The cultural critics over at Family Guy have once again aired grievances about an often ignored social issue: women and aging. Network television shows in this comedic genre often address civil rights, but the underlying points can get lost in layers of crude satire. One of the newer episodes, “Brian’s Got a Brand New Bag,” illustrates society’s contemptuous treatment of older women.
I’ll sum up what the episode summed up: Brian – the Griffin’s “middle-aged” dog – is sick of dating younger female characters and tries to date, or rather, “mate” with a “cougar” – a word that has recently entered into the cultural vernacular as an older woman who dates younger men.
Brian falls in love, realizes he can’t deal with society’s pressure on his desires, and leaves her for a younger woman – who can’t look up because she’s too busy texting, a pretty fair reflection of reality.
NBC’s 30 Rock, is another network television show that recently touched on the issue of women’s aging. One of the show’s female leads, Jenna Maroney (Jane Krakowski), has a mental meltdown when she realizes she has been cast as a mother instead of a daughter in a TV pilot. The level-headed Liz Lemon (Tina Fey) tries to tell Jenna that a woman “can be like Madonna and cling to youth with golem arms, or can be like Meryl Streep and embrace age with elegance.” Jenna chooses the latter, but not before a desperate attempts at anti-aging which included taping her face to avoid wrinkles and repeatedly referencing Facebook.
The point of such satire seems pretty basic: most women only have a certain amount of time before society renders them unappealing. Western civilization tends to bow to the taste makers of mass media, where youth and sex sell and old age is anything but celebrated – especially for women. Sure, there is an old and wise academic lady or a middle-aged heroine thrown in here and there, but unfortunately the majority of female stars are touched up with cosmetic surgery and Botox. Paradoxically, older men are more likely to be seen in their natural skin, respected, and even worshipped.
In Professor Peg Cruikshank’s Women and Aging course last semester we discussed why women often face deeper ageist discrimination than men. One of the biggest reasons is that women lose a whole lot of social value when they go from being idealized virginal figures or care-giving mothers to, as Cruikshank put it, “grumpy, frumpy, sexless and uninteresting.”
In contrast, it’s common to hear that men only get more handsome as they age. It seems like there is a rusting hulk of ideology from the 1950s lurking around; just in case women forget that even though we’re allowed to work, our primary value is still in child-bearing and making our men happy – if, you know, we date men – and making them happy includes looking fresh.
The women I see portrayed most predominately in media are 25-years-old or under with lots of makeup, lacking clothes and hips. The image may invite lewd suggestion, but definitely not respect; it beckons, “come get me: I’m ripe for silence, domesticity, reproduction.” The messages imply that all we’re good for is harvesting, and when we’re too old for that we disappear, a new Miley Cyrus every couple years establishing a new norm for women to follow. When we hit that dreaded age of menopause we are free to become nagging and irritable old hags or cute little patronized grandmothers; our “fruitfulness” is over.
How to change this superficial perspective is daunting in this era of technology and consumerism. As we distance ourselves from each other’s faces and learn to satisfy every need with artificial products, the wisdom and experience once valued in older populations has faded – advice from commercials and Blackberries at every turn. As women’s socially-defined attractiveness diminishes, so, supposedly, does our need to exist. Apparently at 40 our date lists get shorter and by 60 we are expected to be world class knitters.
Maybe ?Family Guy? could have ended without Brian’s disdain at the generation he didn’t belong to. Maybe they could have left out the Milk of Magnesia jokes, or the trip to the hospital for a hip broken in the bedroom (on a side note, I have heard multiple times that women don’t even brush the height of their sex lives until middle age). Regardless, it’s great that a contemporary mainstream voice recognized women above 50, with commentary quieting stating that hierarchies are unnecessary and that there is value in every age – even the one without iPhones.
In the words of Liz Lemon, “two paths: Meryl Streep. or Madonna.”