The limits of internal self-perception as the sole arbiter of truth
Glosswitch notes a certain lack of cordiality toward women who forget how to be young.
Being an older women is, by all accounts, grim. It’s not just that women in their fifties are hit hardest by the gender pay gap, with most drives for pay parity aimed at their younger countertparts. Nor is it simply that, to quote a recent Guardian correspondent, older women “face daily insinuations in the media that we are ugly”. As women get old, their age is seen to cast a shadow over every contribution they make and every belief they hold.
As shown by the recent furore over Germaine Greer lecturing at Cardiff University, it’s not enough to disagree with an older woman. One must cast her as “a dinosaur” facing “a slow and painful extinction”.
True story. As I’ve mentioned before, all this disdainful use of the label “second-wave” is very thinly veiled “fuck off and die you disgusting old hag.”
You would think, then, that younger feminists would champion the cause of older women. “Help the aged”, as Jarvis Cocker sang in a song only some people will remember, “’cos one day you’ll be older too”. To which, alas, the standard younger feminist response seems to be “no, I won’t. I’ll identify my way out of it.” Unfortunately older women have come to symbolise everything that contemporary feminism seeks to deny: biological necessity, the body, the limits of internal self-perception as the sole arbiter of truth. These women let themselves get old! How could they have been so stupid? Ageing is such a deeply unimaginative, essentialist thing to do!
Right? Right? Why don’t people get to “identify as” young? Why is it that age is still taken as a brute fact while sex/gender is taken as the opposite? Why isn’t internal self-perception decisive for all categories?
Asking that question is one of my Listed Crimes. I still don’t know the answer though.
I passively identified as young until just a couple of years ago, then one day woke up and found myself on the wrong side of a line labelled ‘old’.
I say passively because I never really felt I was getting old. No kids. Hobbies and interests that were perceived as younger. I didn’t physically look my age and had few serious aches and pains. Then a pile of severe stress for several years, eye sight that plunged off a cliff in two years, a knee injury and employing a bunch of very bright energetic young things at work…
Suddenly, old! Attitude certainly helps delay the inevitable, but you young things mark my words. Your bodies will have their brutish way with you eventually. Now get off my lawn.
Thinking what they’re thinking again …
“Well, we understand what age is, blah, blah, blah, so it really is a fact. But we don’t understand what sex/gender really is, which means we have no facts, so you must simply accept what we say it is, unquestioningly, or you are responsible for the genocide of trans people.”
I know I keep beating that drum, but I heard a podcast this weekend with a trans woman once again making the link between Greer’s comments and the murders of trans people. What a remarkably efficient and effective way to completely negate someone’s thoughts, words, and very being, to make them complicit in, if not entirely responsible for, murders.
“Stop all discourse! We have a show-stopper here!”
I used to think when I got older, things would be better because I would be able to be a person instead of a body. I was, unfortunately, quite attractive when I was young – I say unfortunately because that subjected me to all sorts of abuse from men who thought that meant I should belong to them, and it also meant I was dismissed as an air head, in spite of not being an air head (it would almost certainly have been worse if I had been blonde).
Now I’m older, and it seems I somehow ceased to exist somewhere along the line – wherever it is that society perceived I had crossed the line from young to old. It is now equally difficult to get things done because many people are totally capable of looking past me, even people who wanted to own me a few years ago.
I’ve suspected that many people who embrace the anti-second wave rhetoric do so to as a way of holding on to their perceived youthfulness. But then I’m cynical and often unwilling to make charitable assumptions.
Oh, it’s not cynical, Jennifer. It’s the truth. And it’s an ugly truth that will provoke SCREAMING if you dare suggest any young person is indulging in it.
But they are. I did it too, even though I wasn’t fully conscious of why at the time. Gay male culture mirrors the most pathological power relations of hetero patriarchy pretty closely. Denigrating older people and finding thinly plausible excuses for why your nastiness has a legitimate point is a universal pastime of young, attractive people who know somewhere, deep down, that today’s pretty won’t be with them forever. They’re scared as hell of it.
TLDR; it’s Chill Girl-ism.
It’s certainly become increasingly popular over the years/decades/centuries for the new generation to salivate over the demise of the old, and there’s some justification for it.
“You people” wrecked the world that I am becoming an adult in, and “you people” are trying to keep it that way. “Your” lies, “your” evil deeds, and so forth…
Explains but doesn’t excuse this kind of behavior… these whatever wavers are still full of shit. The scariest opponents of women have always been other women.
