Photo Credit: "Erotic" by bshep on Photobucket
“When I am at a social occasion, the showstoppers are no longer the young beauties in their 20s. Rather, those who draw all the light in the room are the women of great accomplishment and personal charisma — and these are usually women in midlife. (Indeed, at events I have attended recently, cadres of conventionally beautiful young women seem now to be treated almost like wallpaper or like the catering staff,” Naomi Woolf from the Washington Post article, “A wrinkle in time: Twenty years after ‘The Beauty Myth,’ Naomi Wolf addresses The Aging Myth.”
She ended up reinforcing The Age Myth--and creating a new one, The Ageless Myth-- in this article sooo over the top on the joys of being over 40 (and actually closer to 50 in her case) that it could only have been written by someone suppressing BIG fears of aging. She is preaching to her choir, that cohort of well-off women her age--as she expands the generation gap among all women.
Wolf is the Titanic headed for the iceberg. Something—her 50th birthday or 55th or 60th, a bad break-up or a worse Botox job, an asymmetrical face lift, a cancer diagnosis, the marriage of a prominent man in her age group to a very young woman—something will rip into her psychic unsinkable hull; and all watery hell will break loose.
Some of her conclusions were ridiculous. Beautiful young women are reduced to wallpaper now? Men pity a man with a young beauty on his arm? Oh, bite me. When my friend Richard Anton Diaz walks out with that tiny gorgeous and vivacious wife half his age, the aptly named Rita, I have never seen men casting looks of pity at him. Wolf's logic is terribly flawed, for example, when she is clearly saying no young women have “charisma” but all older women do. Really? Does “charisma” pop out like a rash on your fortieth birthday?
Plus, Wolf does not touch upon the crux of the matter: If you have money, preferably lots of it, you can age much more gracefully than if you do not. Good genes also help.
If she had written a balanced piece about aging, the good, the bad and the ugly, and acknowledged the beauty and desirability of women at every age, including the dewy young and the seventies as exemplified by Catherine Denueve, then I would say she is OK with aging.
But she reminds me of some aging Boomers who insist upon seeing themselves as the best, smartest, sexiest of all the ages—and caution never to mention the word “grandmother,” even though some of us married and became mothers quite young, like me, for instance, married at 19, mother by 21, 38 when the only child went off to college. In the early photos, I looked like the young nanny with my charge. (However, I did continue my education and always worked as a professional. Drum roll please.)
How can those of us who are grandmothers—even if we insist on being called “Grammy” and not the icky “Granny”—pretend we are not? And why should we? Susan Sarandon, who had her second child at 46, may not become a grandmother until she is in her 70s. Why is that a good thing? There’s a lot to be said for being able to play on the floor with the grands without needing their help to bend your knees—or climbing into the tree house and exiting via the long slide—or having your granddaughter be proud to show you off at grade school because you wear “little jeans” and “big heels.” More to the point, will Sarandon be able to own up to the title even at 80—and will she be wearing fat jeans and comfortable shoes?
When you must paint your core demographic as The Best, acknowledging no downside, erasing the second generation of offspring when necessary, you are freakin’ scared out of your mind AND in denial. Naomi Wolf was on solid ground with The Beauty Myth. She was (still is) a beauty so she could step outside and view beauty subjectively. Aging is something else. Nobody gets entirely outside that box. No matter how you kid yourself, as the years pile up, you are moving on the human conveyor belt toward the inevitable end. Death. Yes, even for the ageless, forever young-ers, Death will show up at the door.
Susan Jacoby has a book about that, Never Say Die, in which she describes Boomers as “living in Fantasyland” where Naomi Wolf apparently has a big house built on sinking sands.
THANKS TO STEVEN OTERO AT SEXY SPIRITS FOR SENDING THE RESEARCH FOR THIS POST. If you haven't checked out the Sexy Spirits website, you're missing the best connection in New York City--in the country for that matter--to all manner of adult sex education programs, most rooted in spiritual sex. Anton's demonstrations in Orgasmic Providing are awesome; and if you study with him, maybe you will pick up his secrets to being 60 and looking 40. Steven is the source for information on all things sexual, research from university studies through 70s porn.
copyright 2008-2011, www.sexyprime.typepad.com; PARTIAL reposts only permitted with link back to original article on SexyPrime
