Two weeks ago, around the Grammys, photos of Madonna were circulating. Puffy and changed features, she was literally unrecognizable. The cruel comments rocketed on social networks. The most amiable hypotheses were that she was making an experimental work of her own body. The others crucified his refusal to grow old and talked about surgery botched. Big discomfort. Not in relation to the lady’s face, that’s her business, but in relation to this open bar of misogyny and ageism, this festival of insult.
When a woman decides to retouch her body, that’s up to her. We don’t have to judge. Either way, women who are in the public eye live in a trap. Those who do nothing are shouted down, and those who resort to tricks are judged. A perfect catch 22. The burqa of flesh that Nelly Arcan was talking about. Madonna therefore had a bad week. At 64, she bears the weight of appearances and that of age. Basically, a lady her age should make jam in her kitchen. Too old, too touched up to appear in public.
This subject is of particular concern to me. I passed the fateful 55 years. I know that I no longer have my place on TV, which questions me a lot.
Would I have extended my “lifespan” if I had had surgery and Botox? I do not believe. Because there is a real belief in the world of TV: that someone “old” can no longer speak to younger people. Mature and competent women (and many men) are dismissed from projects in management offices, with distressing words. And you MUST attract the public aged 25 to 54, the heart of the advertising target. Is this prejudice valid, when, anyway, young people are turning away from the small screen en masse? Are the broadcasters working against the common good, which would like all generations to rub shoulders, for the good of all?
The host Marie-Claude Barrette had Thursday in an interview1 these clear words: “We talk a lot about being more inclusive with cultural communities or different bodies, but we are not inclusive with the age of the audience we are targeting. Nor with age at all. And, coincidentally, the law of double standards hits hard here. We’re tough on women aging on screen. Our appearance no longer belongs to us: it belongs to society.
Is current intersectional feminism concerned with issues raised by ageism towards women? “All minorities”, but not that of age. However, aging is the lot of all and, more violently, of all.
There is something profoundly neoliberal about this way of seeing the question of age as an individual responsibility. Botox, injections, fillers, surgery are a way to privatize aging, to prolong our market value. Care is an investment in our own commodity. It will however be necessary to think of aging differently: not an individual fall, but a collective and universal phenomenon, demographic, social, political.
If we accustom the eye – and the discourse – to seeing and hearing different ages rubbing shoulders in the media and in society, a normality would settle in. In the meantime, a woman who looks her age should expect to be invisible.
As I have already written, Quebec society is particularly hard on its old people. It was during the pandemic, with the most vulnerable seniors, whom we left to die in indifference and whom, despite the Herron residence scandal, we still ignore today. But the qualifier “old”, in the media, showbiz and in more and more fields, tends to apply early, from the age of 55. “OK BOOMER”, this contemptuous interjection very 2020 did not fall from the sky. “Shut up, Grandpa, to the garage!” »
Age is a boundary. We don’t like 80-year-olds, but neither do those who are aging. It’s very telling. A society that thinks of itself in closed age groups, in impermeable generations, tells us that it doesn’t care about dialogue. The past, the experience, the durability are not desirable. The past is obsolete. Old stones or old skins; your fate is precarious. The acceleration of the speed of replacement of generations and their categorization tells us that the pace is not about to slow down. Millennials, fear the worst: the Zs will be ruthless with you…
Ageism is a plague. Madonna and Marie-Claude Barrette have understood everything, but react differently. The first flees forward, and that is its privilege. The other, without being naive, calls on society to show more openness and empathy. I am resolutely #teamMarieClaude.