More 'Just Thinking' Pieces
Old-ageism: A Unique Prejudice
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The Only One
Old-ageism 1 : A Unique Prejudice
They are all monsters. Racism, sexism, classism, religionism, anyidentityism – when it denigrates, excludes, tortures or kills people, it is a monster. Old-ageism is, too. But you wouldn’t know it.
I am on a fresh campaign against it. Old-ageism finally caught the light. Not because it was suddenly there. But because I had been in the dark.
Old-ageism is like that – invisibilised. Who in my culture wants to be old? No one. And who loves old people, the oldness of them? No one. Well, one. Christopher. When we were first in love and meeting for fortnightly trysts every two months, we talked about things like that. It was wonderful. (We still do. It is still wonderful.) One day I warned him I would someday be old (I was 38), and that among the brilliant genes I got from my mother (such as non-greying hair and slim legs), I also got one for wrinkles. Think linen – at the end of a hot day.
Christopher said he loves old people. Really? Really.
Whew. I relaxed somewhere, in the place where ‘oh dear’ usually revs up in advance of a catastrophe.
And I see now that the ‘phew’ came not from realising that he might actually see me as beautiful all my life, maybe; but that with him I would not have to live after age 60 with the silent presence of old-ageism, that aberrant prejudice, slayer of confidence and joy.
I say 'aberrant' because I realised recently that old-ageism is different from the other prejudices. Thus my campaign. Here are the differences.
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Old-ageism is the only prejudice that everyone experiences if they live long enough.
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It is, therefore, the only prejudice whose victims were once its perpetrators.
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It also is the only prejudice whose defining visible features (wrinkles, sags, hair change, etc.) get steadily more so.
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Is the only prejudice whose core assumptions are sometimes true.
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It is the only prejudice sanctioned by society everywhere, including in the progressive media and in rigorous halls of academia.
The implications of each are huge. For example:
1
We all know that we are going to experience old-ageism one day, and so we dread old age. Which is a pity because it means that living longer is not a sweet prospect. And it should be. By the time we are old, we are rich: we have experience and knowledge and perspective beyond measure. It should be the sweetest time of all.
And this first difference – that everyone will experience this prejudice – should make us determined not to absorb its assumptions (e.g., old people are a waste of space because they are no longer on the ball; they are a pain because they forget things; they are tedious because they do everything, including think, slowly.) But weirdly it doesn’t. The inevitability of old age makes no difference. We can be as negative about, as repelled by old people as we would be if old were never going to happen to us. In that way old-ageism acts like racism and sexism and all the other ‘forever-them-never-us’ prejudices. But that perspective doesn’t actually work because old-ageism, we know factually, is ‘also-us’.
And products like 'Forever Young' perfume and 'Forever Young' songs and 'Forever Young' cosmetics and 'Forever Young' hair extensions (really?), plus a trove of 'Forever Young' fitness books, as well as an entire industry of forever-young face (and every other kind of) lifts are part of it. They drone: 'old-is-ugly, old-is-sad;’ and so we see ugly and sad when we see old.
Which is really ugly and sad.
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Then there is the consequence of #1: no other prejudice is perpetrated by people who will for certain become victims of that same prejudice. A white male perpetrating racism and sexism will not gradually and inevitably become a Black female, victim of racism and sexism. But a young person perpetrating old-ageism will gradually and inevitably become an old person, a victim of that prejudice.
And that is just too weird. I think it is, in fact, the weirdness of this second difference that puts the whole issue of old-ageism into the too difficult box. We sit hard on the lid, ignoring the pounding inside. We can’t seem to handle it. Even activist oppression-savvy people remain ignorant of old-ageism. In that ignorance they perpetrate the prejudice while they move slowly towards it, not able to think about it. And the cycle continues. Along with the sadness.
3
The portrayals of most of the ‘big’ prejudices like racism, sexism, classism, religionism usually include physical features. That was clever of the great prejudice designer in the sky. After all, if you can see it or hear it or dress it, you can mock it, you can exclude it, you can ban it, and in fascist regimes you can execute it. So it is perfect for creating systemic oppression – the physical distinctions make it easier to spot immediately who is beneath you and is perfect for keeping you, discernibly different from them, at the top. No confusion, no hesitation: see them, hear them, round them up, keep them down – they look like this.
Also, the physical dimensions of these prejudices develop from early in our lives, many from birth. And so, as devastating as the prejudice towards them is, we have time to get good at navigating it, anticipating it, outwitting it, creating cultures of pride in defying it.
