Will Self on: ageing
28/01/2009
We must embrace the idea of getting older
My mother always spoke, not contemptuously, but pityingly of those men who ditched their partners of long-standing in favour of a younger model. ‘I don’t understand it,’ she’d say. ‘At every stage of my life I’ve really only been attracted to men of my own age.’ Of course, some may say that this is all a matter of taste: there are those who relish a disparity in age just as there some who are drawn to other from different countries, or of different races. I’m not so sure; after all, if the analogy were really to obtain, we would have to concede that by and large our culture promotes one ethnic stereotype of beauty – because most certainly that is the case with when it comes to age.
Older people are beginning to be allowed to be attractive in our society – a concession that’s been wrung out of the media by constant campaigning. But it’s an attractiveness that all too often is based on a paradigm of feigned youth. The fiercely preserved older person is, by and large, the golden oldie standard. T
here’s something distinctly queasy about all these older woman television presenters launching high-profile campaigns against ageism, and arguing that they have been dismissed in favour of younger women, while at the same time struggling for all they’re worth (and it is costly) to ape the appearance of these striplings; it’s as if the campaign for racial equality had been spearheaded solely by black people who had had their skin colour artificially whitened.
Older people are beginning to be allowed to be attractive in our society – a concession that’s been wrung out of the media by constant campaigning. But it’s an attractiveness that all too often is based on a paradigm of feigned youth. The fiercely preserved older person is, by and large, the golden oldie standard. T
here’s something distinctly queasy about all these older woman television presenters launching high-profile campaigns against ageism, and arguing that they have been dismissed in favour of younger women, while at the same time struggling for all they’re worth (and it is costly) to ape the appearance of these striplings; it’s as if the campaign for racial equality had been spearheaded solely by black people who had had their skin colour artificially whitened.
Be that as it may, the Moira Stewarts and Anna Fords of this world do have a point: Britain now has age-discrimination legislation, while on current demographic trends the overall population is set to become nothing but older – a further parallel with burgeoning racial diversity. I’d argue that given this is the case we need to radically rethink our idea of the beautiful, and jettison a good deal of the premium placed on juvenescence.
It may be that it’s easier for me to contemplate this because I’ve discovered in middle age that far from lusting after younger women, I’m only really attracted to those a fair bit older than myself. When I say ‘attracted’ I don’t mean anything quite as blunt as sexual desire – I’m married and believe in the old fashioned virtue of fidelity – but I wouldn’t altogether rule it out, even if only at a theoretical level. I’m not sure I’m like the gerontophile played by David Walliams in the Little Britain sketch (you know the one, always so keen to take granny to the toilet), but my view of what’s beautiful in people – female or male – embraces the signs of ageing.
Just as I find people in their 20s, and even 30s increasingly bland to talk to – there’s the lack of shared cultural references, but also all those fervently held opinions unsubstantiated by any experience – so I find their smooth skin and thick hair rather doll-like and unlived in. Older people, by contrast, have their lives written in their bodies.
George Orwell said: ‘By the age of fifty most men have the face they deserve’, and while not necessarily wishing to take this overly moral view of anyone’s appearance, the fact remains that a visage that has confronted a multiplicity of experiences; a mouth that has spoken words beautiful, loving and stern; eyes that have gazed upon the fine and the brutal aspects of life – these are productive of a beauty that is not narrowly aesthetic, but an entire psycho-physical phenomenon.
It’s one thing to look upon the old as wise – it’s quite another to see that very wisdom as deeply attractive. Indeed, I’d argue that it’s not until we begin to do this that we’ll be able to address the shocking disrespect shown to old people in Britain today.
My generation – the baby-boomers – are all too likely to end up being ‘cared for’ in by agency workers in state homes the size of shopping malls; it’s in our interests to promote senile seductiveness for all we’re worth; let us not rage at the dying of the light, but embrace it as incredibly flattering.
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