GEORGIE BINKS:
Are older women invisible?
CBC News Viewpoint | October 3, 2003 | More from Georgie Binks
It all became clear one day, as I stood at the MAC makeup counter of a Toronto department store, trying to catch a salesperson's eye. The black-clad 20-somethings kept avoiding my steely gaze and waited on all of the younger women around me.
I worried that perhaps I was in the middle of a dream or possibly, even, invisible. When I finally grabbed a young man at the counter with a couple of piercings to his lower lip, he apologized. "I thought you were with your daughter," he said, pointing to one of the Goths beside me. God forbid a woman in her 40s should buy lipstick on her own.
I realized then that part of me was starting to disappear. Unlike Alice, in Woody Allen's movie of the same name, who was given potions to make her invisible, all I had to do was continue to sit around and age and I, too, would start to fade away.
I did what many women do when they first realize they're disappearing – I fought back. We can be perked up or puffed out. I coloured my hair, increased my daily dosage of makeup, bought bellbottoms (or are they flares now?) and started wearing my daughter's clothes.
Cosmetic surgery was beyond my budget, though it has done much to make a liar out of Shakespeare's Duke Orsino, who claims in Twelfth Night that women are like roses, "whose fair flower, Being once display'd, doth fall that very hour."
What I didn't realize initially is that invisibility runs deeper than just our skin.
While older women have become the new hot thing sexually, we are disappearing everywhere else. Beers ads and Web sites herald the cougar (slang for older woman). Books like Jane Juska's A Round-Heeled Woman: My Late Life Adventures in Sex and Romance, inform us men will always want us sexually.
Juska, 67, placed an ad in The New York Review of Books that read, "Before I turn 67 – next March – I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like." Juska got her wish and I applaud her for her exhaustive and daring research.
Out of the movies and books, the older we get the more we start to disappear. Simply being older, even if you don't look it, is a liability. Many men disdain women their own age and seek out the younger ones. As a male friend of mine so aptly put it several years ago, "Putting two people in their 40s together is like putting two magicians together. They know each other's tricks."
Women I have spoken with say wisdom is the problem. One told me, "We older women know a line when we hear one." As well, while many older women might feel they want a man, they don't actually need one. Some say that's attractive to men, but as a friend points out, "If a woman doesn't need you, then where's your bargaining power?"
(Actually, Robert Mason Lee wrote in The Globe and Mail several weeks ago that he liked older women because they were so grateful. Was he walking them across the street and being thanked for it?)
It's already difficult enough to fight invisibility, especially if you're not really sure who you are as you get older. In Fear of Fifty, Erica Jong laments, "We are terrified at fifty because we do not know what on earth we can become when we are no longer young and cute." As well, she says, "It has to do with the whole image of self in a culture in love with youth and out of love with women as human beings."
Of course, the bigger invisibility lies with the rest of the world. There's the general perception that older women are living in poverty (which, unfortunately, many are), so why bother advertising, selling or writing for them.
While studies have shown the contrary, that, in fact, older women buy cars, condos and even clothes, (when we aren't walking around naked like Juska), the advertisers and the stores don't get it.
They think because we don't buy something that looks like underwear turned inside out we only enjoy rifling through the housedresses, but many older women would pay any price at all for a bathing suit that makes them look great (the more whalebone and anti-gravity material the better).
As I wandered around a high-end department store last spring, I wanted to grab a saleslady by the nape of her black lace top and scream, "What the heck is Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin going to wear if she has to go to a party this year?"
A friend of mine, in her mid-70s, figures she was invisible to the male salespeople several years ago, when she went to buy a car. Fortunately, a saleswoman saw her pretty clearly and quickly sold her a Honda.
Women over 50 seem to be off most women's magazines' radar, save the American More, or the seniors magazines. An editor confides that most magazines figure older women don't bother reading them anymore because they're tired of people telling them what to do with their bodies. If a woman of a certain age picks up a magazine it's more likely to be the Atlantic Monthly than a fashion mag.
My neighbour Pat, 60, finds the invisibility freeing. "You can do what you want or say what you want, because no one notices you anyway." But even she wouldn't mind service in the stores. She laughs, "It irritates me to be ignored, but then I speak up and they're forced to deal with a bitchy old woman."
I guess I'm not ready to be invisible yet, nor are many other women I know. They want to buy clothes (especially shoes), read magazines, look for a condo, buy a different car. If they're Born to Shop when they're 20, they're likely still keen to be shopping at 60. It's time for someone with savvy to see us.
Link: www.cougardate.com
Letters:
My mom is 75 and I'm 35 and we both say RIGHT ON to your column "Are Older
Women Invisible?"
I noticed that in the much-touted Vogue "Age Issue" this Fall, although
there were plenty of fashion suggestions for older women, not a single woman
modelling the clothes supposedly suited to us was over the age of 20.
I still like to shop, buy lipstick (MAC no less, and yes I've encountered
similar treatment), and read fashion magazines, although I have to say very
few of them are even worth papering my cat's litter box (and don't even get
me going on the single-woman -over-30-with-cat stereotype!)
Thank you, thank you, thank you for giving voice to what millions of us
"invisible" women out there are dealing with everyday.
You're our hero: keep fighting the good fight!
S.L. and M.L. Brown | Vancouver, BC
Reading the most recent column, "Are older women invisible?" I began to
get a weird sense of deja vu. I have read this comment before, but
that wasn't the weird part, I seemed to have read almost the same
discussion, but from a different view point, maybe even view points.
The first one that came to me was from a few years ago, in one of the
magazines that cater to larger woman (BBW or Mode). It was a woman
with much the same complaints, but she was still young. When she went
into stores with thinner friends, they got served, she didn't.
Obviously in certain clothing stores that made sense as they may not
have carried her size, but when it comes to shoes, make up, and other
things?
For whatever reason, it seems that most sales staff cue in on what they
perceive as the most likely market, with very little effort to reach
out to others. Whether this is a smart selling strategy based on much
experience, or whether it is simply bias made visible, I have no idea.
I don't know if it is comforting, but you aren't alone in the invisible
world.
Bryan Thexton
I'd rather have a woman on my arm, than a girl. I find myself checking out a woman's eyes first to see if there's anyone home behind the makeup and curves. The young'uns are too busy with themselves to think past the mirrors. Life refines us all. I'm sure many men notice you, but like you mentioned, we eventually know the same tricks and traps. If I had to be single again, I think that I'd go for someone my age, at least. The mischief is deeper and more mutual.
Normand G. LaBine
Winnipeg, Manitoba
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GEORGIE BINKS
FREELANCE WRITER
Georgie Binks is a freelance writer living in Toronto. She writes for the Toronto Star and National Post, and has written for Chatelaine, Homemakers, Elle, Glow and Style at Home, as well as salon.com. Georgie is a former CBC radio and television reporter and editor. She has been a feminist since she wrote an essay in high school on "The Changing Role of Women in Society" at her mother's suggestion.
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