Arguably the same could be said for my/our generation and the one before that and the one before that…
Being at the very very end of the baby boomers I have actually been told twice now that my generation is hogging all the good jobs and that we’ll be a massive burden for the young in retirement. Both also arguably true and also a bit like inverse privilege. I didn’t cause it and there’s not much I can do about it other than support policies that try to spread the burden.
Identifying is young is not as outlandish as it seems. Its a thing. I provide accounting services and business advice to a community based aged and disability services provider. Its provides food services , information and referral, transport and home visits.
They are devoting a lot of thought to rebranding/renaming their Seniors’ Hall particularly and their services generally. Despite a demographic surge of ageing baby-boomers, demand for their services is dropping rapidly.
Rob @#8: I saw one Gen-X writer who literally said the Baby Boomers should simply lay down and die. We have been blamed for everything from the fossil fuel culture to plastics in the ocean to “greed is good” (Sorry, that was brought to us by the folks who elected Ronald Reagan – baby boomer’s parents). I expect we will soon be held responsible for other things that pre-existed us, like the Peloponnesian War, the Salem witch trials, and the crucifixion of Baby Jesus while he lay sleeping in his manger.
We are, in short, the EVIL generation, a generation the like of which has never existed before and likely will never exist again. Never mind all the noble causes we fought for; those were erased by the fact that we grew up and became part of the problem.
Well, Millennials don’t like Gen-Xers any more than they like Boomers. So that Gen-Xer will soon get a taste of hyr own vitriol.
@11
They’re already getting it from me…
I’m a Gen Xer, and grew up *between* waves, but because of that was very much aware that where we had equality when I was a kid was very much because of what the feminists had demanded. (Of course, I also was surrounded by a lot of assumption that equality was pretty much normal now, racism and sexism were on their way out and we didn’t need to fight anymore. That sure turned out not to be true.)
But, you know, the Millennials and some Xers are always joking about needing an adult or not being able to adult to day, so they ought to be on board with people being agefluid or transgenerational.
Remember Don’t trust anyone over 30!?
Remember when the Boomer’s parents (or, for those of us born toward the end of the Boom, grandparents,) were responsible for All The Bad?
(Then they turned into The Greatest Generation.)
Haha, but you see, people DO get to identify as young — back when I was online dating a lot, I was frequently informed by men almost twice my age (and a couple of decades older than my posted desired age range) that they are as youthful as 20-year-olds, sometimes even with some (very much unsolicited) details of their sexual functioning as proof! People who matter (and men are raised from infancy to believe that they are the ones who matter) get to identify as whatever they feel inside, and everyone else’s perceptions to the contrary are wrong (and oppressive, and need to be corrected). It’s probably very TERFy of me to imply that this phenomenon might also account for at least some portion of certain transwomen’s vocal insistence that they ARE women in ALL ways and you shut up!
Of course I remember that. I have long since given away that I am over 50. But…one big difference is that Baby Boomer parents weren’t rushing to agree with them. This is one of the worst things I have seen, is that we have forgotten our own history, and many in our generation are so eager to agree that we are terrible, horrible, the worst there has ever been.
And, if you go back and check it out, there was a lot of tongue-in-cheek in the never trust anyone over 30. A lot of students were working side by side with their professors on the issues that mattered. We meant it, but at the same time, we didn’t quite mean it, if you know what I mean. We were questioning the values of the older generation, but that didn’t mean we automatically rejected those people in that generation who shared our values (of course, some of us did, but that’s true in every generation).
I was born in 1960. That makes me too young to be a boomer by most definitions, and too young to be a Gen-Xer. Which probably informs my mistrust of anyone who take the generations heuristic too seriously: we are not, after all, periodical cicadas. The generational heuristic is slightly more accurate than astrology, but only slightly.
Arg. Too OLD to be a Gen-Xer. Need more coffee. Or geritol.
Chris, it looks like we are the same age. I’ve never had anyone tell me I was too young to be a Boomer? I have always been lumped with the Boomers, because the dispute over cutoff seems to happen around 1964. But…that being said, I have less in common with early Boomers than with early Xers, so I do think your main point stands…what does it mean to lump a group of people together when they span 20 years, and expect to find the same characteristics?
At least with the Baby Boom, there is some legitimacy to the idea of the higher growth rate beginning and ending, but still, to assume we are all alike is…ignorant and insulting.
US Census bureau uses 1964. A number of pundits who’ve built careers on discussing the Boomers use 1960. The basic definition is of a protracted spike in births following, and partly as a result of, the end of World War Two., and sustained by a semi-socialist economy for a decade or so after. My parents were 5 and 10 years old in 1945, so it’s not like they were just waiting for the war to end to start boinking.
The earliest boomers are biologically old enough to be my parents. I think the whole notion of the baby Boom writ large as a “generation” is special pleading.
