After turning 40, I found a new power and confidence within myself as a woman. But until a couple of years ago, I was terrified of ageing.
It’s no surprise that so many women are. Western society is so structural in its ageism, from the vocabulary we use, to how people are depicted on film and TV, to advertising and magazine covers (and lack thereof). Getting older is a rigid shorthand for being less capable, valuable and desirable.
I found my own perception of ageing shifting after taking up competitive powerlifting in my late thirties. This made me realise that age wasn’t about a steady erosion of the self. That actually, there are more important and useful things than aesthetics – physical ability and/or personal achievement being one of them. Seeing older women at sporting events really underscored that everything we’ve been told about ageing is mostly wrong. Watching a 70-year woman do a 100-kg deadlift is a beautiful two-finger salute to a society that writes people off just because of their age.
My change in mindset also came from the ongoing grassroots movement to increase representation and visibility of older women who are over 40 and beyond – just by role modelling different life choices from career to fashion choices.
Women in their 50s in particular have been lighthouses of hope, from discussing the confidence they feel in this decade to educating and removing stigma around seismic life changes such as menopause.
However, while this newfound self-assurance I’ve felt in my 40s is great, it is also extremely depressing to realise that women are still at ground zero when it comes to proper representation.
Take body size, for instance. Celebrities are hardly a representation of ordinary people – even though their bodies and aesthetics are pushed as the gold standard of how people should look. But for older women, the criteria is even narrower. Older female celebrities are usually only given space if they somehow seem to defy time, and if they have an extremely slim and toned body.
The recent headlines around Demi Moore releasing a swimwear collection clearly demonstrated this. “Demi Moore refuses to let old age stop her from being sexy”; “Demi Moore, 59, showcases ageless figure…”; “Demi Moore says she’s determined to stay ‘sexy’ and ‘desirable’ as she turns 60”. Similar headlines follow Jennifer Lopez, Jennifer Aniston and Davina McCall, all aged in their fifties.
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It places an impossible set of expectations on older women. “If they can do it, you can too!” the headlines seem to suggest. But most people don’t have the time, genetics or money that celebrities have, nor is it wise to pursue it.
While writing my book Stronger, I learned that the constant pursuit of slimness for women, usually through restrictive eating, can be incredibly damaging health-wise for older women. Not least because it can create disordered eating, but because it also distracts women from focusing on activities and habits that can help them in later life such as building strong bones and good heart health.
It’s not just the world of celebrity, however. While it’s heartening to see older women moving into the influencer space on social media, there is still a woeful lack of representation in two main sectors. The first is body size – something I realised when I was pulling together a list of 40 and 50+ influencers for people to follow. There are some incredible body positive influencers in their 20s and 30s, but I struggled to find older women who weren’t also super lean body types.
The second was that women of colour were massively under-represented across the board in advertising campaigns and social media.
It feels like deja vu. My career has been spent working towards gender equality and better representation across marginalised communities. I’ve seen how organisations and brands think a box is ticked as long as they have a woman. Unconscious bias and structural racism meant this often defaulted to a white woman. The impact on women of other intersections – particularly Black women – was hugely negative, and it’s something that has only started being properly addressed in the last two years.
That change doesn’t appear to have filtered through to older women who identify with those intersections. While chatting to Sam Baker, host of The Shift podcast, we discussed how brands and companies think that all they need to do is cast an older person – they don’t think about the diversity or nuance within that.
Although it is exhausting to have to continually push for better representation, I know that it’s essential work. When I interviewed the anti-ageing activist and photographer Alex Rotas, she helped to reframe ageing as a time of immense liberation and freedom – one in which we are not held back by expectations or old ways of thinking that don’t really serve us. I wish I had known getting older meant freedom; it would have reframed ageing entirely.
Freedom also means being able to be exactly the person you want, without facing judgement about it, or having your age wielded as a weapon against you. The Demi Moores of the world are glorious, but there are a lot of other ways of celebrating older women too – and I think we’ve more than earned our right to see that represented fully and fairly.
I'm 47 and can't help thinking: should I have had another child?