Fear of Fifty (2 page)

But fifty is different for a woman than it is for a man. Fifty is a more radical kind of passage to the other side of life, and this was something we could not share. Let him make fun of “new age” contemplation. I needed it, as have women back to antiquity. Venus de Milo contemplates herself turning into the Venus of Wiltendorf—if she doesn't watch out.

You tell yourself you ought to be beyond vanity. You read feminist books and contemplate falling in love with Alice B. Toklas. But years of brainwashing are not so easy to forget. The beauty trap is deeper than you thought. It's not so much the external pressures as the internal ones that bind. You cannot imagine yourself middle-aged—cute little you who always had “it” even when overweight.

For years I had stayed legally single, fearing both the boredom and the entrapment of something not accidentally called “wedlock”; now I thought the most difficult challenge of all was to keep my mental and spiritual independence while inside a nurturing relationship. This meant constant negotiation of priorities, constant noisy fights, constant struggles for power. If you were lucky enough to feel safe enough to fight and struggle, then you were lucky indeed. If you felt loved enough to scream and yell and exercise your power openly, the marriage had a fifty-fifty chance.

I had come to such a marriage only because I had come to a place where I was not afraid of being alone. I discovered that I liked my own company better than dating. Treasuring my solitude, secure in my ability to provide for myself and my daughter, I suddenly met a soul mate and a friend.

Famous for writing about relationships that flamed with sex then petered out, I surprised myself with this one.

Conversation ignited. The sex was at first disastrous—detumescence at inopportune moments and condoms limply abandoned on the counterpane. So much fear of commitment on both sides that ecstasy seemed irrelevant. Instead, we talked and talked. I found myself liking this person before I knew I loved him—which was in itself a new thrill. I would run away—to California, to Europe—only to call him from far-flung places. We felt our connection so strongly that it seemed we had been together all our lives.

Has anyone dared to write about the disasters of safe sex in the age of AIDS? Has anyone dared to say that most men would rather wear condoms around their necks to ward off the evil eye than put them on their cocks? Has anyone recorded the traumas of midlife lovers who have been through everything from fifties technical virginity to sixties sexual gluttony to seventies health and fitness (you met your lovers at Nautilus Clubs) to eighties decadence (long limousines and short dresses and men who impersonated Masters of the Universe) to nineties terror of AIDS warring with natural horniness?

And then there are the eternal questions of love and sex: Can there be friendship between men and women as long as the hormones rage and rule? How is sex related to love—and love to sex? Are we truly pigeonholed in our sexuality—or does society alone insist on this? What is “straight”? What is “gay”? What is “bi”? And does any of it matter deep in one's soul? Shouldn't we get rid of these labels in an attempt to be really open to ourselves and to each other?

What was happening to me in the second part of my life? I was getting myself back and I liked that self. I was getting the humor, the intensity, the balance I had known in childhood. But I was getting it back with a dividend. Call it serenity. Call it wisdom. I knew what mattered and what did not. Love mattered. Instant orgasm did not.

 

I look around me at fifty and see the women of my generation coping with getting older. They are perplexed, and the answer to their perplexity is not another book on hormones. The problem goes deeper than menopause, face-lifts, or whether to fuck younger men. It has to do with the whole image of self in a culture in love with youth and out of love with women as human beings. We are terrified at fifty because we do not know what on earth we can become when we are no longer young and cute. As at every stage of our lives, there are no role models for us. Twenty-five years of feminism (and backlash), then feminism again—and we still stand at the edge of an abyss. What to become now that our hormones have let us go?

It may seem that, in the last few years, there has been a spate of empowering books for midlife women, but how much have things really changed? Can we so easily undo fifty years of training for midlife self-annihilation?

 

I figure that if I'm confused, you are too. After all, we are the whiplash generation (patent pending):
²
raised to be Doris Day, yearning in our twenties to be Gloria Steinem, then doomed to raise our midlife daughters in the age of Nancy Reagan and Princess Di. Now it's Hillary Rodham Clinton, thank goddess. But sexism (like athlete's foot) still flourishes in dark, moist places.

What a roller-coaster ride it's been! Our gender went in and out of style as hems went up and down and up and down and up again, as feminism rose and fell and rose and fell and rose again, as motherhood was blessed then damned then blessed then damned then blessed again.

Raised in the era of illegal abortion (when a high school or college pregnancy meant the end of ambition), we grew up into the Sexual Revolution—an essentially fake media event that was promptly replaced by good old-fashioned American Puritanism when the AIDS epidemic hit. The tragedy of losing a whole generation of some of the most talented among us was predictably turned into an excuse to bash the life-force and her messenger, Eros. Sex was out, was in, was out, was in, was out—a new twist on what Anthony Burgess called “the old in-out” in
A Clockwork Orange.

The point was: We whiplashers could depend on nothing in our erotic or social lives.

Think of the advice we got growing up. Then think of the world we grew up into!

If we'd been stupid enough to live the lives our mothers and grandmothers made proverbs of, we'd all be bag ladies, scavenging in garbage pails. If we'd been stupid enough to live the lives the magazines and movies of the sixties and seventies recommended, we'd all be dead of AIDS.

Raised to believe that men would protect and support us, we often found we had to protect and support them. Raised to believe we should care for our children full time (at least when they were little), we often found Donna Reed motherhood a luxury few of us could afford. Raised to believe that femininity consisted of softness and conciliation, we often found that our very survival—in divorce, in work, even in our homes—depended upon our revising those ideas of femininity and fiercely sticking up for our own needs.