But as old people we don’t. This identity develops its physical features only many decades into life. For most of our lives, in fact, we don’t know when it will start. When, we wonder furtively, will people start seeing us as old? When is ‘old’ old enough to trigger old-ageism? We even have labels for this long un-demarcated progression: we move from 'adult' to 'middle-aged' to 'older' to 'old' to 'elderly'. But when is which?
This difference in time to face, defy and heal from the prejudice matters because it adds yet another confusing dimension to our relationship with this identity, the identity that, yikes, we absolutely will assume one day – but which day?
I remember the day it happened to me. I was signing in at my gym. I was 62. The very young person signing me in looked at me longer than usual. I knew that she saw wrinkles. The old person kind. Not the ‘middle aged’ or ‘older person’ kind. The old kind. I also knew that she was the epitome of politeness, and that she might well have a grandmother she loved and perhaps feel a certain referred affection for me. But ‘young is glad, old is sad’ had most likely started up somewhere in her semi-consciousness, and I was now one of the sad ones (or one of the amazing-to-be-there-given-my-age ones)
We did not talk about it. So I could be wrong. Maybe she didn’t yet see or think that at all. Or, equally, maybe she had been seeing and thinking that about me for several years. I will never know. But I do know that the shift is lurking out there for all of us, waiting for us to be just old enough to be seen as sad.
And that uncertain certainty, again, is bewildering. It makes us sit even harder on the lid of this whole convoluted, scary spectre of old-ageism. Better, we think, just to concentrate our activism on racism and sexism and other more straightforward prejudices.
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But. The core assumptions driving old-ageism are not just about wrinkles and sags and greying hair (which should be seen as inherently beautiful anyway.) More crucially they are also about disrepair in the brain which leads to cognitive dysfunction. And sometimes these assumptions are true. Only sometimes, but that difference is monumental.
The assumptions driving racism, sexism, classism or religion-ism are never true. Black people are never stupid because they are Black. Females are never less valuable because they are female. Workers are never ignorant because they are workers. Muslims are never violent because they are Muslims. But sometimes old people do get dementia because they are old. And so sometimes that old-ageist assumption that ‘old = demented’ is true.
Again, only sometimes. That caveat makes our navigation of this oppression a unique challenge. It requires us to walk the 'post hoc ≢ proctor hoc' line again. In this case: the fact that cognitive issues can accompany ageing, doesn’t mean that they will.
Wrinkles are inevitable. Sagging is inevitable. But poor memory and slow mental processing are not. Every single one of us of every single age needs to absorb that fact. Cognitive decline is not an inevitable, nor even a wide-spread, feature of old age. Researchers at Columbia University found that only 10% of people over 65 are likely to develop dementia. Old-ageism says that we all will.
Here is why that matters. We can watch an old person forget something, or use the wrong word, or take a visible moment to think something through, and instantly we are sure it is because they are old. We immediately assume they should not be in positions of influence. If the person is 40 or 50, however, the same slip of memory, the same pace of thinking, is not alarming. We all do it.
When an old person forgets something, what we should think is: 'This old person has just had a moment of forgetfulness. I had one of those just yesterday myself. Interesting. Unimportant.'
And then if (and only if) the forgetfulness increases and persists and becomes extreme, whoever the forgetter is should, of course, not be in a position of influence requiring good memory. At any age. But disentangling ‘forgetful and slow' from ‘old’ is a massive job.
So let’s get started. The next time you experience an old person’s forgetting a word, don’t think ‘age'. Think 'Did that matter? Are they still doing a good job of whatever they are doing?' Think whatever you would think about an any-age person who forgets a word. Is it impairing their ability to do their job? If so, do something. If not? Leave it. Don’t ignite the prejudice. Similarly, when you see or hear about an old person’s aliments such as joint pain or cataracts or lower energy, focus on their ailment, not their age.
Verdi wrote Falstaff when he was 80. Caroline van Hook Bean exhibited her paintings until she was 100. Carl Jung sorted out human minds until he was 86. My grandmother was as sharp as a spudger at her 101st birthday party.
Exceptions? No. That’s the point. Mental decline is not a given with age. Its inevitability is only a fabrication of old-ageism.
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Old-ageism is the only societally-sanctioned prejudice left in a progressive world that is now admirably sensitive to prejudice. No one in the media, for example, or in politics or business or religion can now get away with racist or sexist or religionist or any other oppressive comments. The prejudice is still there, of course, inert in most, stirring in others; but officially it is not allowed. Old-ageism, on the other hand, is.
