Visible Crones

Good morning GFPs and welcome to another dispatch from the frontiers of forgetting remembering women exist — and today, specifically, if only briefly, remembering that older women exist, by which I mean women who no longer have completely uncreased skin and who might even have experimented with growing a sneaky grey hair or two. Which covers quite a lot of women, really, this woman included. One might even go so far as to argue that, despite what we see in the public realm, in films, on tv, in ads, such women in fact represent the majority of women (don’t tell ChatGPT, it would find this information extremely distressing).

As regular readers may remember, the invisibility of older women — and specifically, older women who actually look older — is an issue that, as my own face crinkles up and my own hair becomes increasingly striated, I find myself increasingly exercised by. Case in point: NONE of the make-up ads I get served up on social media make ANY SENSE for my wrinkly eyes. I don’t even know why this bothers me so much given I rarely if ever wear make up, although I do stand by being annoyed by an ad for a make-up company that explicitly positions itself as make-up for older women that uses women with no eye wrinkles in its ads for eye make-up. How is that useful?? Maybe I should simply stop doom-scrolling on instagram in the morning. This will be easier when the new Emily St John Mandel AND the new Naomi Alderman books are out, which, by the time you read this newsletter they will be! And all my ads-for-products-I-was-never-going-to-buy-anyway problems will have been solved, hooray. Or at least solved for as long as it takes me to read both books, so about a week. I strongly feel that my favourite authors should be forced to write a new book every six months at least — ESJM hasn’t released one for THREE years — a scandal! Pipe down those of you pointing out I haven’t released one for six years, that is ENTIRELY different (also…unless something goes very wrong I do have one coming out next year…but I STILL cannot talk about it yet because my publisher enjoys torturing me OBVIOUSLY I AM JOKING, love you guys xoxoxo)

ANYWAY. As regular readers may also remember, in a previous edition of this newsletter I pledged to at least try to avoid going the botox and filler route, in part because I genuinely feel quite disturbed by how nearly every female celebrity these days looks perpetually, sort of but not quite, thirty-five, but also because I know how very much I value the few women in the public eye who have so far resisted the enormous pressure to submit to the injectables industrial complex and dare to show us what a fifty-year-old face actually looks like (and, amazingly, the sight has not led me to combust on the spot). And, frankly, I want to be part of that increasingly rarified club of cool gals — sorry, injectables gals, you get to look thirty, we get to be cool, you have to let us wrinkly old crones have SOMETHING.

But to return to the point of this newsletter, I now have some DATA (my favourite thing!) to back up my own sense that being able to actually see other women ageing in public does actually affect how we feel about our own ageing hair and faces and bodies. Who knew? Well, feminists of course, as indicated by decades of feminist writing and research on the subject of how our own sense of self-worth is naturally affected by what we see represented around us. You may remember in fact that I personally ran a couple campaigns on the subject of female representation.