We found ourselves always torn between the mothers in our heads and the women we needed to become simply to stay alive. With one foot in the past and another in the future, we hobbled through first love, motherhood, marriage, divorce, careers, menopause, widowhood—never knowing what or who we were supposed to be, staking out new emotional territory at every turn—tike pioneers.

We have been pioneers in our own lives, and the price of the pioneer is eternal discomfort. The reward is the stunning sense of pride in our painfully achieved selfhood.

“I did it!” we exclaim with some shock and amazement. “I did it! You can too!”

Did men change or did women change? Or was it both? My father and grandfathers, sexists though they were, could never have abandoned their children to waltz off with younger women. They may have been pigs. Perhaps they were less than faithful. But at least they were pigs who were providers. They were in for the long haul, providing also a kind of security unknown today. Why did the generation of men who followed them have no such scruples?

Did women let them off the hook? Or did history? Or did some enormous change take place between the sexes which we still have not recognized or named?

As women grew stronger, men appeared to get weaker. Was this appearance or reality? As women got little crumbs of power, men began to act paranoid—as if we'd disabled them utterly.

Do all women have to keep silent for men to speak? Do all women have to be legless for men to walk?

The women of my generation are reaching fifty in a state of perplexity and rage. None of the things we counted on has come to pass. The ground keeps shifting under our feet. Any psychologist or psychoanalyst will tell you that the hardest thing to deal with is inconsistency. And we have known a degree of inconsistency in our personal lives that would make anyone schizophrenic. Perhaps our grandmothers were better able to cope with the expectation of oppression than we have been able to adjust to our much-vaunted freedom. And our freedom anyway is moot. Our “freedom” is still a word we can put in inverted commas to get a laugh.

For decades, we couldn't expect to take a maternity leave and get our jobs back, let alone find affordable child care. No day care, no Americans who wanted to be nannies—and yet we were (and are) penalized for hiring those who needed child-care jobs.

The dirty secret in America is that every working woman has had to break the law in order to find child care. I have broken the law. So have most of us. (Poor women use unlicensed day care and middle-class women find nannies without green cards.) Look for a woman who is squeaky clean and you'll end up with a woman who has no children. Or with a man.

With ascending expectations and a declining standard of living, we asked ourselves what on earth went wrong. Nothing went wrong. We were merely brought up in one culture and came of age in another. And now we are hitting fifty in a world that is grandstanding about feminism once again. But this time we have good reason to be skeptical.

The whiplash generation is, in its own way, a lost generation. Like spectators at a tennis game, we keep snapping our heads from side to side.

No wonder our necks hurt!

Perhaps every generation thinks of itself as a lost generation and perhaps every generation is right. Perhaps there were flappers of the twenties who longed for the security of their grandmother's lives. But the first wave of modern feminism at least carried its members along on a current of hope. And the second wave (of the late sixties and early seventies) made us dream that women's equality would soon be universal. So my classmates and I have seen women's expectations raised and dashed and raised and dashed and raised again in our not very long lives. The brevity of the cycles has been dizzying—and enraging.

The media still try to comfort us with bromides. Fifty is fabulous, we hear. We should wear hemorrhoid cream on our wrinkles and march off into the sunset popping Premarin. We should forget centuries of oppression in exchange for a new hat with “Fabulous Fifty” embroidered on the brim.

 

What about our need—women and men both—to prepare for death in a culture that mocks all spirituality as “new age” pretension? What about our need to see ourselves as part of the flow of creation? What about the deep loneliness our individualistic culture breeds? What about the dismissal of community and communal values? What about society's mockery of all activities other than getting and spending? What about our own despair in seeing liars and manipulators become rich and powerful while truth tellers are chronically outmaneuvered and fall through that porous “safety net” the liars have woven with loopholes for themselves and their children?

But most of all, what about meaning and what about spirit? These are not empty words. These are the nutrients we hunger for increasingly as we age.

“More things move,” the poet Louise Bogan wrote in her last years, “than blood in the heart.” As human beings, we long for some ritual that tells us we are part of a tribe, part of a species, part of a generation. Instead we are offered hormone replacement therapy or pep talks about how hip it is to be fabulously fifty.

Let's be clear: These pep talks insult our intelligence. We cannot so easily forget that we were raised in a world that mocked female maturity. We cannot instantly forget generations of hoary jokes about old bags, cows, yentas, witches, crones. “Menopause-lady painters” my artist-grandfather used to say about the women who shared a studio with him at the Art Students League. And I didn't even realize this remark was sexist and agist. I just dismissed the old bags—as he did—hardly knowing I was dismissing my own future.

Just because new shibboleths are broadcast over the airwaves, or printed on glossy pages, we cannot expect our images of self to be instantly healed. We are more than just consumers of magazines, television shows, makeup, face-lifts, clothes. We have inner scars, inner wounds, inner needs. We cannot be treated like chattel for fifty years and then suddenly be flattered into political compliance because it has been discovered (quite belatedly) that we vote.

The new hype trumpets that fifty is fab because the baby boom generation has reached that formerly dangerous age and we now run things—or rather our husbands and brothers do.

But I look around and see the best minds of my generation still bucking the system. Women directors are still begging male studio heads for money; women writers and editors are still pleading their cases to male CEOs; women actors are still scrambling for a handful of parts that truly reflect their lives; women artists are still paid and exhibited far less than their male counterparts; women conductors and composers are still seldom heard. Women everywhere are settling for half a loaf or even crumbs. Not losers, these women, but the fiercest and brightest. Not complainers, not whiners, and certainly not lazy, but still subject to a relentless double standard.