For me, growing old as a woman in The U.S.A. is less about wrongdoings done to me than it has to do with a subtle weakening of my place within this community and a not-so-subtle disrespect that appears more with each gone by year. For instance, if I disapprove of x-rated material as systemically damaging to women, it is my age that provokes my classification as a prude and a pearl-clutcher. It can not be that I base my opinion on studies and statistics and the awareness that womanism is a movement-- one that supports the liberty of all women, not to be 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 type of ridicule only partly experienced by younger women with the exact same beliefs. The wisdom that comes with age has little worth to anyone but those owning it, considering that wisdom is another word for old, and old is what nobody would like to be.
I do not know what the solution is, but I can tell you what it isn't, at the very least for me. It isn't to try to appear or act more radiant. It isn't to write articles about how hot/thin/beautiful/ sexy middle-aged women are. They are, but wasting my written voice on promoting shallow efforts at ongoing conformity to what is looked forward to of women in a patriarchal society does not feel beneficial. It is an insidious capitulation. It attracts 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, and that I did not create and can not succeed in.
To be an aging woman in The United States is to become consistently bombarded by imagery and media that distance your younger feminist sisters from you, simply because the idea of no longer appearing like those youthful photos of femininity and becoming invisible horrifies them. I resemble a typical 51-year-old, and it is just unusual realizing that my appearance is something many young women fear.
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