Ageism does its best to stereotype older women (and men) as invisible, unhappy, and dependent. The message is: "If you think life sucks now, just wait because the longer you live, the worse it's going to get." Yikes!
But Ashton Applewhite, age advocate and author of "This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism," shakes down the myths of ageism and showers listeners with the facts. You may be surprised and definitely encouraged.
Here are some facts that may surprise you:
So, put in your earbuds and listen to my interview with Ashton Applewhite.
Ageism does its best to stereotype older women (and men) as invisible, unhappy, and dependent. The message is: "If you think life sucks now, just wait because the longer you live, the worse it's going to get." Yikes!
But Ashton Applewhite, age advocate and author of "This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism," shakes down the myths of ageism and showers listeners with the facts. You may be surprised and definitely encouraged.
Here are some facts that may surprise you:
So, put in your earbuds and listen to my interview with Ashton Applewhite.
Do you feel overlooked and invisible because you're an older woman? Have you had those age jump days when you look in the mirror and swear that you're looking at your mother? Do you feel the clock ticking and wonder whether you have enough time to check off all the items on your bucket list? Hello, I'm Jane Leder and I'm the host of Older Women and Friends, a podcast about and four older women that kick stereotypes to the curb. We older women are the keepers of stories, and guests on Older Women and Friends share their stories about love, loss, dreams, friendships. But let's not kid ourselves Aging can be a messy, complex affair. But older women have been around the block a few times and learned a thing or two, and this podcast celebrates their lessons. So put in your earbuds and join me on Older Women and Friends.
Speaker 1:The episode you're about to hear originally aired on February 2nd 2023, when Older Women and Friends was just getting started, but with so many new listeners tuning in now, I thought this interview with anti-ageous mover and shaker, ashton Appelwight was worth a repost. It's such an interesting and important conversation. If you've already listened, please tell a friend or two to check it out.
Speaker 1:Ashton Appelwight is recognized as the mover and shaker in the battle against ageism, but her journey has not been linear or easy. Like so many of us, the prospect of growing old made her feel anxious and often filled her with dread, but she forged ahead. She spent some twelve years and then she wrote this Chair Rocks a Manifesto Against Ageism, a book that the Washington Post named as one of the hundred best books to read at every age. But it's one thing to read praise on a book cover and it's another to listen to the author tell her own story. So I am really, really psyched to welcome Ashton Appelwight, the author of this Chair Rocks a Manifesto Against Ageism. Hello, hello, jane, good to meet you, nice to meet you too. Well, can you talk a little bit about the kind of kid you were growing up?
Speaker 2:Well, that makes me think of my grandmother, who was not a writer but said if she was going to write a memoir she would call it as Namri Swerves. I could have sworn that my older brother, who left home at fourteen, never had another word to say to my father and then just uncovered some chatty correspondence they had when he was in his forties. So I don't trust anything about my memories and I will say my memory has always been terrible. But I was certainly a nerdy, very, very bookish kid, and I still am.
Speaker 1:How do you think your bookishness or your nerdiness affected you or primed you to be so curious about aging?
Speaker 2:You know, I think curiosity is a trait that I think most kids are curious, because they need to know what's dangerous and what's hot and you know what's literally hot, too hot to touch or whatever and I suppose conventional education bashes it out of some of them. But I think if you are a curious younger person, you tend to be a curious older person, and I very much am. I am also a generalist and I could never figure out what to be when I grew up or what to major in in college not in that order. I've never heard of a place I wouldn't want to travel to or a food with a few exceptions that I wouldn't try and sample. So I think that's my nature.
Speaker 2:I will say that if you had told me 15 years ago that I would become fascinated by aging, I would have said you what I want to think about, something sad and depressing that old people do, and what I learned was, of course, that we are aging from the minute we're born. Right to live is to age. To age is to live, and that you know it's, it's how we move through life, and that it is relevant to every domain of human endeavor this education, the workforce, health, every domain of study of you know economics, public health, biology, philosophy, you name it and the more you know, the more interesting it is, because most people are terrified to even think about it. There's always a hot moments that are or what my son's girlfriend called no shit, oh shit. Moments right like, oh, really, let me, oh, wow, you know where. You realize that it is all around us and that we tend to not see it. Did that hit your question?
Speaker 1:I think so, but I think it would be helpful if you could just give us a quick definition of age. Is some absolutely.
Speaker 2:The dictionary definition is stereotyping and prejudice on the basis of age.
