The year is now coming to an end. I would like to present a text by Susan Sontag about the phenomenon of aging in modern society. She wrote the essay "The Double Standards of Aging" in 1972, over 50 years ago, and a lot has changed since then. Some things even seem crazy to me as I read them now. (...) a woman who has never married is pitied. She was not found acceptable, and it is assumed that her life continues to confirm her unacceptability. Her presumed lack of sexual opportunity is embarrassing. I know many women who are committed singles, never been married, and enjoy their independence. The pressure may be greater for younger women. Older women these days are much more confident and are not ashamed of their age.
When it comes to contact with local Gambians, I mainly meet people who are the same age as my current partner, i.e. a generation younger. In order to somehow save myself, I always try to keep a certain distance, and that's where my age has a positive effect. If I were the same age as the young people of the Backway (who risk their lives looking for greener pastures), I would have less chance of making it as a woman and an artist. Otherwise I would have to fulfill the task as a (becoming) mother, running the household and looking after the family. Nevertheless, the idea of a childless artist couple, in which both parts perform the same tasks and exchange ideas on a transparent level, was even for my mother difficult to understand back then.
Susan Sonntag worked hard to ensure that women get more respected. By reading her texts, I was able to work on my self-awareness and gain better self-confidence.
Some things aren't relevant these days. What means it has already changed. For example: "Men are allowed to age, without penalty, in several ways that women are not" is actually outdated. For men aging is difficult like for women as well. This is particularly clear to me when it comes to film stars who operate on their faces, male or female. And this is also decreasing, people can now cope better with their age, I think. The assessment of beauty has also changed. People no longer divide themselves so easily into beautiful and ugly. Perception, like technology, has become more sophisticated. My hope is that gender apartheid will pass over time and with it social difference as well as injustices will disappear and that aging as a process in every person's life can take place in peace and without humiliation.
The following text contains many things that would no longer be described in the same way today. She says what people tend to keep quiet about to avoid generalizations. Or maybe it seems to me that way, because I have already gotten used to keeping my mouth shut instead of running the risk of saying the wrong thing?
The emotional privileges this society confers upon youth stir up some anxiety about getting older in everybody. All modern urbanized societies—unlike tribal, rural societies—condescend to the values of maturity and heap honors on the joys of youth. This revaluation of the life cycle in favor of the young brilliantly serves a secular society whose idols are ever-increasing industrial productivity and the unlimited cannibalization of nature. Such a society must create a new sense of the rhythms of life in order to incite people to buy more, to consume and throw away faster. People let the direct awareness they have of their needs, of what really gives them pleasure, be overruled by commercialized images of happiness and personal well-being; and, in this imagery designed to stimulate ever more avid levels of consumption, the most popular metaphor for happiness is "youth." (I would insist that it is a metaphor, not a literal description. Youth is a metaphor for energy, restless mobility, appetite: for the state of "wanting.") This equating of well-being with youth makes everyone naggingly aware of exact age—one's own and that of other people. In primitive and premodern societies people attach much less importance to dates. When lives are divided into long periods with stable responsibilities and steady ideals (and hypocrisies), the exact number of years someone has lived becomes a trivial fact; there is hardly any reason to mention, even to know, the year in which one was born. Most people in nonindustrial societies are not sure exactly how old they are. People in industrial societies are haunted by numbers. They take an almost obsessional interest in keeping the scorecard of aging, convinced that anything above a low total is some kind of bad news. In an era in which people actually live longer and longer, what now amounts to the latter two-thirds of everyone's life is shadowed by a poignant apprehension of unremitting loss.
The prestige of youth afflicts everyone in this society to some degree. Men, too, are prone to periodic bouts of depression about aging—for instance, when feeling insecure or unfulfilled or insufficiently rewarded in their jobs. But men rarely panic about aging in the way women often do. Getting older is less profoundly wounding for a man, for in addition to the propaganda for youth that puts both men and women on the defensive as they age, there is a double standard about aging that denounces women with special severity. Society is much more permissive about aging in men, as it is more tolerant of the sexual infidelities of husbands. Men are "allowed" to age, without penalty, in several ways that women are not.
This society offers even fewer rewards for aging women than it does to men. Being physically attractive counts much more in a woman's life than in a man's, but beauty, identified, as it is for women, with youthfulness, does not stand up well to age. Exceptional mental powers can increase with age, but women are rarely encouraged to develop their minds above dilettante standards. Because the wisdom considered the special province of women is "eternal," an age-old, intuitive knowledge about the emotions to which a repertoire of facts, worldly experience, and the methods of rational analysis have nothing to contribute, living a long time does not promise women an increase in wisdom either. The private skills expected of women are exercised early and, with the exception of a talent for making love, are not the kind that enlarge with experience. "Masculinity" is identified with competence, autonomy, self-control—qualities which the disappearance of youth does not threaten. Competence in most of the activities expected from men, physical sports excepted, increases with age. "Femininity" is identified with incompetence, helplessness, passivity, noncompetitiveness, being nice. Age does not improve these qualities.
