For me, maturing as a woman in The U.S.A. is less about oppressions done to me than it has to do with a subtle weakening of my place within this community and a not-so-subtle disrespect that pops up more with each passing year. For example, if I disapprove of pornography as systemically harmful to women, it is my age that prompts my classification as a prude and a pearl-clutcher. It can not be that I base my thoughts on studies and stats and the understanding that womanism is a movement-- one that supports the freedom of all women, not to remain confused with individual women who choose to reduce their images to the sexual uses and abuses of their bodies, calling that empowerment. My age sets me up for a sort of contempt only partially experienced by younger women with the same views. The wisdom that comes along with age has little worth to anyone but those possessing it, considering that wisdom is another word for old, and old is what not a single person prefers to be.
I have no idea what the answer is, but I can tell you what it isn't, at the very least for me. It isn't to try to seem or act more radiant. It isn't to publish blog posts about how hot/thin/beautiful/ sexy middle-aged women are. They are, but throwing away my written voice on supporting shallow attempts at ongoing conformity to what is looked forward to of women in a patriarchal culture does not feel beneficial. It is an insidious capitulation. It attracts women my age to trade away opportunities to weigh in on important matters for a chance to be among the "seen" again. I won't participating in a game I hate, which I did not create and can not win.
To be an aging woman in America is to become constantly pestered by imagery and press that distance your younger feminist sisters from you, simply because the idea of not looking like those youthful images of femininity and becoming invisible terrifies them. I look like a common 51-year-old, and it is just bizarre realizing that my appearance is something many young women fear.
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