We are aging in a culture of shame
Because they bear the physical signs of age, aging women are hyper-visible. Because these signs are culturally undesirable, aging women are socially invisible
J. Brooks Bouson, Professor of English at Loyola University Chicago, author of Shame and the Aging Woman: Confronting and Resisting Ageism in Contemporary Women’s Writing
In the note accompanying her answers, Professor J. Brooks Bouson describes them as “depressing.” To a certain extent, that might be true, but at the same time, I find them enlightening. They remind me the work of David Macaulay, the British-born American illustrator known for his pen-and-ink drawings. In particular, in his book Underground, Macaulay shows what no picture will ever be able to capture: the underlying, invisible structures that allow our cities to function and our lives to happen within. Along the same line, Professor Bouson connects the dots of our subterranean collective consciousness about aging. She explains why we go to the lengths we do to achieve and maintain a youthful look. It’s not just because of what we see in the mirror, but because of what we come to believe about that image. But I’m running ahead of myself.
J. Brooks Bouson is a Professor of English and the Assistant Chair of the English Department at Loyola University Chicago. Her work is focused on twentieth and twenty-first century women’s literature and on feminist theory, especially the history of feminist theory. She also has a long-standing interest in the narcissistic character and the empathic dynamics of the reader/text transaction, which grows out of her application of Heinz Kohut’s psychoanalytic theory of narcissism to the study of literature in her book The Empathic Reader: A Study of the Narcissistic Character and the Drama of the Self. More recently, she has turned to the study of emotions in literature, shame in literature, and trauma and narrative. In addition to her book The Empathic Reader, she has published scholarly books on contemporary women writers: Brutal Choreographies: Oppositional Strategies and Narrative Design in the Novels of Margaret Atwood; Quiet As It's Kept: Shame, Trauma and Race in the Novels of Toni Morrison; Jamaica Kincaid: Writing Memory, Writing Back to the Mother; Embodied Shame: Uncovering Female Shame in Contemporary Women’s Writings; and Shame and the Aging Woman: Confronting and Resisting Ageism in Contemporary Women’s Writings.
Bouson is also is the editor of four recent critical collections: Critical Insights: Margaret Atwood; Margaret Atwood: The Robber Bride, The Blind Assassin, and Oryx and Crake; Critical Insights: Emily Dickinson; and Critical Insights: Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. In the book that promoted our encounter - Shame and the Aging Woman: Confronting and Resisting Ageism in Contemporary Women’s Writing, Bouson discusses recent women writers from Doris Lessing to Margaret Laurence, from Thea Astley to Eva Figes. Her goal? To uncover how the shaming ideology of sexageism oppresses older women in our culture.
As she points out, the cultural shaming of older women is “a secret hidden in plain sight.” To hyper-simplify the concept, it’s a process that begins with the “pedagogy of defect” as women are instructed to detect, and find unacceptable, even repellent, any imperfections in their bodies and to feel shame about the visible signs of aging, such as gray hair, wrinkles, and sagging skin and any functional impairments they may suffer as they undergo the natural processes of bodily aging. Because shame breeds silence, many aging and elderly women remain silent about the shaming they endure in their daily lives. But remaining silent breeds more shame and more silence. Even though speaking about shame may make us wince, it is necessary to break the silence if we want to seek some remedy to the shame that afflicts so many older women in our age-phobic and graying twenty-first century culture.
As I mentioned in a previous interview discussing cosmetic intervention, () my aim is not to give directions or instructions. Nonetheless I feel that, while we can carry on with our lives - cosmetic intervention and hair dying included - it’s better to do it with some awareness in the pocket, rather than blindly. We might discover, as Professor Bouson reveals, that there’s a space of freedom in breaking that silence.
Why did you decide to write Shame and the Aging Woman?
My book project, Shame and the Aging Woman: Confronting and Resisting Ageism in Contemporary Women’s Writings, which was published in 2016, grows out of my long-standing (over twenty years) interest in, even obsession with, shame theory. In my 2000 book, Quiet As It’s Kept: Shame, Trauma, and Race in the Novels of Toni Morrison, I wrote about racial shame in the works of the novelist and Nobel prize-winning author, Toni Morrison. In my 2009 book, Embodied Shame: Uncovering Female Shame in Contemporary Women’s Writings, I investigated the deeply entrenched body shame that persists in the lives of girls and women in our twenty-first-century culture of appearances. My interest in the issues surrounding the shaming of aging woman in our culture grew out of my research for the chapter on the aging woman in Embodied Shame.