In fact, you, maybe even today, have said or thought something old-ageist and didn’t notice. I received a text in the spring from a celebrated liberation historian and scholar, aware of my upcoming 78th birthday. The text said, 'You will always be young.' Three PhDs, thirty publications and thirteen plummy professorships have not educated him in the history of old-ageism. In all his regalia, he, too, a scholar and life-long champion of human rights and dignity, is an unaware perpetrator of oppression.
I am not young. I am old. Must I be seen euphemistically as young in order to be seen affirmatively as old? It is not true that I will always be young. In fact, I will, as of now, always be old – fantastically, thank-godfully old. Let’s celebrate. Just as we did when I turned 21. I became adult then. I have become old now. It is splendid.
Some of the smartest public thinkers, including prize-winning journalists and political analysts for the world’s most prominent publications, consider old age to be, ipso facto, a problem, when it is nothing of the kind. They are overt about it even though their comments and analyses are ignorant. Ignorance, publicly accepted as intelligence, builds danger.
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What, then, causes this one identity to be different from all the others? What makes it so difficult to embrace?
One tiny thing. Death.
The real problem with oldness and its ever-proliferating physical features are that they are indicators of approaching death. We do not like death. Even though we are designed to die, and ageing is the way we usually do it, even though death is not only natural but necessary for the creation of life, it just does not feature in our panoply of life’s loveliness. And it is exactly our fear of, aversion to, and denial of death that make ‘old’ so hard to celebrate, so easy to invisibilise. We don’t want reminders that each of us, whatever our age, is on a path to death. Nor that the older we are, the closer we are to it.
The challenge is to be joyous about all of that, to toast this life and its path to death, to give thanks for it because there is no life without it. None. Not even galaxies get to live unless they will one day die. It is the original quid pro quo. No death, no life.
In the presence of that holy truth, we need, I believe, to dismantle any injunction to look at ageing and see ugly and sad. We need to see ‘glorious’ and let old be old. Magnificently.
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There is usually a point in our lives, an indelible moment, sometimes early on, sometimes later, when we know oppression, when we actually conceptualise it. We, of course, know it as an unarticulated reality from the first moment we experience it, some of it from birth. But we don’t know we know it.
Then something happens. The scrim of inherence lifts. We see. We see that prejudice is not an intrinsic thing but a manufactured thing. We see that it is merely a set of assumptions. Refuse-able. Extinguishable. Replaceable. We stand there. We hold it gingerly. That moment is epiphany.
That moment for me was October, 1969, during coffee with a new faculty member in the Quaker school where I had my first job. I was 23. She was 35. I was telling her about the little adventure I had had the day before at the Motor Vehicle Administration (MVA), renewing my driver’s license. I told her about the interminable questions and the scowling clerk and the waiting and the proliferating groans in the line behind me. I became desperate. ’Then,’ I said to Sally, ‘I burst into tears. And everything improved. I was out of there in five minutes with a brand new license!’
I smiled at Sally. She looked horrified. ‘Nancy,’ she whispered in a shriek, ‘in that moment you set women’s liberation back twenty years!’
‘I did?’ I asked her. ‘Wow. I am sorry. What is women’s liberation?’
What is women’s liberation? Today, 55 years into my women’s rights activism, I cannot believe it was I who asked Sally that question. But it was. And I am grateful to her for her outrage (even though I do not agree that crying is counter-feminist. If anything, crying can make us all, including (especially) men, smarter. But maybe not at the MVA).
Sally told me all she could in fifteen minutes about sexism and the institutions that embody it. I listened, agog. At the end she ripped away ‘just how it is’ to reveal ‘we can change it’. And as she spoke about women, I began to see that there was more to it, that it was only part of all the 1970s ‘liberation goings-on’ : all the marches against racism, all the workers strikes, all the rumours of imminent protests for gay rights. They were not, as I had been told throughout my young life, gangs of renegades ruining our country.
I got up. I thanked her. And I marched. I have been marching ever since.
What is hard to believe now is that in these five decades of playing my part in exposing and rooting out assumptions of prejudice and their impact as thinking inhibitors wherever I can, I missed old-ageism. For all the reasons above, I just missed it. I feel bad about that. I am embarrassed.
But I am grateful to have lived long enough to get up again, to move into the light of old-ageism, to march for its demise until, I hope, I am very, very old.
1 In May of 2022 I published a piece here called, ‘Old!’. It set the stage for today’s piece as I continue my journey towards an understanding of the innards of society’s vicious prejudice against old people.