The Pleasure of Aging
All aging is successful, not just the “sporty” version. Otherwise, you’re dead. —Ashton Applewhite
I turned 52 this week. “Don’t worry,” a friend said. “You don’t look older than 42.” I used to take this as a compliment. Beginning in my thirties, I worried that each encroaching year meant the best was behind me. I’m not alone in that thinking. Our culture is youth-obsessed and our economic engine churns on anti-aging messaging. Thankfully, I’ve been disabused of these ideas by my good friend, Ashton Applewhite. Ashton is the author of This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism and she gave a phenomenal TED Talk in 2016 called Let’s End Ageism. Over the years, we have had several conversations, many of them on the dance floor, about the toll ageism takes on our planet, our communities, and our relationships to our own pleasure.
Aging is inevitable. Ageism is a function of a misguided society. Ageism, according to Ashton, is anytime someone assumes we’re “too old” or “too young” for something—a task, a relationship, a job, a haircut—instead of finding out who we are and what we’re capable of. Ageism cuts both ways, it relegates both older and younger people to second-class status and has enormous consequences for all of us—from teenagers to centenarians.
One way to counter ageism is through intergenerational friendships. Mixing age groups makes for better living, more sustainable communities, and it can bring more creativity and inspiration through different perspectives. Ashton and her partner Bob have modeled this for me. In pre-pandemic times, a group of us would gather monthly at their house to mingle and, at midnight, we would head out to a club. The age range was rarely less than fifty years, with people in their twenties and others in their seventies. These dance nights have shown me that I don’t have to stop doing the thing I love but that I will want to listen closely to my body and modify a few things on occasion. At the end of the night, Ashton always takes a hot bath and ices her knees.
“Nothing stays the same,” she told me recently. “If you are measuring your prowess, your identity, your whatever, by what it once was, you're not going to be in great shape for whatever kind of transition lies ahead.” She likes to use the phrase “old person in training” which is simply acknowledging the fact that someday we’re going to get old. By connecting to that future, older you at whatever distance feels manageable—she can even be a distant speck on the horizon—we get off the hamster wheel of age denial.
Ageism runs smack into one of the core principles of pleasure: the acceptance and approval of the present moment. I have learned from Ashton that when I look in the mirror and wish for a more youthful reflection, or when I imagine the older version of myself as somehow inferior, I am setting myself up for fear and disappointment. The idea that we peak in our 20s or 30s and slide downhill is not only damaging to our emotional wellbeing, it’s also erroneous. People are happiest at the beginning and the ends of their lives. No matter how apprehensive we may be about aging, nobody actually wants to be any younger. Olders experience fewer social anxieties and are generally more accepting of themselves and uncomfortable emotions. All of which is to say, there is a lot of pleasure to be had in our later years.
And speaking of pleasure and aging, Ashton says, “One of the yuckiest age stereotypes is that horrible phrase, the sexless senior.” Ageism also blinds us to the sexuality of youngers.
“We don't stop singing, we don't stop looking at art,” she told me. “Why would we stop being sexual? We always find ways to do versions of the things that are important to us. Why would we stop wanting pleasure of whatever sort? We don’t stop doing the things we love. We just modify them to accommodate what our aging bodies need.”
“For many of us, sex gets better and better because we stop measuring sex by the number of orgasms,” she told me. “Think back to the sex you had in your 20s. Was it the best sex you had? Hell, no. Staying sexually engaged as we age means embracing a broader notion of what sex is and the forms it can take.”
But what of our aging bodies and of our health concerns, I wondered.
“It's not that the scary shit isn't real,” she says, “it's that our fears are way out of proportion to reality.” Her research bears this out. A vast majority of us will end our day living interdependently (a term she uses to remind us that no one is truly independent) and enjoying our lives and in the world in all kinds of interesting ways.
“Even as age strips us of things we cherished—physical strength, beloved friends, toned flesh,” Ashton writes, “we grow more content.”
If we see aging as an opportunity to practice being in full approval of ourselves at every moment, we are building our capacity for pleasure. “Accepting our age paves the way to acknowledging it with ease, even pride,” Ashton reminds us. For me, today, that means looking in the mirror and loving up on my wrinkles, the sunspots from my glorious summers, the way my limbs call out to be stretched and moved gently. Today, it means I claim every year I have ever been and every future year that I might be so lucky to experience.
Institute for Pleasure Studies
Change starts with language. Ashton uses the words “olders” and “youngers” because there is no number at which one becomes “an old person”. Olders and Youngers are nouns, value-neutral, and it emphasizes that age is a continuum. There is no old/young divide.
Here are a few tips from This Chair Rocks to help you identify ageism:
If you're not sure something is ageist or not, think about whether the same language or image would be appropriate if the situation involved someone significantly older or younger. When does an amorously entwined couple get downgraded from hot to adorable?
Don’t compliment someone by telling her she’s “different” -- fitter, stronger, more stylish -- from other people her age. She can only accept this compliment at the expense of other women her age and it implies you’ll stop admiring this attribute or capacity when it stops being exceptional.
Watch out for sanitized or romanticized views of aging: depictions of sexless, placidly smiling older on a porch swing or doing split in a dance competition or being the token wise elder.
Don’t use “still” when describing a routine activity, because it suggests that the activity makes the person an outlier. Older people are not still driving, going to the gym and the office, traveling, having sex, etc.
Don’t use adjectives for older people that you wouldn’t apply to younger ones, like “spry” and “feisty” and “kindly.” Try “active,” “opinionated,” and “kind.” Children are “little,” “cute,” and “childlike.”
The next time someone asks how old you are, tell them the truth. Then ask why they wanted to know, or what feels different now that they have a number, and why.
Assume capacity, not incapacity. Speak to an older person the same way you would to a younger one. Offer help if it seems appropriate, but don’t insist.
Train yourself to notice when everyone in a group is the same age, and unless there’s some legitimate reason, speak up about it.
The next time you wonder whether an outfit, or an attitude, or an outing is age-appropriate, reconsider the question.
Start or join a consciousness-raising group around age bias.
Go deeper:
Let’s End Ageism, Ashton’s fabulous TED talk will change the way you think about aging and how to spot ageism, the last acceptable ‘ism’.
This Chair Rocks: Ashton’s Blog includes, “Yo, is this Ageist?” where you can submit your questions. Her lastest is a challenge, one that I am still contemplating, a year of letting our hair grow grey.
Good Listening:
Death Sex and Money, the podcast by Anna Sales, brings us these stories from life over 60.
Been There Done That with actress Joanne Allen, real-life stories of and by the baby boom generation.
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