For me, aging as a woman in The United States of America is much less about discriminations done to me than it is about a subtle undermining of my place within this world and a not-so-subtle disrespect that appears more with each passing year. Such as, if I condemn pornography 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 thoughts on studies and research and the knowledge 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 images to the sexual uses and abuses of their bodies, calling that empowerment. My age sets me up for a type of ridicule only somewhat 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, due to the fact that knowledge is another word for old, and old is what no person wishes 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 seem or act more youthful. It isn't to publish articles about how hot/thin/beautiful/ sexy middle-aged women are. They are, but wasting my written voice on going to bat for shallow attempts at ongoing conformity to what is expected of women in a patriarchal society does not feel beneficial. It is an insidious capitulation. It lures women my age to swap away opportunities to weigh in on concerns for a chance to become among the "seen" again. I won't participating in a game I hate, and that I did not create and can not win.
To be an aging woman in America is to be constantly bombarded by images and press that distance your younger feminist sisters from you, simply because the idea of not appearing like those youthful photos of femininity and becoming invisible terrifies them. I look like a normal 51-year-old, and it is just strange discovering that my appearance is something many young women fear.
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