When I began working on Shame and the Aging Woman, I was struck by observations of contemporary women studies and age studies scholars, who note that ageism is deeply entrenched in feminism and that many older second-wave feminists are deeply ageist. For example, in their analysis of the “inadvertent but pernicious ageism” found in much contemporary women’s studies scholarship, age study scholars Toni Calasanti, Kathleen Slevin, and Neal King write that, while feminists “have contributed to the literature on bodies, discussion of old bodies is sorely lacking.” Moreover, even as feminists have recently begun to show more concern about aging, perhaps because they themselves are aging, they “do not often question the stigma affixed to old age” nor do they “ask why it seems denigrating to label someone old.”
In a similar way, Margaret Cruikshank points to the impact of ageism on women’s studies scholarship. “We in women’s studies have averted our gaze from women over sixty, even if we are over sixty ourselves,” comments Cruikshank. Noting the lack of scholarly interest in age studies, Cruikshank speculates that women’s studies scholars “unconsciously avoid the topic, knowing that old people, especially women, are stigmatized. Internalized ageism may afflict us, in other words. Like others, feminists resist physical changes and the diminishment of our social power, and thus aging has not seemed to be a promising subject for study.” One of my goals in Shame and the Aging Woman is to bring together shame theory and the work of feminist age study scholars in order to expose how gendered ageism wounds older women and makes them ashamed of their age.
How did you select the authors you examine in Shame and the Aging Woman?
In Shame and the Aging Woman, I bring together the research findings of contemporary feminist age studies scholars, feminist gerontologists, and narrative gerontologists, and I also draw on the work of shame theorists. “The natural response to shame is hiding, and hiding breeds silence which further deepens shame,” as shame theorist Gershen Kaufman tells us. Shame about the aging female body is a cultural burden inherited by women.
But because shame can breed silence and a hiding response and because the exposure of shame can cause more shame, all too often older women live alone with their cultural wounds as they come to internalize society’s harsh and shaming judgments against them. In my work, I examine representative post-1960 writings by North American and British women novelists and memoirists who have refused to be silenced and are determined to publicly expose the myriad ways our culture devalues and humiliates older women in our age-phobic contemporary culture.
As if the authors were pieces of a puzzle, what is the emerging picture?
Because women in general live longer than men, we live in a society, as Margaret Cruikshank has remarked, where “‘old’ means ’woman,” and where old women bear “the brunt of ageism.” The fact that old women find it difficult to resist ageist stereotypes and so come to see their age-altered bodies as shameful and ugly reveals how our culture’s “‘intractable hostility’” to decline is “‘imposed with particular vengeance on older women.’” Indeed, there would have to be a “massive shift in consciousness” in order for frail old women to “love their bodies” or for older women who are not yet frail to see “old bodies in decline as simply old and not ugly.”
Even as society continues to gray in the twenty-first century, the cultural shaming of aging women is getting worse as more women live into advanced old age. As anti-aging surgical and nonsurgical cosmetic procedures have become even more deeply entrenched in recent years, the pressures on older women to avoid the stigma of an age-marked appearance have only intensified, as feminist sociologist and gerontologist Laura Hurd Clarke reports.
Influenced by the “healthist discourses that hold individuals personally responsible” for both the health and appearance of their bodies, which are presumed to be “one and the same thing,” older women have felt increasingly that they have a “moral responsibility to fight the onset of an aged appearance.” Those who “look old and, therefore, ugly and unhealthy” are harshly judged as people who have “morally, socially, and physically failed in their clash with the never-ending advancement of time.”
The observations of age studies scholars like Cruikshank and Hurd Clarke call attention to the shameful plight of older women in our graying culture. In Shame and the Aging Woman, as in Embodied Shame, I focus on works published during or after the second-wave feminism of the 1960s and 1970s and therefore works potentially influenced by feminist critiques of cultural representations of femininity and the female body. I focus on post-1960 fictional and nonfiction works by women writers who have dared, in the wake of second-wave feminism, to break social taboos by writing about the various and insidious ways in which the shaming ideology of sexageism oppresses and damages older women.
Can you explain the meaning of “sexageism?”
The term “sexageism” brings together two oppressive and shaming ideologies—“sexism” and “ageism” —to describe the ageism experienced by older women. In her 1996 essay “Female Grotesques in Academia,” women studies scholar Mary Carpenter used this term to describe the plight of aging academic women when she stated that, “ageism for the academic woman is always sexagism.” In more recent years, other women studies scholars have found the terms “sexageism” or “gendered ageism” useful in their analysis of the damaging impact of our sexist and ageist culture on older women in our graying society.
