Me, ageist?

Ageism is a bit like racism, and we all have it

Ageism. The ism that isn’t talked about. Have you even heard of it?

Are you an ageist?

I am, even though, like racism, I would have denied it in the past. No, I’m an ageist through and through. I’m entering my 80th year around the sun, so it’s a good time to look at this.

I’m in a course called Deepening the Sage Within, taught by the gentle Janey Talbot who lives on the Sunshine Coast in Canada. It comes out of the work of Sage-ing International, that comes out of the work of Reb Zalman Schachter who was the closest to having a Rabbi I ever got.

One week we looked at ageism, informed by a mind- and category-blowing book, This Chair Rocks, by Ashton Applewhite.

Is a 70-something “cute as a button”?

Someone shared a story about how a relative told her she was so cute after watching her and her husband play a banjo duet. The storyteller identified this as ageism. No, kindergartners and cute, she asserted, she was a woman “of age” (I made that up, but do we really have to say that now?) having fun with her husband “of age.”

We do say, “woman of a certain age”, which connotes a bit of mystery and elegance. You think Greta Garbo. You wouldn’t say “woman of a certain age’ about a woman who has to work 3 jobs to raise her grandson up.

When I’m told I don’t look 79, I might tilt my head to the side and down (a gesture of humility) and toss off a thanks or “you don’t look so bad yourself”. I might say, “good genes.” The ageism here is that I take it as a compliment, like I’d achieved something admirable.

Privilege or achievement?

No. To be this kind of old is a privilege, not a sign of moral character or proper self-care. It doesn’t make me good. Or better than.

Some can look 50 at 70, and some look 70 at 50, and a lot of that is determined by status. It is an historical novelty, a product of enough food for a lifetime, of a profession that rests on a sharp mind, not an able body, and on many operations for physical problems that could have killed me: two hip replacements, two cataracts, one laminectomy, and a colectomy for Stage 3 colon cancer. In another time or country, I surely would have died decades ago.

Stop and think about this. In other times and places, a thick waist and wrinkled face might bestow respect. It is true, like universally true, that successful aging equates with an ozempic body? Frankly, I don’t believe this even as I write, because I am ageist. Get it.

Self-hating because you don’t conform to social norms is something-ist: age, size, color, sexual identity, income, profession, education, size of house, type of car, and on and on.

I am not in college!

I remember advising a person in a tight place financially, but hankering after an expensive new car. I asked why can’t he dig out of a hole by buying a used car. A corolla? No! I’m not a poor collage student! Currently I’m encouraging house rich people to consider a kind of sharing called in-home suites - to increase the stock of affordable rentals. Below their polite no’s I hear “house sharing is for kids in college, not us”. The more you look, the more you see what Robert Fuller, in his book Somebodies and Nobodies called rankism, the ism below all isms.

Anti-semitism R Us

I grew up in a WASP town that subtly red-lined Jews. But my family didn’t look Jewish. We passed. We lived, while I was in High School, in a mostly WASP area. My mother’s snobbery clearly rubbed off on me; I was actually proud that I didn’t look Jewish. Or relieved that I wasn’t subject to taunts and cold shoulders. Years later I learned the term “internalized racism” and recognized what I learned at my mother’s knee. Watching anti-semitism rise again, I understand anyone who wants to pass - whatever the -ism.

Here in the USA, as in Brazil where I’ve spent a lot of time, lighter skinned people have more opportunities that darker skinned people. In Brazil, it’s not as pronounced as here, but we know that color gradient is part of privilege gradient.

Ageism is right up there with racism and other isms

Why should it not be this way with ageism? A gradient of skin tone, chin tone, upper arm tone, eyelid tone, ankle tone, waistline tone, with firmer being better. To the degree that I use my relative vitality as a compliment, to that degree I am ageist, putting myself above others.

Is this not part of the fears of aging? Is this not part of the fear of being invisible - just another squat old person feeding the pigeons? Isn’t this the fear of needing a walker or being in a wheelchair? One of my best friends was in a wheelchair for years, so I know the projections of able bodied (or TABs, temporarily able bodied people) on wheel-chaired people. They talk louder and slower as if losing mobility is losing acuity.

Internalized ageism is fertile soil for the billion dollar anti-aging industry. According to Precedence Research, the market now is $72 billion and will be billion by $122 billion by 2032. It doesn’t take a PhD to see that as Boomers age, the industry will age along with us.

Nothing wrong with wanting to stay fit and attractive in some way. It’s when you have internalized ageism that you become vulnerable to being milked by the anti-aging industry, and putting distance between you and the rest of the people because you “don’t look your age.”

Ageism affects health

A Harvard analysis of 183 social factors that can predicted death within four years found 8 core factors:

• poor neighborhood cleanliness,

• low perceived control over financial situation,

• meeting with children less than yearly,

• not working for pay,

• not active with children,

• not volunteering,

• feeling isolated, and

• being treated with less courtesy or respect.

If, by the mere fact of getting older you risk such consequences, no matter how hard you try wouldn’t you develop internalized ageism?

As I write this - and it’s taken longer than most posts - I realize how ageism in all its guises makes coming of aging difficult unto heartbreaking. I now find it in many nooks and crannies of my psyche. I feel sad, seeing how I and so many others may reject, criticize, blame ourselves for crossing that line that marks old age as a social construct.

This is big. I’m young in this study - still wide eyed with my discoveries. As I mature in my understanding of ageism - without and within - I will come back to this again and again. I welcome your companionship on this journey of opening wide to our whole life cycle.

As Applewhite says:

Aging isn’t a problem to be solved. Or a disease to be cured. Or something icky that old people do. It’s how we move through life, and more of us are doing more of it than ever before in human history. What stands between us and making the most of these longer lives? Ageism: judging, stereotyping, and discriminating against people on the basis of how old we think they are. Solve for ageism and we also address sexism (aging is gendered), ableism (disability is stigmatized), and racism (which denies multitudes the chance to age at all).

It’s one thing to point out a social ill…

It’s another to be candid with one another through telling stories about our encounters with ageism, especially our own.

Do tell.