I agree that the the Baby Boomers as a demographic is a pretty useless classification – especially if they extend the label up to 1964.
I was born in 1957 – late enough that I never had to risk polio (the vaccine was already available) but early enough that I had to suffer most other so-called ‘childhood diseases’. Late enough that I was vaccinated against tuberculosis; and with a father young enough that his life was saved by antibiotics when he caught TB in his teens; but old enough that his mother died of TB a couple of years earlier. Early enough that my parents were heavily influenced by the propaganda to raise large families to replace those slaughtered in the two world wars; early enough to have grown up surrounded by a cohort of women with no men, having lost them to WWI. Early enough to have lived through women’s fight for access to work that they had been doing during WWII, until they were discarded in favour of demobilised returning men and disbarred on account of their sex.
I’m old enough that I was thoroughly grown up and a parent several times over before it was finally, reluctantly, acknowledged that women don’t cede all rights to restrict someone else’s access to their own bodies on marriage. Old enough to remember all sexual orientations other than vanilla heterosexuality being regarded as mental illness.
And I’m old enough to remember the big fights during the seventies, and subsequent decades, between older women and younger women about what was/is important for feminists to fight for.
Bearing in mind that the following is my own perception, as a female-bodied person raised in and socialised to English cultural norms. Each generation builds on what the previous generation has achieved. For my grandmothers’ generation, when ordinary working women literally had nothing, then focus had to be on the major issues – suffrage, property rights, access to children after divorce, that sort of thing. I used to hear some of them complain that my mother’s generation didn’t know how lucky they were, that the older women had already won the big fights, why did the younger women need to waste their energy on frivolous stuff like the right to choose to stay in paid employment on marriage? Why did they need ‘equal pay’ when they had the option not to work? Weren’t they lucky, being able to stay at home and be looked after by a man? I think that many of the older women, having a sense of how fragile the status quo was, how easily gains which had been hard-won could be taken away if the people – men – in power got upset, were terrified that their daughters would ask for one thing too many and in retaliation all rights would be rescinded once more. How dare the younger women rock the boat by making further demands?!
Anyway, my mother’s generation, supported by enough of their elders, managed to build on the gains made, and (amongst other things) won the right to be employed even if they were married, won the right to have their earnings taken into account when negotiating a mortgage or a loan (but a woman still needed a male guarantor when taking out a loan, even when I was an adult), won the right of access to contraception even if they weren’t married, and won the right to end a pregnancy on their own terms.
My generation, supported by enough of the older women who didn’t think our demands frivolous compared to their own battles, won the right to say no to sex in marriage, the legal right to equal pay for equal work (even though employers still manage to exploit loopholes to avoid paying women what they deserve), legal access to previously forbidden careers, the removal of homosexual orientation from mental illness lists, etc. and raised daughters to adulthood who, for the first time, could assume as a matter of course that they were equal to their brothers and that any discrimination was morally, ethically and legally dubious.
However, in a way my grandmothers’ generation was right – women assuming equality by right seems to have been the ‘step too far’ that they envisioned; the backlash has been horrendous. A particular cohort of old men, it seems, were happy to feel themselves magnanimous in doling out favours to the ‘little women’; perhaps they did think that the ‘pretty young things’ would look more favourably upon them if they handed out a few concessions. But a whole generation who think that they are the equal of men? Wasn’t it bad enough fighting off competition from their sons and grandsons, whilst keeping just enough rights from their sisters that the latter weren’t a threat? How could they cope with an entire generation, instead of half, who were after the power they had wielded by right for so long?! So they started poisoning the minds of the younger generations of men, blaming competition from their sisters for the lack of access to the best education and careers, subtly ensuring that the true cause – a generation of men raised in an unequal world, hanging on to power with a death grip – would be ignored.
So we have the situation today, where young women are finding it particularly hard to build on the gains made by their feminist forbears, but instead of recognising the true cause of their woes – the intransigence of the hidden male establishment – they are blaming the generations of women who fought before them, for daring to ask “What is really important to fight for?” And, since older feminists can recognise that LGBT rights tend to coat-tail on those granted to women (because LGBT prejudice is an outgrowth of misogyny) and so don’t put them centre-front of their agenda, younger women have grabbed onto LGBT rights as a way of having their own cause. With marriage equality being the last bastion to fall for gay people, it seems that only trans issues remain.
Young feminists are fighting about trans issues because they want their own rallying-cry to distinguish them from their predecessors, and because they haven’t noticed what the real enemy are doing.
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NZ defines the Baby Boomers thus (Department of Statistics). Because it is a demographic surge, it will vary from country to country.