For me, aging as a woman in The U.S.A. is much less about oppressions done to me than it is about a subtle undermining of my place within this civilization and a not-so-subtle disrespect that pops up more with each gone by year. As an example, if I condemn x-rated material as systemically damaging to women, it is my age that provokes my labeling as a prude and a pearl-clutcher. It can not be that I base my opinion on studies and research and the understanding that womanism is a movement– one that supports the freedom of all women, not to remain confused with individual women who choose to reduce their identities to the sexual uses and misuses of their bodies, calling that empowerment. My age sets me up for a kind of disdain only partially experienced by younger women with the exact same views. The wisdom that comes with age has little market value to anyone but those having it, because foresight is another word for old, and old is what not a single person prefers to be.
I do not know what the solution is, but I can tell you what it isn’t, at least for me. It isn’t to aim to seem or act younger. It isn’t to publish blog posts about how hot/thin/beautiful/ sexy middle-aged women are. They are, but squandering my written voice on championing shallow efforts at continued conformity to what is looked forward to of women in a patriarchal culture does not feel beneficial. It is an perilous capitulation. It invites women my age to trade away opportunities to weigh in on important matters for a chance to become among the “seen” again. I won’t participating in a game I abhor, and that I did not put together and can not succeed.
To become an aging woman in The United States of America is to become constantly bombarded by images and media that outstrip your younger feminist sisters from you, because the concept of no longer appearing like those youthful photos 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.