Speaker 2:We are being a just any time we make an assumption about someone or a group of people based on how old we think they are, including you're too young. It's important to realize that it cuts both ways because we live in such a youth obsessed society. Older people absolutely bear the brunt of it, but it really does cast a shadow across our entire lives and I, like the. The World Health Organization launched a global campaign to combat ageism almost two years ago and I want to point out it's not the World Old People Organization, it's the World Health Organization, happy to talk about how ageist attitudes affect our health, and they have a really nice framing. They say they are aiming to change the way we think, feel and act about age and aging, because there's the idea of beliefs and of prejudices and of discrimination, which is how these ideas are embodied in policies and structures around us so that leads me perfectly to my next question, and that is what are some of the beliefs about, as you call olders in our society today?
Speaker 1:some of those myths, those stereotypes?
Speaker 2:yeah, of course a stereotype is, by definition, the notion that all people who belong to a given group are the same. And of course all stereotypes are false and misleading, but especially when it comes to age, because the nerdy way to put this, the way scientists put it, is the defining characteristic of late life is heterogeneity. The longer we live, the more different from each other we become. Every newborn is unique, of course, but you know, seven year olds have way more in common developmentally, physically, cognitively, than 27 year olds, who are way more alike than 47 year olds, and so on. So the older the person, the less the number their age reveals about them. So I would say the mother of all stereotypes is that at some point we, you know, turn into the elderly or the aged. And the V is the problem there. Right, this assumption that we, or you know those, those infuriating marketing check checklists that you know, divide the population to, you know, 18 to 23 and 23 to set 27 and so on, and then end at 60 or 65 or even 40.
Speaker 1:Right, as though everyone over that point is capable, interested in the same things, does the same stuff, when nothing, literally, could be further from the truth the thing that drives me absolutely nuts as if you're online and you're filling out your age and they have the scrolling column and to scroll all the way down in my case to 1945, seems like it takes a year, and the further down I go, the more frustrated I get is like could you guys make this a little easier, please? But that's, that's neither here nor there.
Speaker 2:I'm just grateful it goes all the way down to 1952. I mean think how much worse it would be if it didn't even include us. Now I know that's what I'm talking about now.
Speaker 1:I know some of these stereotypes are that older people are more unhappy than younger people right or have higher levels of depression.
Speaker 2:In fact, older people enjoy better mental health than young or middle aged people.
Speaker 2:There are always exceptions, of course, but that's a huge one, and you know it's part of the way aging itself affects the healthy brain.
Speaker 2:It's those, those are the psychological underpinnings of the you curve of happiness, which shows that people are happiest in childhood and then in very late life, partly because as we get older and when I started out thinking about this, I thought well, everything about growing old is obviously gonna be awful, and one of the things that must make it more awful is the death is closer and I envision, like the grim reaper this you know shadow hanging over my sad iron beds, dead. And in fact that's not the way it works for the vast majority of older people. The awareness that time is short helps us spend our time more wisely, be more careful about who we spend it with and be present in the moment, which we know is what. And kids do it because they don't have to live any other way. So that's just one finding that, you know, old people are sad and depressed. I like to point out that not only is it not the case, that's even more remarkable, given that we inhabit a culture that persistently silences and denigrates us.
Speaker 1:I know there are other stereotypes out there. Like the vast majority of people 65 and older live in nursing homes it's down to 2.5% in the United States.
Speaker 2:I think it's 3% in Canada, yeah, or that. You know we're all gonna. We can't remember you know where we put the car keys, where Alzheimer's is right around the corner, and that's not remotely true. Part of I mean most of the tiny percentage of older Americans who live in nursing homes do have severe cognitive impairment when require serious nursing care. And we're talking about nursing homes, not all senior living, right, but that fear is bad for us. As the saying goes, if you can't remember what your car keys are for, that is indeed a sign that something might be wrong. But no one knows.
Speaker 2:For sometimes I think of myself as being in the both sides of the story. Business, for example, dementia rates are declining. No, we never talk about that. Why? Because fear sells, you know, and because a scary and extreme headline and I'm guilty of this too, I'm more likely to click on that than the true story, which is most of us will muddle along in the middle. Just fine, you know, but that is, that is the true story, right? And the apprehension of that, when we are forgetful, it could be the sign of something terrible happening itself is bad for us. I'd love to quote a study to verify that. Can I, because it's one of my favorite Absolutely Mic drop propositions? The woman who has done most of the research that addresses how our attitudes towards aging affect how long and how well we will live is named Becca Levy and she has a study that shows that people she describes as people with more positive attitude towards aging I like to see people with more accurate attitudes towards aging.