Middle-class men feel diminished by aging, even while still young, if they have not yet shown distinction in their careers or made a lot of money. (And any tendencies they have toward hypochondria will get worse in middle age, focusing with particular nervousness on the specter of heart attacks and the loss of virility.) Their aging crisis is linked to that terrible pressure on men to be "successful" that precisely defines their membership in the middle class. Women rarely feel anxious about their age because they haven't succeeded at something. The work that women do outside the home rarely counts as a form of achievement, only as a way of earning money; most employment available to women mainly exploits the training they have been receiving since early childhood to be servile, to be both supportive and parasitical, to be unadventurous. They can have menial, low-skilled jobs in light industries, which offer as feeble a criterion of success as housekeeping. They can be secretaries, clerks, sales personnel, maids, research assistants, waitresses, social workers, prostitutes, nurses, teachers, telephone operators—public transcriptions of the servicing and nurturing roles that women have in family life. Women fill very few executive posts, are rarely found suitable for large corporate or political responsibilities, and form only a tiny contingent in the liberal professions (apart from teaching). They are virtually barred from jobs that involve an expert, intimate relation with machines or an aggressive use of the body, or that carry any physical risk or sense of adventure. The jobs this society deems appropriate to women are auxiliary, "calm" activities that do not compete with, but aid, what men do. Besides being less well paid, most work women do has a lower ceiling of advancement and gives meager outlet to normal wishes to be powerful. All outstanding work by women in this society is voluntary; most women are too inhibited by the social disapproval attached to their being ambitious and aggressive. Inevitably, women are exempted from the dreary panic of middle-aged men whose "achievements" seem paltry, who feel stuck on the job ladder or fear being pushed off it by someone younger. But they are also denied most of the real satisfactions that men derive from work—satisfactions that often do increase with age.
The double standard about aging shows up most brutally in the conventions of sexual feeling, which presuppose a disparity between men and women that operates permanently to women's disadvantage. In the accepted course of events a woman anywhere from her late teens through her middle twenties can expect to attract a man more or less her own age. (Ideally, he should be at least slightly older.) They marry and raise a family. But if her husband starts an affair after some years of marriage, he customarily does so with a woman much younger than his wife. Suppose, when both husband and wife are already in their late forties or early fifties, they divorce. The husband has an excellent chance of getting married again, probably to a younger woman. His ex-wife finds it difficult to remarry. Attracting a second husband younger than herself is improbable; even to find someone her own age she has to be lucky, and she will probably have to settle for a man considerably older than herself, in his sixties or seventies. Women become sexually ineligible much earlier than men do. A man, even an ugly man, can remain eligible well into old age. He is an acceptable mate for a young, attractive woman. Women, even good-looking women, become ineligible (except as partners of very old men) at a much younger age.
Thus, for most women, aging means a humiliating process of gradual sexual disqualification. Since women are considered maximally eligible in early youth, after which their sexual value drops steadily, even young women feel themselves in a desperate race against the calendar. They are old as soon as they are no longer very young. In late adolescence some girls are already worrying about getting married. Boys and young men have little reason to anticipate trouble because of aging. What makes men desirable to women is by no means tied to youth. On the contrary, getting older tends (for several decades) to operate in men's favor, since their value as lovers and husbands is set more by what they do than how they look. Many men have more success romantically at forty than they did at twenty or twenty-five; fame, money, and, above all, power are sexually enhancing. (A woman who has won power in a competitive profession or business career is considered less, rather than more, desirable. Most men confess themselves intimidated or turned off sexually by such a woman, obviously because she is harder to treat as just a sexual "object.") As they age, men may start feeling anxious about actual sexual performance, worrying about a loss of sexual vigor or even impotence, but their sexual eligibility is not abridged simply by getting older. Men stay sexually possible as long as they can make love. Women are at a disadvantage because their sexual candidacy depends on meeting certain much stricter "conditions" related to looks and age.
Since women are imagined to have much more limited sexual lives than men do, a woman who has never married is pitied. She was not found acceptable, and it is assumed that her life continues to confirm her unacceptability. Her presumed lack of sexual opportunity is embarrassing. A man who remains a bachelor is judged much less crudely. It is assumed that he, at any age, still has a sexual life—or the chance of one. For men there is no destiny equivalent to the humiliating condition of being an old maid, a spinster. "Mr.," a cover from infancy to senility, precisely exempts men from the stigma that attaches to any woman, no longer young, who is still "Miss." (That women are divided into "Miss" and "Mrs.," which calls unrelenting attention to the situation of each woman with respect to marriage, reflects the belief that being single or married is much more decisive for a woman than it is for a man.)
