Depicting women over 40 as old and frumpy isn’t just wrong, it’s stupid - Women's Agenda

Depicting women over 40 as old and frumpy isn’t just wrong, it’s stupid

Facebook is probably the website I visit more often than any other site each day. I click in and out at least every couple of hours, both for work and for personal reasons. I rarely even see the ads down the left hand side, but when I do, I’ve noticed recently that Facebook is knows that I’m over 40 and it pretty much has only two kinds of ads to serve me – how to look younger, and how to meet a man who doesn’t mind I’m over 40.

It’s either irritating or mildly amusing, depending on my mood, but surely it’s also a bit stupid? I’m older, more sure of what I want, have reached some level of success, and have disposable income to spend. And the best they can come up with is products or services to disguise those achievements? As if my failure to hold on to youth is something I should be ashamed of, and that shame overshadows everything else I do and think?

Why is it such a prevailing view that women are not useful or visible when they’re no longer young?

This is not just Facebook and not just me.

Millers is an online clothing store with a large customer base across Australia and New Zealand, they recently conducted a survey of 4,298 women over 40. The results are pretty stark.

Three quarters (76 per cent) want to see women their age appropriately represented in popular media like advertising, fashion spreads, movies and television shows; nearly half of those women said this is very important to them. However, 80 per cent of them believe this is simply not happening, describing the way they’re portrayed as ‘old’, ‘elderly’, ‘unimportant’, ‘frumpy’, ‘invisible’, ‘unfashionable’ and ‘dowdy’.

Despite that, 80 per cent said they feel younger than their age and 61 per cent said they are more youthful than their mothers were at their age. That response raises an interesting question: how do they perceive their age? Why would a 45-year-old woman feel that she feels younger than 45? What does she think she should feel like at 45? Old? Past it? No longer relevant? Why would she think that? Is it precisely because women over 40 are so often depicted as old, unimportant, frumpy and invisible.

Jane McNally, Brand Director for Millers, said the survey clearly indicates that women 40+ feel misrepresented, despite the fact that they are proud of their age and who they are.

Over the years we’ve struggled to find models through the usual casting agencies and we’ve always wondered why this age group is so under-represented, particularly when we see so many beautiful women in our stores.

These women have given life, love and care to others for decades, and they’re not embarrassed about their age or how they look. From beauty and entertainment, to fashion and film, the messaging in the market is telling women they should look younger and hide their years. We need to proudly recognise all women over 40 and celebrate their beauty, vibrancy and character – wrinkles and all.

I’m not sure if men feel the same way, I suspect they do feel some sense of loss when they realise that youth has gone, but I’d be surprised if they feel the same sense of invisibility that older women do. The pressure put on women to be young, white, pretty and slim is not applied to men in the same way.

There is a natural sadness in getting older, particularly if your life hasn’t turned out the way you thought it would. Some sense of loss for opportunities not taken, chances that won’t come again is normal, but the abilities and achievements still open to men over 40 are not as available to women. And that sense of erasure from cultural life, where older women are either non-existent, or are simply caricatures of the Mum, bitter old battleaxe or crone archetypes is terribly diminishing to women who still have decades of fulfilling life to live.

The Millers research found that, despite the fact that around six in 10 women regularly feel valued (60 per cent) and respected (65 per cent) by their family and friends, the majority (78 per cent) said they have felt invisible when engaging with those beyond their close circles, with 15 per cent regularly feeling this way. Almost a third (31 per cent) also said they have felt discriminated against because of their age.

Retailers lead the way in terms of places where women said they have felt ignored (65 per cent), followed by public transport and walking down the street (44 per cent), social gatherings (42 per cent) and at restaurants or cafes (33 per cent).

It’s telling that our cultural push to disregard women over 40 runs so deep that profit-driven corporations so thoroughly ignore the potential of such a lucrative market. Older women have much wider interests and desires than desperately trying to erase all evidence of their age, and they do not want invisibility as the only alternative. That should not be such a difficult concept for the cultural and consumer markets of Australia to understand.

It would be easy to dismiss this as a first world problem, mostly because it is, but we live in the first world, and more than that, we can care about such things and still have the capacity to understand the crisis in Syria, the needs of disadvantaged people in our own community and the state of the world we will be leaving for the next generation, and many other things as well.

It is, after all, one of the advantages of maturity, being able to understand the world around you in all its complexities.


 Note: Just so you know, this is not sponsored content. I thought the research was interesting and it tied into things I’ve been noticing lately, so I used it, but Women’s Agenda is not receiving any payment from Millers for this piece. 

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