Speaker 2:We need. I am no Pollyanna. There are lots of things to worry about when it comes to getting older, you know running out of money, getting sick, ending up alone. Those fears are legitimate and real, but our fears are way out of proportion to the reality, right as with Alzheimer's, and so I would say people with more accurate attitudes towards aging are less likely to develop Alzheimer's, even if they have the gene that predisposes them to the disease. That's one reason the World Health Organization is prioritizing anti-ageism campaigning.
Speaker 1:I get that because I have a mother, had a mother who had dementia, so anytime there is a complete lapse of memory, which does occur more and more often I then go into the mode of uh-oh, it's just around the corner.
Speaker 1:So reading and hearing about that kind of statistic is very heartwarming to me and I'm sure, to a lot of other people. There's something you wrote that I keep quoting now all the time, and I think it goes something like there are two universal truths, things that are going to happen to all of us. One is that we're going to lose someone or many people we love, and the other is that at least one part of our body is going to go a little wacky on us, and that just cracked me up.
Speaker 2:Well, I frame that as there are only two universal bad things about getting older, because we are so worried about this avalanche of awfulness and none of all of those bad things happen to all of us, obviously, and those are the only two that happen to all of us. And I could suffer a physical loss that wouldn't bother someone else and someone else if I were not able to drive at night anymore I happen to live in New York and don't own a car Whereas to someone else that particular vision loss would be a terrible catastrophe. I'm not athletic, but for an athlete who loses some physical capacity that's really integral to their identity and their sense of themselves, that's a more terrible loss, and I have things that would be harder for me to give up than other people. So it's always deeply, deeply individual. We age well not by pretending this is never going to happen and we only have limited control over what does happen. We age well by adapting.
Speaker 1:You talked about ageism and I think you said it is ugliest for older women. Can you talk about that a little bit, because this is after all called older women and friends?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. It makes me think of a quote by a wonderful writer named Cynthia Rich, who wrote with her then partner. They have both since died. The first book called about that addresses the intersection of ageism and sexism in the 70s and it's called Look Me in the Eye, old Woman. And Cynthia Rich says the harshest form of misogyny is reserved for older women. And I think it is because of our power Think about medieval Europe, the way witches were burned at the stake the power of older women, which is of course harshly curtailed by poverty, by capitalism, by patriarchy, by misogyny.
Speaker 2:I'm not saying we all get to go work our witchery, but I think people react most harshly to things they fear, but women do. Aging is gendered. Women are punished far more harshly by appearing to look visibly older. Our worth in patriarchy is very much tethered to our reproductive capacity. Very little health research is done on women after menopause because we're no longer reproductively useful. Women, as we know, earn far less than men. We stop being promoted to managerial positions in the US at age 34, when studies shows I mean in the workforce women are never the right age. First were too cute and sexy to be taken seriously. Then we hit our 30s and were too fertile, we might have children, which, as we all know, would reduce our ability to think or work. And then boom, you're not sexy or fertile anymore, and that's it.
Speaker 1:And yet the reality is. I think we, but is it? Women live something like two-thirds of their lives post-menopause? I'm not sure I have that right. It's either a third or two-thirds. It's a long time.
Speaker 2:It's a long time. I think we have two very helpful lessons one, the women's movement and also the body acceptance movement, because I think that the toughest ask which it shouldn't be, of course is to get people women in particular to look more generously at each other and at ourselves. It is staggering how much conversation among women has to do with how we look. I have resolved never to discuss hair, and it's tempting because any post about hair gets 10,000 likes and dislikes and 50 women showing pictures of their beautiful gray hair and more power to them. There are so many voices out there telling us women what we should look like and should say and shouldn't say, and so on. I don't want to be one of them, but look at how far the body acceptance movement has come in pushing the narrative to include the idea that beauty is not restricted to the thin, the young, the white, the blonde, that we need to accept all body types, and what we need to do between our ears and then take that awareness out into the world is that age two is a category that we need to push back against as signifying our value in the culture as one that depreciates. And the reason I do the work I do is because we need a mass movement like the women's movement, and I love to bring up consciousness raising in this context, because what consciousness raising did was bring women together to share stories, and what that meant was they were able to see, oh gee, it's not my fault or my bad or unique to me that I'm getting harassed or not getting promoted or have no power in my marriage. These are widely shared problems that we can come together and do something about, and women have a huge advantage here because we talk to each other right. That is a real advantage that women have as we age. So look at your exam and your own attitudes towards age and aging, and there's so many directions all of this can go in, you know, because most bias is unconscious, because we can't challenge bias unless we're aware of it, and so we need to look for evidence that we are agist instead of evidence that we're not.
