Ageism is a bully
We have been hypnotized into believing that women lose value as they get older. I’m all about snapping us out of that trance
Mariann Aalda, actress and activist
Since we left the Super 8 behind - and that’s a long, long time ago - there’s something missing from our lives. More than the film capturing life's scenes, the warm flash light carved moments in the memory. Reality, for a handful of seconds, came alive. To me, as a child, it felt like being immersed in a deep and intense “now.” I don’t remember voices or sounds, but I can still feel the cold marble floor as I sat on it. It’s Christmas day and I’m wearing a red dress and a pair of yellow wool tights. In the joyful excitement of the light, the comparison with the matching outfits of my blond and posh city cousins pales. Until the light lasts, wearing hand-down clothes feels more bearable.
Fast forward forty-plus years, standing at the stern of a sailing boat moored in a tiny bay in the north of Sardinia, I feed pieces of bread to seagulls for breakfast. The water is still and the sun, hidden by the rocks, is not yet shining on the red granite reef. The whole place has a mellow, watery feeling like a mirror melting away. The guests of the other boats prefer to spend the night at the harbor, taking a real shower, going for a stroll, having an aperitivo, and choosing one of the many restaurants that dot the shore. The life in the bay is made of more solitude and the occasional thrill. Fighting the wind to catch a buoy, waking up at the sound of a rope beating the hull, leaning overboard in the light of a torch during the night to make sure the anchor is not giving way. When in the morning the other boats return, we lift the anchor and take to the sea.
The sea is like a shining blue fabric, specks of sun blinking rhythmically on its surface, the boat’s engine snoring lowly. I switch on the stove below deck and then, holding a tray with a couple of mugs, I climb the steep ladder carefully. We enjoy a mid-morning coffee, before hoisting the sails. Freed from the lazy bag, the sail makes one loud snappy sound, and then adjusts its tone to the wind, while climbing up the mast. The bigger the area exposed the smaller the noise. Correspondingly, the winch handle slows down in its track with its unmistakable clicking noise. I am caught up by the dazzling whiteness of the sail full of wind when, all of a sudden, there’s just silence and we fly effortlessly on the water. In that instant, it is as if time folds onto itself. The suspended moment is fixed in my memory with the same intensity of the Super 8 flash light. This time it is impressed by the sudden silence rather than the glowing light.
Talking with Mariann Aalda, an energetic 72-year-old actress and activist, is another of these moments, as she casts a light on something I never fully understood so far. That is why living in Thailand and therefore aging in a different culture is such a joyous experience for me. But as she mentioned the emotional power of the images that surround us, there is a silence and, in my mind, a switch of gear. This conversation between a frosty Chicago evening and a blooming spring morning in Chiang Mai - hundreds of leafless trees covered with yellow flowers along the streets - is going to be filed in a special drawer in my memory. Because I stepped out of my culture of reference, the bewitching arts of an advertising fairy are blunt weapons.
First of all, tell us a bit about yourself and your story.
As many children, I grew up watching the Mickey Mouse Club in the Fifties. One of the protagonists was Annette Funicello. She was Italian, she had olive skin, and I thought she was the closest thing that looked like me. I learned a little song and dreamed to be in the Mickey Mouse Club as I grew up. In my motivational talks, I like to share with my audience the secret to having big dreams: aim for the stars to land on the moon. I missed the Mickey Mouse Club by a hair, but I ended up working for The Edge of Night, the show that preceded the Disney show.
You said that casting directors stopped calling you after you turned 50 and that your agent suggested that you put on weight to do more character work. How did you turn things around?
I left that agent as he wasn’t willing to find work for me, but I also decided to leave Hollywood when I aged out. I didn’t want to be an extra to a movie. My “why” for acting is bigger than simply being on a stage. I moved to New York to take care of my ailing mother, taking turns with my sister. I took stand-up classes and wrote at home during the day. When my sister returned from work, it was my time to go out to do my solo show. Because I am a storyteller, I started to tell my story as a stand-up comedian. As I learned, the more personal the story is, the more universal it feels and my audience never failed to let me know that my stories resonated with theirs.
