For me, growing old as a woman in The United States is less about grievances done to me than it has to do with a subtle weakening of my place within this civilization and a not-so-subtle disrespect that pops up more with each passing year. Such as, if I disapprove of pornography as systemically harmful to women, it is my age that prompts my labeling as a prude and a pearl-clutcher. It can not be that I base my viewpoint on studies and stats and the knowledge that womanism is a movement– one that supports the liberty of all women, not to be confused with individual women who decide to reduce their images to the sexual uses and misuses of their bodies, calling that empowerment. My age sets me up for a kind of disdain only somewhat experienced by younger women with the same beliefs. The wisdom that comes with age has little significance to anyone but those owning it, because foresight is another word for old, and old is what no person desires to be.
I do not know what the answer is, but I can tell you what it isn’t, at the very least for me. It isn’t to try to seem or act more youthful. It isn’t to write blog posts about how hot/thin/beautiful/ sexy middle-aged women are. They are, but wasting my written voice on championing shallow initiatives at ongoing conformity to what is expected of women in a patriarchal society does not feel productive. It is an dangerous capitulation. It entices women my age to exchange away opportunities to weigh in on important matters for a chance to become among the “seen” again. I won’t play a game I detest, which I did not create and can not win.
To be an aging woman in America is to become regularly saturated by imagery and media that distance your younger feminist sisters from you, because the concept of no longer looking like those youthful pictures of femininity and becoming invisible alarms them. I look like a typical 51-year-old, and it is just bizarre discovering that my appearance is something many young women dread.