Speaker 2:I want to mention a site called the Old School Clearinghouse, oldschoolinfo, which I started with two colleagues with the idea inspired by the women's movement. I thought you know the anti-ageism movement is new. Wouldn't it be cool if we had a central repository for the best books, the best talks, the best info, graphics, podcasts that talk about ageism. So it's all there. Everything is free. We accept the books, oldschoolinfo, and we also make our own workshops and guides and we have on there free downloadable. Take them, change them, share them, rewrite them, do whatever you want with them. To addressing internalized bias who me agist. Then one about the intersection of ageism and sexism, called agist sexist. Who me Also ageist racist. Who may download them? Look at the questions at the end. Starting a consciousness raising group is a big ask, right, but bring some women together and talk about the stuff, because we don't talk about it enough, right, and make sure all ages are in the room.
Speaker 1:I wanted to ask you a little bit about self-care, as it's relating to women, because it's become such a big business. You need this cream. You should have this kind of massage. Take a day and go to the spa, and to me it seems as if it's all very external, that it may make you feel better for an hour, two hours the next day, but that and according to Nancy Collier, who has just written a book, the self-care needs to come from within out, not from out within. Any thoughts on that?
Speaker 2:Well, I certainly agree with her and I want to point I think I'm right about the fact that the whole notion of caring for yourself, especially if you are engaged in difficult work, came from at very radical origins among women of color doing really difficult work. Audrey Lord writes about this the fantastic poet and activist who sadly died very young, who you just never go wrong quoting or reading Audrey Lord and it's a way to look after ourselves so that we find joy in the struggle and so that we don't wear ourselves out. This has been like everything else in our culture come modified and turned into things that people can sell and make money off. No one makes money off satisfaction. A more sort of obvious example is the beauty industry. You know where, if you just buy this cream or have this massage, everything's going to be nifty and in fact you know your skin does a really good job of caring for itself.
Speaker 2:And the beauty industry. I follow a fantastic blogger on the skin industry named Jessica DeFino and a lot of these products. You know, strip away all the things from your skin and then you spend a lot of money replacing it bit by bit. I'm oversimplifying, of course, but we know that. You know from Buddhism, and I don't mean to pretend any knowledge of Buddhist thought, but from religious tradition that contentment comes from within, not from acquiring external stuff, and certainly not by comparing us ourselves to other people. I'll quote my grandmother for the second time, and that's a first for me and it was not unique to her, but she, one of her addicta was. Comparisons are odious.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I need to think about that one a little bit myself. It's hard, it's very hard. So what might an age-friendly world look like?
Speaker 2:You know that's such a big question because everyone ages. So if the world were a place in which your age was not neither held against you nor used to elevate you, I want an age-neutral world. I want a world in which your age is right, there for everyone to know, but no one thinks more or less of you or places a higher or lower value on you because of that number, whether you're three, you know, or 93. That because everybody ages. That would also be a world where your skin color is not used to discriminate against you, where your body size is not held against you.
Speaker 2:It is a world of equity rather than a world configured by, frankly, largely wealthy white men to further the interests of wealthy white men at the expense of everyone else who is more and more different from that center of power in terms of class, in terms of education. Are you fat? Do you have an accent? Do you have an education? Do you come from here? Do you have a social network of people with privilege, and on and on and on. So a world without ageism would be a world without any discrimination against people on the basis of things we cannot change about ourselves.
Speaker 1:That sounds wonderful, doesn't it? My next question is if each one of us could do just one thing, because we're not going to be able to go out there and change the world, we know that. But if each one of us and maybe we can talk about women. I mean, a very surfaced example is your suggestion that when someone says wow, you don't look your age, and you say you don't either. Well, I tried that yesterday at Nordstrom Rack and I was, for whatever reason, they needed to ask for my age, and when I mentioned it she went oh my God, you don't look your age. And I looked at her and I said you don't either. She was bewildered, she didn't know how to respond, and then her initial response was she was going to start to do the yes-butts. And I know yes-butts because I have been a yes-butt woman and I am working really hard to change that.
Speaker 1:So, this is going to be my one small practical contribution. Hopefully, doing this podcast will be another, but I wondered for women who are listening now, what are maybe some of the basic things that each one of us could do?
Speaker 2:Right, Well, I want to commend you on speaking up, because it takes courage. We can't. There is no culture change without discomfort. So you were able to say that to her instead of snapping at her. At least she didn't call you young lady. It's hard to be neutral in those contexts, but the fact that she was bewildered is a completely perfect and appropriate response, because you're asking her to challenge why something she intended as a compliment I feel like a compliment and it is in those moments.
Speaker 2:I mean, I think it's say ages things all the time, but that's when we go. You know the gear is crying or go, gee. Maybe there's a different and better way to think about this. So I would go back to the basics of learning more about aging and considering your own attitudes towards age and aging. I can think of two suggestions.