How did it feel to be on that stage to tell your story?
It felt scary, but I don’t think that being afraid of something should stop you from doing it. As the American psychologist Rollo May wrote in his book The Courage to Create, courage is not the absence of fear, but the determination to act in the face of fear. Of course, I felt naked in front of the audience. It was terrifying to talk about me. At the same time, I am convinced that acting is my ministry. In my motivational speech to young actors, I often tell them that acting is a service industry; we’re in the service of our audience, of the writers, and of the producers.
Did you really study to become a hypnotist or was it just a metaphor?
It was not a metaphor. Actors have a natural curiosity for human condition and when I was out of a job because of my age at 51, I had to make a living for myself. So I went back to school. I trained to become a hypnotist and one of the first things I learned is how language drops into our subconscious mind. Hypnotism is not more than getting your conscious mind to relax so that you can have a conversation with your subconscious.
In your Ted Talk you mentioned the discovery of a "spell" that makes women doubt their value and their sexual currency as they age. Can you tell us about that?
After I became a hypnotist, I realized that around eighty percent of my clients were women in their late forties to over fifties who were suffering from depression. They had lost their reason for being. They were focusing on the negatives of their time, on the images that media supplied them. Through the suggestions I gave them and by listening to my own words, I realized that, probably, I have been hypnotized too into believing that we women lose value as we get older. Now, I’m all about snapping us out of that trance.
Is there a similar spell for men?
Yes, men buy into the same system of values as women do, but in reverse. They think that having a younger partner makes them feel younger; it’s like a trophy that says something about them.
How important it is to realize the existence of a cultural conditioning in order to free oneself from it?
The images we see are very powerful. I had my aha moment when my son was four years old. He was watching TV while I was preparing dinner. I heard him saying “Oh, oh, here comes the bad guy.” I asked him how he knew it was the bad guy and he replied: “Because he’s brown.” I was blown away: not only because we were a family of brown people, but because my son acknowledged the power of a TV message. Even if the message contradicted his everyday experience. His father was a brown guy and, by my son’s admission, not a bad one.
The same applies to us: throughout our life, we see images that dictate what is beautiful, what is sexy and when the comparison doesn’t work anymore, instead of questioning the image, we question ourselves. With this regard, the logic has its limits. You can’t create an intellectual argument over an emotional belief. That’s why I helped my patients to adopt positive suggestions to escape from this cultural trap. We have control on the suggestions we decide to adopt and this way we can stop losing confidence. There’s nothing sexier than a confident woman, it’s mesmerizing, it’s captivating.
You called ageism a bully. What are the similarities with other types of bullying?
All the words that end in “ism” are bullies. They are the gatekeepers, they say “no, you can’t.” A bully can’t stand up in front of many people who say, “yes, we can.” But we must take a stand. You can’t simply say: I’m not racist. I’m not ageist. Unless you’re anti-racism, anti-ageism you’re part of the problem. If you want to change things, you need to become part of the solution.
Is it possible to laugh about aging?
I do not do self-deprecating humor. I do observational humor. I do not make fun of getting older. I want people to laugh with me, not at me. Unfortunately, making fun of older people is still a gray area out of the politically-correctedness.
What else have you learned along this journey?
One of the keywords is mortality. When you realize that you have more years behind than the ones you have in front, something funny happens with time. I realized I have patience, I feel like I have all the time in the world. I do the work I have in front of me, I don’t obsess about the one that I might or might not do. I gave up anxiety and moved to the present. The other keywords that we should agree to ban are “still” and “for your age.” I’m not still working at the age of 72. As there’s no need to retire as an actress, I still work. Also, I don’t look good for my age. I look good because I feel good.
