In The Woman in the Mirror, I address body-esteem and self-esteem across the life cycle in women. At what point in the life cycle do women escape from the body trap? Whatever happened to the well-padded grandma who cooked wonderful feasts for the family and had the best lap in town for story-reading or napping? Was that grandma happy with her body? Was she resigned to the fact that at her age, this is what her body was made for? Or after the family went home and the grandchildren were in bed, did she take off her clothes, look in the mirror and cry about what she saw? Did anyone ever wonder whether grandma had body image issues or did we just assume that she was too old to care?
Body-esteem during the perimenopausal years and beyond is a difficult topic and one that is gaining in importance as our society grays. The world would prefer not to think about older women, but our world is soon going to be heavily populated with women over 50. Since women outlive men by on average 5 years, they're a substantial social force-and a substantial economic force. But there's a paradox. On one hand, the world prefers just not dealing with older women-and indeed they feel ignored or even invisible. The world doesn't want to see their bodies because they foretell inevitable decline. The world doesn't want to think about them as sexual beings because younger people find it "gross" believing that these old ladies should have aged out of any sexual desires. We pay money to watch Hollywood glamorize winter-spring relationships between older men and younger women, but feel disgusted with relationships in which the woman is substantially older than the man. Cougars don't garner the same envy that men with trophy wives do. The world wonders what a younger man could possibly see in an older woman.
At the same time, the world declares that 70 is the new 50. The comfortable grandma role gives way to the hipster grandma who is expected to be slim, fit, reconstructed, and reconstituted-that is as long as she doesn't show too much cleavage, bare arms, and god-forbid her neck! Women over 50 are amidst an identity crisis.
What we do know is that society has a "double standard on aging." Older women are definitely judged more harshly than older men. While men are referred to as stately, distinguished, and dapper as they age, women are called shrunken, wrinkly, and saggy. It is permissible for women of all ages to find older males from the age range of George Clooney to Sean Connery attractive. But if a young man declares a 70-something woman attractive, eyebrows raise because the world thinks there is something downright unnatural about a younger man finding an older woman attractive. Men are permitted to continue to act and feel young as they age. It seems as if all women are expected to "act their age" and bury any youthful feelings or desires they may have. Men can have trophy wives and become grandpadaddies, but women, lacking the prerequisite eggs, rarely become grandmamommies and when they do, the tabloids roll off the presses.
Middle and late adult women experience the discrepancy between their felt age (how they feel on the inside) and their chronological age (how old they actually are biologically). Women over fifty will commonly say that they get a jolt when they look in the mirror, wondering "Who is that old lady?" Moreover, their relationship with the mirror is different than that of men, One sixty-something woman I interviewed declared about her seventy-something husband, "When I look in the mirror, I see an old woman; I swear when he looks in the mirror, he sees the same reflection he saw when he was in high school!"
We know strikingly little about body-esteem and self-esteem in older women precisely because no one asks them. Maybe the world assumes that they've matured out of the body-preoccupation that younger women experience. Or, maybe the world just doesn't want to know because we might find out that these women still harbor active dreams and desires and that sits uncomfortably.
