I was sitting on the terrace of a bar one evening in Montreal with friends, after giving a public lecture. Behind us, the city was lit up, ready for Saturday night. All the pretty neon signs above the shop windows were on, advertisements for pastries, flowers and haircuts. I love the city at night more than any natural landscape.
I thought the light would be flattering in a photo. So I pulled my chair aside and climbed on it. I asked the moon behind me to smile a little. And I took a selfie.
A young man with a cap draped over his dark hair and painted fingernails, who had been in the audience that evening, came to tell me that he had written an essay on cats in my novels.
” Oh ! marvellous ! I told him, inviting him to sit down with us.
He was sitting at the table, shy and happy. I turned to the young man and asked him if he thought I was too old to take a selfie. “Never,” he said with absolute sincerity. I laughed: “Great! »
Of course, I wouldn’t have stopped taking selfies if he had told me I was too old. I was just curious to know how he saw this exercise from a middle-aged woman, he who was not yet out of his twenties. Wasn’t he supposed to see me as a witch?
I never imagined feeling comfortable with my physical appearance at my age. At 49, according to society, I’m supposed to be furious and bitter at the loss of my former, younger, more beautiful self.
Oddly enough, I can’t stand looking at pictures of myself when I was younger. I look exhausted, overworked and unhappy. When I look at it, I see myself ugly and useless and poor. Is this the me I’m supposed to mourn?
When I was young, every day was a dangerous eventuality; taking the metro or walking down the street. Older men were shouting vulgar comments at me from their cars. They showed up. A man once offered to take me home, tie me up, and teach me how to make love properly. I looked at my running shoes and shook my head.
At school, boys would tell me I was a dog and push me into lockers, yelling in my face that I was ugly. In my school, poverty was seen as a form of ugliness.
The insistence on youthful beauty in girls causes them to have short-term plans. I wanted people to tell me that I had a whole life ahead of me, not that I was in my prime!
As I approach fifty, I am told that I am becoming invisible… I am conditioned to be terrified of aging. I am told that turning 50 is a great tragedy for women. At 50, no man can find you attractive anymore. When men stop trying to sleep with you, your life is empty and you become bitter and hateful. As if being attractive was the defining trait of women, without which everything they say or do becomes irrelevant.
It wasn’t always like this. Before the 1600s, in the West, the role of women in society was valued more than their physical appearance. They participated in everything from farming to construction, and they were especially dominant in the fields of medicine and childbirth, regardless of age. Then, we orchestrated the witch hunt, a way to regain power from older women. And later, the new capitalist notion of the hourly wage, which would be paid to men and not to women, made them entirely dependent on men. Their main role has become that of giving birth to future workers. Once sterile, they were only a burden on society.
I realized that I don’t even know what 50 year old women look like. There is a definite lack of representation of older women in visual media. As they get older, they are not depicted in movies, on television, or in advertising. Young women are beautiful to look at. But I want to see other women my age.
Social media is being criticized for the prevalence of bikini-clad fitness gurus leading girls to compare themselves, doubt themselves, their worth. But what’s new?
You have to see the other side of the coin. Social media is not edited like a magazine, it is not filtered. If you look, you can see women of color, taller women, trans women, women with disabilities, who are busting beauty myths by loving their bodies.
I decided to follow a hashtag for older women on Instagram to gain access to pictures of older women on my feed. I wanted to be reminded of the beauty of mature women every day.
As for the worrying and repeated threat that men won’t want to have sex with me anymore, that’s nonsense. Why would I want men to try to sleep with me? Frankly, I consider that an insult. Rather, I want men to tell me how my work has touched and inspired them. Young people want me to mentor them. The older ones want to collaborate artistically.
When someone, male or female, compliments my work, I am moved. I feel good. I feel pretty. I feel important. I feel loved and lovable. And when I look at my selfies, it’s this inner beauty that charms me.
There are so few pictures of me in my twenties. No one thought my appearance was worth preserving and documenting. Now I am photographed all the time. Not because of how I look, but because of what I think.