For me, the aging processing as a woman in The U.S.A. is much less about injustices done to me than it is about a subtle undermining of my place within this society and a not-so-subtle disrespect that appears more with each gone by year. Such as, if I condemn porn as systemically harmful to women, it is my age that provokes my labeling as a prude and a pearl-clutcher. It can not be that I base my opinion on studies and statistics and the understanding that womanism is a movement-- one that supports the liberation of all women, not to remain confused with individual women who choose 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 contempt only somewhat experienced by younger women with the very same point of views. The wisdom that comes with age has little significance to anyone but those having it, due to the fact that foresight is another word for old, and old is what no person prefers to be.
I have no idea what the answer is, but I can tell you what it isn't, at least for me. It isn't to try to seem or act younger. It isn't to write blog posts about how hot/thin/beautiful/ sexy middle-aged women are. They are, but wasting my written voice on going to bat for shallow efforts at ongoing conformity to what is expected of women in a patriarchal society does not feel productive. It is an dangerous capitulation. It invites women my age to swap away opportunities to weigh in on concerns for a chance to be among the "seen" again. I won't play a game I detest, which I did not put together and can not win.
To become an aging woman in The U.S.A. is to be continually saturated by imagery and media that distance your younger feminist sisters from you, considering that the concept of not looking like those youthful photos of femininity and becoming invisible horrifies them. I resemble a traditional 51-year-old, and it is just strange discovering that my appearance is something many young women dread.
