THE PRIVILEGE OF AGE

I’ve been hanging out on the Internet for almost ten years. From a purely clinical point of view, I was able to document my physical, mental and emotional evolution – and that is always interesting.

What had started in a digital world totally disrupted by the advent of social media as a joke to prove to my darling teenager that any type of feminine beauty could find an audience on the Internet, has since become my space of lightness in a finance lawyer’s life that is sometimes a little arid.

Also, I make no secret of it, this website has potentially become over the years a form of digital will that I will leave to my children – if they are willing to continue paying the annual WordPress subscription.

Anyway, I’m rambling. Today I am a woman, I am a 50-year-old woman, I am a 50-year-old woman who lives in an agist society which still massively highlights young women and which makes so-called mature women invisible.

Ageism mainly affects the female population, since the socio-cultural standards in force for, let’s say some time now, often reduce the women to their bodies and that said bodies must often be young – the two purposes being for, let’s say a few time already, on the one hand motherhood, on the other hand sexual desirability.

If we return to our dear dictionaries, French Larousse dictionary defines old age as the fact of “passing from the prime of life, from maturity to the declining period which follows” – provided that I do not know exactly at what age the Larousse dictionary estimates that we are declining.

I note: “maturity”. I realize that men and women do not necessarily place this maturity at the same time in their lives. They don’t necessarily place it on the same aspects either.

Even if the physical maturity is around 35 for women, they feel, according to numerous surveys, more fulfilled and happier around 50.

The world of appearances may govern our Western societies with a strong emphasis on the physical aspect, but the fact remains that each human being has been endowed with three powerful engines: the body of course, but also the brain and the heart.

The result of surveys placing the age of women’s fulfillment at 50 therefore makes sense: the mental and emotional centers are stronger and more serene as they get older – and a woman who knows who she is, what are her desires in life and who is lucid about her qualities and flaws well knows that it is necessary to accumulate life experience to get there.

With experience obviously comes wrinkles – which should be glorified rather than ridiculed – but this is where the debate gets complicated. Many so-called mature women experience a phenomenon which makes them invisible in the eyes of the male population in particular and in the eyes of society in general.

Several elements explain this invisibility.

The fact is that we live in post-capitalist Western societies, where humanity, in the same impulse, must be performative but where humanity has itself become a product.

When we come to women, the idea of performativity inevitably refers to sexuality and motherhood – and is as old as time, we discussed it here and there.

The presentation of humans as a product is also as old as time, but its realization has been accelerated in a world that has become overly digitalized. Before, one sent a painted portrait of the suitor to the potential fiancé who lived far away. Today, dating apps are just real-time supply and demand markets that don’t tell their name. Everyone will present themselves as a sexual or sentimental product, trying to offer their best real or supposed qualities for a lower cost (emotional, cerebral and perhaps financial, who knows).

What applies to the body often applies to the mind: on the love market, the impressionable young woman, more admiring and more malleable than a mature woman will often represent the archetype sought after by men because the cost/benefit balance (whether emotional, cerebral and perhaps financial, who knows) may be taken into account by a man.

In addition, the socialization of many women take place from a very young age through their bodily value, as recognized by the Other. A little girl should be pretty, a teenager should be feminine, and a woman should be attractive. The little girl’s body is quite quickly sexualized and it will be the same at each stage of her life – until the supposed final fall that comes with middle age, which will make it invisible.

The woman, considered Simone de Beauvoir, only exists socially via her body.

And in fact, one must recognize that the discomfort of so-called mature women who feel invisible comes through the gaze of the Other. Invisible to the Other, they gradually become invisible to themselves.

It is certainly not a question of not existing at all in the gaze of the Other, but a woman should above all be sufficient in her own gaze.

Fairness requires today to distinguish between social norms that we understand better and real life values, to understand and to abstract ourselves from the permanent social pressure which only emphasizes the female physique.

A young woman who will be aware of the lack of foundation of societal norms which see her only through her body, who will have decided to evolve in such a way as to achieve physical fullness of course, but also intellectual and emotional fullness will probably be less sensitive to the so-called invisibility that society will inflict on her when she is mature – and in reality will not even experience it. By paving a life path made of reflection and distancing, such a woman will reach – at each of her ages – the greatest possible fullness.

Accuracy requires us to pay honor to the two other centers of life available to us, namely the brain and the heart, the fullness of which is only acquired through experience.

I suspect that this article will be the first of a series.