I illuminate the affective—shame—dynamics of this oppressive ideology in Shame and the Aging Woman, and show how aging women are subject to what shame theorist Andrew Morrison calls “learned cultural shame” as they internalize the cultural message that they are physically unattractive and socially devalued people. In our gerontophobic culture, aging women learn to feel shame about the visible signs of aging (such as gray hair and wrinkled skin) and any functional impairment they may suffer as they undergo the normal processes of bodily aging.
This has only gotten worse under the new model of “successful aging.” In her 2015 book Women in Late Life, age studies scholar Martha Holstein comments that the “successful aging” paradigm, which resonates with a culture that “venerate[s] youth, devalue[s] old age, and cultivate[s] fears of an aging apocalypse,” has created a new model of aging, one that, in a seeming denial of bodily age-related changes, stresses a kind of agelessness or an “endless middle age” extending into later life. Rather than counteracting sexageism, the new “successful aging” model promotes ageism and deepens the shame of older women who fail to age successfully or to keep up a younger-looking appearance.
What is “embodied shame” and how do we adopt this concept?
In Shame and the Aging Woman, I focus sustained attention on the aging and elderly woman’s “embodied shame”—that is, shame about the aging female body. In his important work on body shame, shame theorist Paul Gilbert describes the experience of shame as an “inner experience of self as an unattractive social agent” and as an “involuntary response to an awareness that one has lost status and is devalued.” In expressions of body shame, as Gilbert notes, such an experience of social devaluation may be reflected in negative assessments of the body—“I hate, or am disgusted by, my body.”
The fact that older women commonly see their gray hair and wrinkles and other signs of aging as a deviant or pathological “mask or disguise concealing the essentially youthful self beneath”—which is called the “mask of aging” experience—reveals the toxicity of internalized ageism. Even though many women experience shame as they grow older, they feel that they “must be silent about the vagaries of their aging bodies lest they collaborate in their own devaluation,” observe co-authors Martha Holstein, Jennifer Parks, and Mark Waymack in their 2011 book Ethics, Aging, and Society: The Critical Turn.
Although older women “inhabit and live in and through culturally stigmatized bodies” and are “aware of how others judge their bodies,” the “meanings attached to living and functioning with and through bodies that are not culturally esteemed” have received “almost no public attention.” Rather than revealing their shame—and thus risking the intensification of their feelings of shameful exposure—many aging women remain silent about the indignities they confront in their daily lives.
Because ageism has “a stronger impact on women than on men,” especially on older women’s “evaluation and experience” of their bodies, aging women may come to feel intense body shame: those with aging bodies have “spoiled” identities and older women, in particular, may experience “a profound sense of shame and aversion towards their own and other older women’s bodies,” as age studies scholar Laura Hurd Clarke writes in her 2011 book Facing Age: Women Growing Older in Anti-Aging Culture.
That older women may have an aversive reaction to their own bodies is a sign of their deep feelings of disgust. The fact that “the body of the old woman is often regarded as the disgust object par excellence” in our society, as disgust theorist Colin McGinn writes, reveals the lethal power of sexageism. Treated as objects of disgust, older women may feel a profound sense of self-disgust as they, internalizing the contemptuous gaze of others, come to see themselves as ugly old women—and thus as physically repellent people.
You wrote that aging women have to deal with an unspoken contradiction: while they become hypervisible because of their aging body, they become socially and sexually invisible. While we are used to thinking of hair dying, cosmetic, and plastic surgery as an attempt to mask the aging process, you pointed out it is a way to hide one’s shame. Can you tell us more about these issues?
We live in a contemporary culture, as feminist philosopher Susan Bordo writes, where women have been instructed in the new “pedagogy of defect” by becoming habituated to created images of physical perfection—“the ageless and sagless and wrinkleless”—and thus have learned to find bodily defects “repellent, unacceptable.” We also live in an anti-aging society in which “being old is a stigma and reflects a spoiled self,” as shame theorist Michael Lewis writes. Thus, it is not surprising that many older women attempt to mask the aging process—that is, hide their shame—by dyeing their hair and using cosmetics and plastic surgery as they try to minimize or eliminate the signs of aging on their faces. Many older women who feel good about their appearance do so on the basis of looking younger.
If aging women are rendered hypervisible because they bear the physical signs of age—which publicly mark them as socially undesirable older women with spoiled identities—they are also socially invisible, for others ignore or shun them or even treat them in an openly hostile way in the public sphere. The plight of the hypervisible and socially invisible older woman in our culture points to the hidden shame script that governs the lives of so many older women. For just as shame about appearance can lead to the defensive desire to hide or disappear, it can also lead to the fear of disappearing; to the experience of social invisibility that is the consequence of social rejection; and to the social death that occurs when one is ignored or openly treated as an object of contempt in public spaces.
