When I was focused on my singing career, I was always made very aware that my age was against me. Opera singers generally start their training very young, and I didn’t start until I was in my mid 20’s. I felt like I was constantly playing catch up, and I was afraid to reveal my true age because I felt left behind by others my age who were already embarking on professional careers.
I always seemed to be ten years behind my peers and I knew it. One of my more abrasive teachers even told me I should give up because I was too old to build an operatic career, and that was when I was 30. I was very hurt and angry about this and it made me all the more determined to prove her wrong. The fact that this judgment was from a woman underlined the real problem with ‘internalised misogyny’, which unfortunately sets women against women instead of them helping each other and building each other up.
I was given the advice from a very successful PR agent once that almost all female recording artists are lying about their age. If this is true it’s really quite shocking, but it’s endemic of the problems with an industry which has been run for so many generations by powerful, and often predatory men. The casting couch has always been an open secret and the women who unwittingly find themselves there have been singled out for being nubile and easily manipulated. Naivety and virginity are fetishized, and intelligence and experience downplayed; young women are seen as a desirable and decorative prize, a ‘trophy’, but not a person.
Women are expected to be young forever. The same pressure is not put on men, they are allowed to be ‘mature’ and ‘distinguished’, even ‘venerable’. Women, by contrast, are rewarded for being coy, girlish and kept in a perpetual state of childhood.
This robs them of agency and discourages assertiveness and strength, leaving them vulnerable and voiceless. Being discriminated against once you are past your 20’s leaves a lot of very young and inexperienced girls open to being put in compromised situations that older women would at once recognize and steer clear of. The way we talk about older women even makes it worse, comparing them to animals, ‘cougars’ and ‘mutton dressed as lamb’.
A lot of this is due to the way females, but not males, are oversexualized by the media. For too long, women have been prized for their fertility rather than their personalities and accomplishments. Even ‘career women’ get criticized for not dedicating their lives to being wives and mothers.
If you only value women as brood mares but not actual people with their own ideas, accomplishments and ambitions, those past their peak fertility are of no value. Their only role is childbearing. Trivializing women’s experience has robbed them of their unique voices.
It was a situation at a famous TV talent show which led me to write this post. I had been very hesitant to disclose my age. One of the producers gave me this wisdom, which I was not too sure was wisdom at the time, that the female judges are ‘age positive’ – both over 40, but proud of it, not pretending to be naive youngsters, but proper adult women. Owning it is a brave move in an industry obsessed with youth, sex and size 0 Instagram stars. More women need to find the faith to get over the old ‘never ask a lady her age’ maxim and stand up for themselves.
The whole ‘anti-aging’ market is aimed at making women afraid that they do not deserve love and acceptance if they have cellulite and a few grey hairs. It’s playing to this insecurity, that you have to pretend to be still of ‘breeding age’ or face mockery and rejection. This is one of the accepted faces of everyday misogyny.
We do not do this to men. When they get grey hair, they are often considered even more attractive. The TV host George Lamb went grey in his twenties, and it added to his already good looks. If he was a woman, he would have been forced to conform and dye his hair blonde.
This generation of women has a duty of care to the next to stop this misogynistic attitude, and to stop deliberately infantilizing themselves in order to be ‘popular’. It makes you an object, a sub-human thing no better than a blow-up doll. The obsession with female youth, virginity and immaturity fosters dangerous attitudes, including passivity and objectification and prevents women from speaking out in authority, making them weak and powerless in a hostile and patriarchal world.
Women gain experience through their lives, through both good and bad, and should be proud of it, not trying to project an image of the perfect Barbie Doll, a vacant but beautiful toy to be fetishized and owned by a man.
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This post is republished on Medium.
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