For me, growing older as a woman in The United States is less about prejudices done to me than it is about a subtle undermining of my place within this civilization and a not-so-subtle disrespect that appears more with each gone by year. Such as, if I disapprove of porn as systemically damaging to women, it is my age that prompts my labeling as a prude and a pearl-clutcher. It can not be that I base my viewpoint on studies and stats and the understanding that feminism is a movement– one that supports the freedom of all women, not to be confused with individual women who decide to reduce their identities to the sexual uses and abuses of their bodies, calling that empowerment. My age sets me up for a type of disdain only partially experienced by younger women with the same point of views. The wisdom that comes with age has little worth to anyone but those owning it, because wisdom is another word for old, and old is what nobody prefers to be.
I do not know what the answer 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 promoting shallow attempts at ongoing conformity to what is expected of women in a patriarchal civilization does not feel beneficial. It is an insidious accedence. It invites women my age to exchange away opportunities to weigh in on concerns for a chance to be among the “seen” again. I won’t participating in a game I detest, which I did not put together and can not succeed in.
To be an aging woman in The United States is to be continuously bombarded by images and press that outstrip your younger feminist sisters from you, because the concept of not appearing like those youthful images of femininity and becoming invisible terrifies them. I look like a typical 51-year-old, and it is just unusual recognizing that my appearance is something many young women fear.