Describing the annihilating force of contempt, shame theorist Léon Wurmser writes: “Contempt says: ‘You should disappear as such a being as you have shown yourself to be—failing, weak, flawed, and dirty. Get out of my sight: Disappear!’” To be exposed as one who fails someone else’s or one’s own expectations causes shame, and to “disappear into nothing is the punishment for such failure.” In his account of the contempt-disappear scenario, Wurmser calls attention to the punishing aspects of contempt, a “strong form of rejection” that wants “to eliminate” the other person: “If it is appearance (exposure) that is central in shame, disappearance is the logical outcome of shame—and contempt is the affect that brings this aim about.”
The phenomenon of the hypervisible but also socially invisible—and disappearing—older woman reveals how contemptuously aging women are treated in our age-phobic culture as they are subjected in their daily lives to the contempt that says, in effect, “Get out of sight and disappear.” In a more sinister version of a contempt-disappear scenario, those who are old and disabled or ill may end up “disappearing” into nursing homes. Remarking that the “embodied experiences of older women and their perceptions of beauty work have been largely unexplored,” sociologists and gerontological researchers Laura Hurd Clarke and Meridith Griffin have investigated, through in-depth interviews with women ranging in age from fifty to seventy years old, contemporary women’s experiences of and responses to their aging appearances.
Subjected to gendered ageism because they are both aging and female, the women in Hurd Clarke and Griffin’s study feel deeply distressed about and damaged by the loss of a younger-looking appearance. “I look in the mirror, and I judge myself, and I wish I looked the way I looked 10 years ago… I think very young, but my body seems to have aged faster,” remarks a fifty-one-year-old woman. “I’ve felt for the last 10 years that I’m completely invisible to men… Nobody even sees me… I am invisible. I am not there,” comments another woman who is fifty-two. Noticing that when her hair turned gray she “became invisible” when walking down the street, another woman, who is sixty-eight, admits that when people “just about walk into” her, she feels “not-so-confident” and “put down and demeaned.” “I think I’m scared because I know that essentially the world thinks old things and old people are kind of like garbage,” confesses yet another sixty-five-year-old woman as she reflects on the aging process. “I’m just holding my own and when I look like a piece of garbage, it’s probably how I’ll be treated.”
Again and again in the narratives of the women they interviewed, Hurd Clarke and Griffin note that women’s “perceptions of invisibility” derive from their possession of “the visible markers of gray hair, wrinkles, and sagging skin” and thus are “grounded in their acute visibility as old women.” Aware of the “various social perils of looking old,” older women feel pressured “to mask, if not alter, the physical signs of aging with the use of beauty work interventions such as hair dye, make-up, and non-surgical and surgical cosmetic procedures, all in order to maintain their social power and visibility.”
I feel that concepts like “pro-aging,” “successful aging” or “rejuvenation” are falsely positive. You would never say “successful adolescence” or “pro-adulthood.” What lies under the surface of these “movements”?
While the new successful or healthy model of aging offers a positive contrast to the decline-and-loss paradigm by assuming that individuals can remain healthy and active into advanced old age, it also promotes ageism by reinforcing prejudice against the disabled or chronically ill elderly, especially the dependent elderly who end up in nursing homes because they suffer from debilitating illnesses and/or functional impairments.
The successful aging paradigm, as Martha Holstein observes in her 2015 book Women in Late Life, has created a new model of aging, one that stresses a kind of “endless middle age” extending into later life. To Holstein, the affirmations of agelessness voiced in commonplace sayings—sixty is the new forty and seventy is the new fifty; aging is not inevitable; you are only as old as you feel—are evidence of “age denial.” “If one can’t change the power of binaries—young is better than old—then claiming to belong to the valued category is a sensible, albeit problematic, strategy,” writes Holstein, since the struggle to be “not old” is “a struggle in opposition to our probable future selves.” In her trenchant analysis of the new binary that has emerged in recent years—the third and fourth ages—Holstein explains that “ageism is simply displaced” in this new division of late life, which relegates “a time of progressive disablement” to the fourth age and associates the positive features of successful aging with the third age.
Under the contemporary successful aging paradigm, older women feel more pressured than ever to retain a younger-looking appearance as long as possible, and so they may use anti-aging nonsurgical cosmetic interventions or products (such as Botox or laser skin treatments) or surgical cosmetic procedures (such as face lifts or liposuction) in order to keep up a more youthful appearance. The fact that the contemporary preferred way to age successfully is to maintain a younger looking appearance or to minimize the physical signs of aging calls attention to the deep shame and disgust attached to old age and to the age-altered (therefore “ugly”) bodies of older women. Just as older women may defend themselves by trying to pass as younger, so they may avoid calling themselves “old.” Again, the determination of many aging women to maintain a younger-looking appearance and their resistance to being called “old” grows out of and is a response to the pervasive shaming of older women in our culture.
