actually, there is no answer for it, except to lead by example, and not to feel depreciated by a profoundly discriminatory culture. There’s wisdom and poetry in grey hair, my friends, and you heard it here first. We mature women have even more value that we know, and we have to let the rest of the world know it, loud and clear!
For myself, Katherine honours a power suit, (real) pearls, defiant red lipstick and a sassy attitude. There will be no more apologizing for the magnificent, highly capable, wise and strong woman that it’s taken years for us all to realize. Not-so-little red riding hood, eats wolf for breakfast! “You’re out of touch,” as a wity ricochet, “the new trend for any REALLY SMART employer is…”
#MatureWomenRock!
#AgePower
#HighNoonForNanna
Change the discourse, sisters! Rock on!
© Nov 2022, Katherine De Vere, All Rights Reserved,