"That feminism has a tendency to trash the past is hardly a new observation; women who went before us are an embarrassment." Photo / Kristina Flour, Unsplash
OPINION:
The cliché of middle-aged womanhood is that we “become invisible”. Alas, superpower fans, this does not happen. We are still here, same as always; it’s just that we’re being ignored. Other people are actively choosing not to acknowledge or value us.
This ignoring is often talked of as a minor issue, perhaps even a perk of becoming decrepit (hey, at least we don’t get catcalled any more!). Meaningful, positive attention is not on the cards for us; the implication is that any irritation we might now feel amounts to a hypo-critical resentment at no longer being treated as sex objects.
This trivialises what is being done to us and – bonus sexism – implies younger women secretly love being treated like pieces of meat and miss it when it’s gone.
I write as someone who fell for this. I assumed it would not bother me. I even allowed myself to feel superior to women who seemed more reluctant to let nature take its course.
But being ignored is not the same as the end of objectification. You’re still an object; you’ve just changed in status from painting or sculpture to, say, hat stand.
No wonder, the pressure on women to look younger is always there – and the increasing variety of ways in which to “get work done” has made the standard even more unforgiving.
And age matters in many ways to a woman: at 47, I am already beyond the age at which women reach their highest career earnings; were I a man I would, on average, have another 10 years to go before reaching this peak.
A BBC/Ofcom review in 2018 found the under-representation of women on screen to be entirely down to low proportions of women in older age bands. As Nicky Clark, founder of the Acting Your Age campaign, documents, between 2000 and 2021 the average age for a male actor nominated for a Bafta remained in the mid-40s, while for their female counterparts it fell to the early 30s. She has also found that only nine per cent of UK audiences can recognise more than 15 women over 45, compared with 48 per cent when the question relates to men.
The belief that older women have less to offer, deserve fewer rewards and should ideally not be seen at all remains widespread.
This is frustrating not just because the problem itself – being ignored – defies attempts to draw attention to it, but also because there are reasons why women my age might feel we have more to contribute than ever. As writer Rachel Shabi puts it, “women reach 40 and hit their stride... only to be cruelly shoved aside”.
As luck would have it, I appear to have hit middle age at a point where efforts to counteract the ignoring of older women are being eagerly slapped down in the name of kind, virtuous conduct.
“Complaining to the manager” and “being entitled” have been identified as the key sins committed by middle-aged women. Middle-aged women are, apparently, “the worst online trolls”, “the worst drunks”, or simply “the worst”.
Naturally I have asked myself whether this is just one of these things that happens as you get older and find yourself out of touch with the Youth of Today. You no longer like the right music, your taste in clothing offends, people make Halloween masks based on your face and carry effigies of women like you being guillotined on protest marches.
But those women who report being talked over and ignored just so happen to be those that other people would like to shut up. Not only are we made to feel greedy and superfluous when we want to participate in everyday human interactions; we are told, “yes, you are greedy and superfluous” when we do so.
A case is being made for silencing us, one which scapegoats us for bad behaviour that is not unique to our group and makes crimes of traits that in other people would be seen as independence, self-assertion or empowerment. After two brief decades of being told “you go, girl!”, suddenly it’s “hang on, we didn’t mean you!”
If we are experiencing a backlash against feminist gains, middle-aged women form a perfect target.
Men who hate middle-aged women hate all women; nonetheless, in their everyday interactions it can be useful for them to grant younger ones a temporary reprieve. To be openly, consistently anti-feminist can be socially and politically inconvenient. Rather than attack feminism itself – something which, according to the viewpoint your politics requires you to endorse, is either “on the right side of history” or has already taken over – it is easier to weed out the women who have aged beyond feminism’s promise and been found wanting. In this way, younger women can be told misogyny will not happen to them because they are different.
It’s a viewpoint that’s becoming common. It says feminism will be great once we’ve cleared away the debris, the old women, the bad feminists. Once we’re rid of the bigots who spoil the party, bad fairies at the christening, our purified souls will ascend to feminist heaven. The process will be painful, but it’s the right thing, the feminist thing, to do, because after the witches are burned, women will be worthy of the equality they’ve always craved.
The trouble is that there are so many witches, and yes, the majority might share certain qualities with innocent victims of witch trials of yore, but that’s just coincidence. This time the witches are guilty as charged.
I’ve come to think of this as hag hate; insidious because it enables deeply regressive beliefs about what women should be (young, beautiful, feminine, fertile, f---able) to be recast as progressive.
There are those who will claim that it’s not middle-aged women who are the problem, just these middle-aged women, here, now, who are particularly troublesome. Generation X women just so happen to fit a template that is every misogynist’s dream, while also possessing enough freedom to make the misogyny they do experience look like something they have chosen, either in return for other privileges or because they are simply too ignorant to understand how misogyny works.
Older women, just by virtue of being older, are associated with a “more sexist” past and thus appear complicit in a sexism that is on its way out. They are “dinosaurs”. Raging against them can feel like a break with the patriarchal past. The target of misogyny becomes an emblem for it. Get rid of her, and the problem is solved.
So who is perpetrating hag hate? Men, of course, including both the traditionalists, who slot us into the battleaxe/mother-in-law/shrew categories, and the self-styled progressives, who prefer to portray us as ill-educated bigots, essentialist mummies or miserable prudes.
But women are doing this, too. Younger ones who do not want to acknowledge the thread that connects them to older women, and older ones who do not wish to be seen as “like all the others”.
There are difficult truths about the oppression of women – unlike other oppressed groups, we are not a minority, and the nature of our oppression is shaped by the status of the men in our lives, some of whom we may love.
Discomfort with our own powerlessness and dependency on the men of our own social milieu can translate into rage at the older woman who is like us, but more embedded, more complicit, the Aunt Lydia to our Offred. It can feel as though the only way to access true sisterhood is by rejecting her.
If misogyny differs from other forms of oppression due to women’s relationships with men, then ageism differs from other forms of discrimination due to the fact all of us will experience both sides of the young/old divide. Unless we die young, each young person slowly becomes an old one, and there is no way around this, no means of changing direction or halting the course.
That feminism has a tendency to trash the past is hardly a new observation; women who went before us are an embarrassment. In late 2020, a tweet comparing Covid to feminism went viral, declaring both to have “problematic second waves”. The young female tweeter gained multiple likes and follows, which may be of less practical use than the equal pay legislation and domestic violence shelters created by second-wavers, but at least they are clean. The longer you live, and the harder you fight, the dirtier your hands become.
For many women, pregnancy and birth, not to mention the long-term aftermath, transform their understanding of sex, gender and the body. They help us to understand why older women might have different views to younger ones on, for instance, the political salience of biological sex. It is more than a matter of older women having views that are “out of date”. Older women have views that are informed by different experiences, and these experiences deserve to be understood not as creating bias or triggering prejudice, but as adding to a lifetime’s knowledge base.
From an early age, girls are taught to apologise a great deal: for taking up space, for having needs of our own, for just not being male. Older women tend to be less reflexively apologetic, for numerous reasons: our forced exit from a sexual marketplace which directed us towards prioritising men’s needs in return for higher status, our increased reliance on female networks, perhaps even hormonal changes.
The flipside of this is that when we say sorry, we mean it. We’re less likely to recite the social justice catechisms, falling over ourselves to make sure no one thinks we are terrible people (we’re hags, so they’re going to think we’re terrible anyway).
But middle-aged women do not have to represent, include or step aside for every other person before we claim space for ourselves.
At 59, the Kiwi actor hopes to help shift the discourse around women's health.