For me, getting old as a woman in The United States is much less about wrongdoings done to me than it is about a subtle undermining of my place within this world and a not-so-subtle disrespect that pops up more with each passing year. For instance, if I disapprove of porn as systemically harmful to women, it is my age that prompts my classification as a prude and a pearl-clutcher. It can not be that I base my viewpoint on studies and research and the awareness that feminism 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 for a sort of contempt only partially experienced by younger women with the very same point of views. The wisdom that comes with age has little worth to anyone but those possessing it, considering that knowledge is another word for old, and old is what no one wants to be.
I don't know what the answer is, but I can tell you what it isn't, at the very least for me. It isn't to aim to look or act more radiant. 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 promoting shallow attempts at ongoing conformity to what is expected of women in a patriarchal society does not feel productive. It is an dangerous surrender. It lures 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 play a game I dislike, and that I did not put together and can not win.
To be an aging woman in The U.S.A. is to become continuously pestered by imagery and press that outstrip your younger feminist sisters from you, due to the fact that the idea of not resembling those youthful pictures of femininity and becoming invisible frightens them. I resemble a typical 51-year-old, and it is just bizarre recognizing that my aesthetics is something many young women dread.