For a woman who is no longer very young, there is certainly some relief when she has finally been able to marry. Marriage soothes the sharpest pain she feels about the passing years. But her anxiety never subsides completely, for she knows that should she reenter the sexual market at a later date—because of divorce, or the death of her husband, or the need for erotic adventure—she must do so under a handicap far greater than any man of her age (whatever her age may be) and regardless of how good-looking she is. Her achievements, if she has a career, are no asset. The calendar is the final arbiter.
To be sure, the calendar is subject to some variations from country to country. In Spain, Portugal, and the Latin American countries, the age at which most women are ruled physically undesirable comes earlier than in the United States. In France it is somewhat later. French conventions of sexual feeling make a quasi-official place for the woman between thirty-five and forty-five. Her role is to initiate an inexperienced or timid young man, after which she is, of course, replaced by a young girl. (Colette's novella Chéri is the best-known account in fiction of such a love affair; biographies of Balzac relate a well-documented example from real life.) This sexual myth does make turning forty somewhat easier for French women. But there is no difference in any of these countries in the basic attitudes that disqualify women sexually much earlier than men.
Aging also varies according to social class. Poor people look old much earlier in their lives than do rich people. But anxiety about aging is certainly more common, and more acute, among middle-class and rich women than among working-class women. Economically disadvantaged women in this society are more fatalistic about aging; they can't afford to fight the cosmetic battle as long or as tenaciously. Indeed, nothing so clearly indicates the fictional nature of this crisis than the fact that women who keep their youthful appearance the longest—women who lead unstrenuous, physically sheltered lives, who eat balanced meals, who can afford good medical care, who have few or no children—are those who feel the defeat of age most keenly. Aging is much more a social judgment than a biological eventuality. Far more extensive than the hard sense of loss suffered during menopause (which, with increased longevity, tends to arrive later and later) is the depression about aging, which may not be set off by any real event in a woman's life, but is a recurrent state of "possession" of her imagination, ordained by society—that is, ordained by the way this society limits how women feel free to imagine themselves.
Sontag, Susan. On Women (pp. 6-13). Picador. Kindle Edition.
Saturday, 16
Prediction for 2024: I hope I will write more regularly and often.
Monday, 11
About Sentimentality
I was raised to be sentimental, I was almost forced into it. At the expense of reason. If I hadn't shown this excessive compassion, I would have been relegated to the loneliness that I still feared as a teenager. It was an appeal to humanity to show social behavior - more important than following intellectual interests. I was supposed to be guided by feelings rather than thoughts. Not controlled, but spontaneous. My critical thinking was recognized as such - you're always so critical - but wasn't really taken seriously. I should have been be more positive.
My father was the pessimist. He joined my mother's family. Probably because he came from a different background, he tried to integrate well and even questioned his own people. Something my mother never did. On the other hand, he needed to be the head of our nuclear family as we were living in a patriarchal society. He had a tangled mess of emotions inside of him when I think back.
My mother could be very dry, which he couldn't. She alternated between concerned and dismissive, which often unsettled me. Irony was his weapon to avoid revealing his feelings. Or he became strict. Yes, there was an underlying capriciousness within the communication that was compensated for with sentimentality.
It is possible to be empathetic without having to burst into tears. On the contrary, sentimentality is characterized by excessive display, which leads into insincerity. It is simple and not complex. Sometimes though, tears still well up in my eyes and I am overwhelmed with emotions. However, it always makes me uncomfortable because it doesn't suit me, but comes from a learned skill that gives me a headache like a bad wine. Something is obscured that could easily be treated as clear ideas instead. But one prefers to keep silent, because something might come out that should remain a secret.
Saturday, 8
RIP Professor Zephaniah.
According to my mood
I have a poetic licence, i WriTe thE way i waNt.
i drop my full stops where i like ........
MY CAPITAL LetterR go where i liKE,
i order from MY PeN, i verse the way i like
(i do my spelling write)
Acording to My MOod.
I HAve poetic licence,
i put my commers where i like,, ((()).
(((my brackets are write((
i REPEAT WHen i likE.
i can't go rong.
i look and i.e.
It's rite.
i Repeat when i liKe. i have
poetic licence!
don't question me????
Benjamin Zephaniah, City Psalms, 1992, p. 25, Bloodaxe Books
Thursday, 7
finding content is not easy when the surface is so shiny and beautiful. but the desire for beauty remains. it is so deep that it will remain. better not to see what is behind. the ugly remains repulsive for now. however, ugly things are facts sometimes at which it's better to look carefully. like with wounds. a doctor cannot focus on aesthetics when healing. or the aesthetics of medicine. some people cannot see blood, not because they find it ugly as such, but because it is something necessary in the human body. then, suddenly it becomes visible even though it should be hidden. red mouth, painted fingernails, beauty symbols. movements, such as punk, have put this into perspective and declared safety pins beautiful. ultimately, what is considered beautiful is a personal decision.
Friday, 1
Art Space Work of the Month
Maren Sanneh
Meeting at Kër Thiossane, part of “Dakar May 2016” series
photography, inkjet on glossy paper, 2017, 42 x 29,7 cm