Speaker 2:One is to think about how you use the words old and young and literally when you use them. Think about whether you use them in a neutral way. They're perfectly good words. I'm old, it's okay to wish. You know, my friends are so gun shy, they're like happy birthday and then the blood drains out of their faces. You know that did I screw up?
Speaker 2:Age is real. We should be able to reference it, right? It's like whether we'd like, you know, chocolate, ice cream, or whether we're heterosexual. It's intrinsic to our identity, right? We get into trouble when we attribute value to it, positive or negative. So when older people say I feel young, what they mean is I don't feel, I feel sexy, I feel active, I feel with it. Right, I don't feel old, that means I don't feel invisible, I don't feel useless. We can feel all those things, positive and negative, at any age. When I was 13, I felt so ugly, you know, and so full of despair about everything, by far more than I ever have since, right? So watch out for attributing a value to old or young, because we can feel all those things at any time.
Speaker 2:Another little habit to try and break, no judgment, we all do these things is you know, one of the reasons the US in particular is so agist is because it's such an age-segregated society, right? When next time you get to a party or, you know, a gathering of any sort, a meeting, a whatever, don't sit next to someone your age, don't make a beeline for people your own. We all tend to do it because it's comfortable, just the way we tend to, you know queer people head for queer people. You know brown people head for brown people. It's habit, right, I mean it is biased, but it's what. And it's uncomfortable.
Speaker 2:And one more it's really hard to come up with a snappy comeback to an ageist comment. You did great, but a really good, all-purpose one, because you could never think of the perfect thing to say until you're lying in bed pissed off. That night is in a neutral tone. What do you mean by that? And let that awkward silence sit there, that bewilderment that you got out of the sales clerk, because that's when the person has to think geez, what did I mean by that? And how do I feel about how? What I meant by that right?
Speaker 1:I love that. I'm anxious to get out there right now and try it. I wanted you to talk quickly about your blog and where people can find it, what your attempt was when you started writing it low these many years ago.
Speaker 2:Oh God, I thought I wrote one serious book, which I will tell your readers about, since they're all women, which is called Cutting Loose why Women who End their Marriages Do so Well, but I do blog and I am very active on social media because, you know, I'm an evangelist so I'm very, very easy to find. My main website is thischairrockscom there. If you look there, it says blog and I have been thinking out loud on that main blog for 15 years and it's searchable by topic. So search, you know, under any topic women. You know I wrote a long post about how the women's movement needs to do better than we did in the 70s. You know that movement was run by and for the interests of white women who were not thinking about whether the effects of their activism actually lifted the boats of working-class women and women of color, and it didn't right. So we need to do better with the movement against ageism and I I include in myself, in that I'm not preaching I think all the time about whether I'm even getting close to that lofty goal. It's going to take all of us. So there's that.
Speaker 2:I also have a blog called Yo Is this Agest? Modeled on an existing blog called Yo. Is this Racist? Where people ask me questions and I try hard to answer them in ways that are witty and informative, which is not easy, believe it or not? And I'm at this chair rocks on Twitter and on Instagram, and you can find me on LinkedIn and I have this chair rocks Facebook page. So if you can't find me, we're not trying very hard, and because I'm the only person in the world with this name and also, again, you can find all these things, all the resources. I've mentioned Becca Levy's wonderful book, which is called Breaking the Age Code in the Old School Anti-Ages of Clearinghouse at OldSchoolinfo.
Speaker 1:Perfect. I'm sure everybody will be making a beeline to their computers as soon as we are done talking and she has one more thing she wants to say.
Speaker 2:Another thing that we are doing with Old School is you know we need to find ways to connect as age advocates right and as people learning to speak and think differently about age advocacy. So sign up for my newsletter if you want. I don't do it very often, but the Old School newsletter, it's easy to subscribe, to cancel it and we will never give it away. But we, every month, we send out a newsletter describing what's new on the site and that lets you know when we're organizing meetups. We have a weekly meetup, we host workshops, we host convenings. So sign up for the newsletter if you want to meet other people who are interested in this work.
Speaker 1:This has been fantastic. I'm so glad that you were able to take some time and talk with me and hopefully reach hundreds and hundreds of quote-unquote older women out there who are tuning in and hearing about this podcast, and I can't thank you enough. It's been great.
Speaker 2:You're very welcome, jan, and take those quotes away. We are older women, nothing wrong with that baby, you got it.
Speaker 1:We're damned a lot of fun. See you, thank you. Thank you very much. Go to Apple Podcasts. Type in older women and friends, scroll down the page and click on Reviews. Until next time.