A scene from the French film Amour.

I've been looking and feeling rather gross lately. I'm sprouting grey hair, wearing crappy clothes and my bushy eyebrows are more John Howard crazy than the latest look of bushy groomed. As I’ve ‘let myself go’, it seems the world around me has become increasingly glamorous, glitzy, young and beautiful. Yesterday I actually clicked on a Facebook link to ‘free anti-ageing trials’ and got sucked into a sales spiel about micro abrasive balls and infusions of Shea butter’.

Clearly it’s been way too long since I read Naomi Wolf’s ‘The Beauty Myth’ where she deconstructs the pressure on women to reach impossible standards of beauty. I understand why she moved on to celebrating her vagina because ‘The Beauty Myth’ set an unattainable goal. Since she showed us how our culture sees ageing as a disease and the beauty industry a form of obedience, our attitude has deteriorated faster than my grooming.

We are now at the point where I would argue our fear and loathing of ageing is worse than sexist. It’s actually self indulgent, offensive and highly toxic.


This is not an ‘ageing gracefully’ article. Far from it. I’m cynical about the new apartheid in ageing that discriminates between those with good plastic surgeons and those with dodgy ones. The celebration of those we deem to age well – Helen Mirren, Meryl Streep and the cruel mocking of those who try too hard to stay young like Kim Novak and Liza Minelli is hardly fair. It now seems the only thing as tragic as a woman looking old is if she’s trying too hard not to. All the airbrushed articles about stars ‘stunning at 50’ and ‘beautiful at any age’ may pretend to celebrate older women but they are still focusing on age and reinforcing an unattainable standard. Meanwhile the average older woman is increasingly fair game. Witness a recent episode of MKR where ’The Captain’ mocked 55 year old fellow contestant Cathy calling her ‘Grandma’ needing a ‘nanna nap’. More offensive when you realize he is only 2 years younger than her. Are man years like human years compared to dog years? Do men age one year to we b*****s seven? Seems so.

Enough. We need to reimagine what ageing is. It’s not about deteriorating gracefully, or with attitude. It’s about realising that ageing is not a curse but a goddam privilege.

I grew up singing along to my idol Blondie 'die young stay pretty' I loved her cool, her stunning sneer, and her ethos of ‘living fast cos it won't last’. But as Deborah Harry approaches 70 and probably drops that song from her set list it’s time to realise such attitudes are highly offensive. Offensive to the old and to the young. But above all offensive to those who don't get to age at all. Those who die of disease, accidents, neglect, poverty, starvation and because in the grand lottery of life they were born in Swaziland, Angola or Zambia where life expectancy is 31.9, 38.2 and 38.63 respectively. Puts those fortieth birthday sad slumps into perspective don’t it!

Writer and Medical sociologist Anne Karph has written a book calling on us to detoxify ageing and to end gerontophobia’. Embrace ageing! What a radical idea! She may as well be asking us to fly.

Karph points out that despite living longer we are becoming more anxious about ageing while we are younger and younger. I remember dying my hair pink at thirty and having to turn the age twice because I just couldn’t deal with it. That seems so silly to me now. But articles about botox as a prevention to ageing by teenagers is more than silly. It’s appalling.

Anne suggests we change the conversation we have about ageing starting with the conversation we have with ourselves. She wants us to end the gallows humour (which is merely dressed up self-disgust) and talk about our body as something we respect, acknowledge and thank for surviving. We should be grateful when it functions, recovers and does incredible things like grows babies, pushes them out, does a mean move on the dance floor or shoots a goal.

To some extent fear of ageing is fear of death. It’s hard to dismiss anxiety about dying. But in twisting our logic to see our body as something that is cheating the ultimate end, perhaps we can become more appreciative.

I’m not pretending ageing is a beautiful act of liberation and wisdom. There are, of course, big losses. But Anne Karph urges us to acknowledge the end of youth. To mourn it and let it go so we can be open to embrace the new. She interviewed many British citizens who saw old age as a time of transformation and liberation when they felt free to truly become themselves.

It’s almost impossible to inoculate yourself from a society infected with a fear of ageing. Yet there is increasing awareness that we need to do so.

Let’s start by seeing ageing for what it is. A gift many won’t get. Survival. Opportunity. My mother likes to say ‘old age isn’t so bad when you consider the alternatives’. I think she stole the line from Maurice Chevalier who also said ‘the older one gets the more one comes to resemble oneself’. Despite all the onesies I think he was right.

So next time you cluck disapprovingly at a frozen face in Hollywood, or moan at ‘an old bag’, or spend a fortune on ‘micro abrasion’ so as not to become her remember this. You are discriminating against your former self.

If you’re lucky.