Day Thirty

It’s amazing the amount of inspiration and ideas you can get from old movies. Tonight it was All About Eve, made in 1950, starring Bette Davis. It got me thinking about moving through time to reach an age where providers are spamming me, hoping I will choose them as my Medicare provider. In the movie, Davis plays a woman of forty, but she is already aged past a lot of the roles that are available for her character, who is a stage actress. Along comes Eve, young, fresh, and ambitious. You can probably figure out the rest…but stick around for the ending. It’s a nice little twist.

TIME FLIES

There are a lot of things women do that men use to dismiss them, or mock them, or ignore their achievements. In fact, no matter how talented, how smart, or how strong the woman, men are going to find something to mock. It seems there is NOTHING women can do that men don’t mock or use against them. In spite of all that, there is one thing women do that is worse by orders of magnitude than anything else: they age.

That’s right. Getting old is the worst crime a woman can commit. It’s almost as though we plan to get old, we do it on purpose to frustrate the men who now have to see women out in public looking…well, old. For some reason, a lot of men don’t seem to realize that they are getting older themselves. They make fun of our sagging breasts, our wrinkles, our gray hairs, but apparently believe their beer belly and male pattern baldness are fine.

Yes, men get old, and yes, they get dismissed for being old. Ignoring the elderly is like the favorite pastime of the young. But men do not receive the amount of abuse for a natural organic process of life that women do. We are expected to remain hot and sexy, or stay out of sight. Since most of us don’t have a picture like that of Dorian Gray in our closet, we should just never venture out where we can be seen. (If you don’t understand the Dorian Gray reference, google Dorian Gray Oscar Wilde; you’ll figure it out.)

There are tales of cultures who valued their elders; some cultures still do. The older women were seen as a source of comfort and wisdom for the younger women, and intergenerational groups of women would work together and sing together and talk together, the young learning from the old. Same with men; the older men were the source of valuable knowledge. Now young people are so sure everything is on the internet, including the wisdom of the ancients, older people have become less valued. Older women in particular are devalued.

This has led to an enormous, huge money industry in women trying desperately to look as young as they used to, not to sag in all the wrong places, not to wrinkle, not to go gray. Tummy tucks and nose jobs are only a small part of the equation. Various sorts of creams and make up are used in a vain effort to look twenty for the rest of our lives. Those who do not participate in the youth-search are mocked because we age naturally, and allow ourselves to look as old as we are… ‘fall apart’, in the words of those who believe all women should be beautiful.

Women who do participate in the endless search for youth, applying make up and hair dye, having botulism injections, going for plastic surgery, are mocked as endlessly as the women who don’t. It seems it isn’t just about looking old; it’s about being old. This is a process no one can stop, except by dying, and it becomes increasingly obvious as a woman ages that much of society would like her to do just that. She is taking up too much space in the world, and her aesthetics are no longer pleasing.

It doesn’t help that some men…and women…have a very expansive definition of ‘old’, starting when a woman is thirty, telling everyone she has ‘hit the wall’. The wall being, of course, sexual desirability. While there are men out there who don’t mind a woman growing old with them, and in fact are happy about it, a lot of men are brought up with the idea that an old woman is a useless woman. If a man believes a woman’s only roles are looking pretty and making babies, of course he would believe that. Older women can no longer reproduce. We don’t look like a dream walking or poetry in motion.

A woman who tries too hard to hold on to her youth becomes a figure of fun. Don’t believe me? Look around. Listen. Not just to movies and plays, which often depict older women struggling to hold on to youth, but to conversations in the grocery store, the office, the church. Listen to how men talk about older women. Hell, listen to how young women talk about older women. It becomes clear these women…I include myself, as I long ago ‘hit the wall’ of thirty…are using up all the oxygen without providing any of the aesthetics.

I suppose the only thing to do with older women, since we are such a drag on society, is to pack us off to Guantanamo Bay, or some other internment camp. There we can bake cookies, which will be shipped out to everyone who likes cookies. We could take in the world’s laundry, so we aren’t using up resources without providing something in return.

But beware. When you mock that older person, the one barely able to walk in front of you, leaning on a walker or a cane, or even the one stepping spryly through life but with the audacity to have wrinkles and gray hair…remember…remember…someday, that will be you.