Moreover, because the incidence of chronic health problems and disabilities increases with age and because women live longer than men, many women are likely, in their later years, to end up living with multiple chronic health conditions or functional impairments. If in our youth-oriented society aging women are shamed, those who suffer from the chronic illnesses or functional limitations or physical disabilities that accompany the aging process are doubly shamed. Thus the successful or healthy model of aging serves to reinforce and even worsen the prejudice against older women facing chronic illness or disablement or physical decline.
You pointed out that gendered ageism is deeply ingrained in our culture. How can we resist its effects? Also, how can we counteract and limit its powerful grip on our self-perception?
In Shame and the Aging Woman, I draw on Hilde Lindemann Nelson’s call for the creation of “counterstories” and “narrative repair” to counteract oppressive master narratives—such as the master narrative of decline that devalues and shames women as they age. I also find useful the ideas of co-authors Martha Holstein, Jennifer Parks, and Mark Waymack in their 2011 book Ethics, Aging, and Society: The Critical Turn who describe how aging women can find a “moral space” that allows the telling of such counterstories in the safe environment of micro-communities of their age peers.
Within these communities, according to Holstein, Parks, and Waymack, women “can be ‘authentic’ and not evade age and its manifestations,” and such places can also be “communities of resistance, ‘oppositional communities,’” in which women both acknowledge their fears about getting old even as they affirm each other by treating each other with attention and respect. In a similar way, age studies scholar Kathleen Woodward, who is “hopeful” that we have begun in the twenty-first century to develop “a broad social consciousness” of aging, argues that it is necessary to change the “affect script” for aging people, and she feels that this can be accomplished “in great part by telling stories.”
What are the most unexpected facts that emerged during your research for this book?
What has most impressed me during my work on Shame and the Aging Woman is the willingness of so many woman writers to talk about shame, which - as I always tell my students - is “risky business.” I am also deeply impressed by the work of narrative gerontologists. Like feminist gerontologists, who have paid attention to the personal stories and counterstories of older women, practitioners of narrative gerontology have similarly opened up the largely neglected study of the stories of aging in their investigations of the personal stories that people tell about their lives and their experiences of aging as they grow older.
Narrative gerontologists study the life stories of aging people because they believe that they can learn about what it means to be old and how older people find value in their lives by asking older individuals about their lives and by studying the stories they tell and the ways they interpret their experiences. To discount the life stories of older persons is to “devalue their experience,” write narrative gerontologists William Randall and Gary Kenyon, who emphasize the centrality of storytelling in the lives of people as they grow old. Interested in the “storied” aspects of the aging experience, narrative gerontologists, as Randall and Kenyon explain, hold as a basic premise that people are “fundamentally storytellers and storylisteners” and that they “not only have stories but are stories too.” People are “not just biological entities or social constructions” but they are also “biographical beings and, indeed, aesthetic compositions.”
As a professor of literature and someone who has a life-long interest in storytelling and story listening, I love Randall and Kenyon’s account of our “storied” identities and the way we can think of ourselves as not only “biographical beings” but also as “aesthetic compositions.” I’m also fascinated with Amelia DeFalco’s description of how, through the aging process, individuals can “accumulate histories, memories, selves,” and thus aging can be understood as a process that, rather than stripping the individual of her identity, instead, enriches and complicates her storied and re-storied identity.
How has your research influenced your personal approach to aging?
In my Women in Literature courses, I always include a segment on the aging woman and I have been deeply gratified by the impassioned responses of my students (it is not uncommon for some students to wipe away tears when we discuss this issue). As I explain to my students, because ageism has become deeply entrenched within feminism over the years, there has long been a feminist avoidance of the issues surrounding gendered ageism and the social devaluation of older women in our culture.
But many of my young women students (especially those who are attracted to third- and fourth-wave feminism) view the ageist oppression of older women as an important social justice and feminist issue, and many of my Loyola University Chicago women students have been so moved by this issue that they have decided to serve as volunteers in city nursing homes. My students are also acutely aware of the difference in the lives of the affluent and non-affluent elderly in a time of growing economic insecurity and a shrinking middle class. My hope is that, as they move forward in their lives, they will challenge and seek remedies (including governmental and economic remedies) to the sexageism that oppresses so many older women in our culture.
