Hey, female friends in their 30s, every time you call yourself ‘old’, the patriarchy wins, Rose Surnow, a Los Angeles-based writer, said in a recent Facebook and Twitter post.
She added a hashtag for emphasis; #?Don’tBuckleToBullshit.
One hundred and two friends ‘liked’ Rose Surnow’s sentiment when it was on Facebook, probably because so many of them had heard it before; Young women in their 20s and 30s branding themselves, usually slamming themselves, as ‘old’. We see it all the time on Facebook – “Welp, I’m officially old” on a woman’s 25th birthday. We hear it from friends single and married, who have children and who do not, on the eve of 28ths and 30ths and 34ths. Of the latter, one friend joked, “I’m practically 35, which means I’m practically 40, which means I’m halfway to dead.”
Surnow’s micro-rant was inspired by a 33-year-old friend she calls Alex, who wants to have children someday and is concerned about her reproductive chances as she gets older. Because Alex is single and going to weddings and baby showers and bachelorette parties, like, every weekend, Surnow notes empathetically, she is worried that she’s somehow not where she believes she’s ‘supposed to be’ in the relay race of life.
She’ll say, “I’m so old or Now that I’m old or Ugh, she’s young,” Surnow says. The concept of ‘old’ is relative, of course, but we think most people would agree that it’s not 33, and it’s most definitely not 25! Others argue that age is just a number and a state of mind. But that’s not stopping a wave of premature age anxiety from sweeping over women in their 20s and 30s.
It’s become socially acceptable, even expected, for healthy women, who have hardly reached traditional middle age to approach their birthdays with abject horror. We’ve all heard of quarter-life crises, but in fact, a negative perception of aging begins much sooner.
Young women freaking out about turning 30 isn’t the result of personal weakness or self-esteem issues, but of what the all-knowing Oprah has called our ‘youth-obsessed culture that is constantly trying to tell us that if we are not young, and we’re not glowing, and we’re not hot, that we don’t matter’.
We all know the drill. Salt-and-pepper-haired men are distinguished; women are critiqued when they don’t dye their greys. Men sire children in their 50s and 60s; women are told by experts to protectively freeze their eggs in their late 20s. There is no widely used male equivalent for the word crone. The real ages of female celebrities, from comedienne and actress Rebel Wilson to singer and songwriter Beyonce to rapper and singer Nicki Minaj, are investigated like crimes. The scenario was a reality for actress Maggie Gyllenhaal, who earlier this year revealed that, at age 37, she was told she was too old to play the lover of a man who was 55. “It was astonishing to me,” Maggie Gyllenhaal said. “It made me feel bad, and then it made me feel angry, and then it made me laugh.”
It’s not a mystery, in other words, why we call ourselves old. Here’s why we should stop. When women refer to themselves as old, we’re co-signing the ageism. We are also, by the way, spreading the implication that ‘old’ is somehow bad, fuelling the narrow assumption that being old is something grim and empty rather than rich with experience, confidence, and, yes, dead sexiness. You learn how to, you know, work the vehicle better. Not to mention the power that can come with age. At 68, politician Hillary Clinton is vying to become the first female president in US history. Would these women skewer themselves as ‘old’, or long to be 16 again?
How best to treat your age, then? The only way to truly shed the stigma of your age is to stop telling the world how old you are. Let 25 be your last big, public milestone birthday. Celebrate your subsequent birthdays and buy yourself a classic car, but do not give your age. These milestones become milestones of cultural expectation. The minute you give your age, people start treating you according to what they consider age-appropriate, and there is therefore no wiggle room for the soul of the person.
Above all, follow the lead of Adele, and don’t waste the present phase of your life by wishing with all of you might to be in another. “When I was 7, I wanted to be 8. When I was 8, I wanted to be 12. When I was 12, I just wanted to be 18.”