The Double Standard of Aging by Susan Sontag

I'm sorry to have missed out on February. Life got really busy, which is a shame, because I was (and am) very excited about both social justice and French literature. I suppose we'll just have to continue to discuss these subjects throughout March, since we got nowhere near completing our readings or exhausting our thoughts.

The one thing I read was a very interesting essay by Susan Sontag: The Double Standard of Aging. I was pretty familiar with the argument through cultural osmosis, but I had never read anything by Sontag.

The essay discusses the double standard in how society perceives and treats aging in women and men respectively. Sontag's conclusion is that there is a far higher pressure applied on women with respect to age, which leads to higher psychological costs for them. Old age is something no one is very happy about (from a social capital point of view, nevermind the biological aspects), since it involves a diminishing of one's sexual attractiveness, but in men these negative aspects are somewhat compensated by an increase in the respect they get, from being perceived as wiser or more interesting. For women, being older is being less attractive: there is no achievement that can compensate for wrinkles. 

Since "being old" creates a different status in society for men and women, "growing old" becomes associated with different psychological processes and costs. Women start perceiving they are growing old far earlier than men (sometimes even as early as their mid-twenties) and they see this as something that must be fought against. They invest a great deal of resources into maintaining the appearance of youth, which takes its toll on their energy and well-being. In the end, they always suffer defeat, and even if they manage to postpone wrinkles by half of decade, they fight the battle knowing all along that they will lose. This knowledge, too, hurts them. 

Sontag argues that the double standard of aging is a consequence of the different standards for beauty and, indeed, worth, we have for men and women. Female beauty is associated with grace, frailty, innocence and the accomplishments that are expected of women are passive: to look a certain way, rather than to do certain things. These qualities wither with age. The masculine ideal, on the other hand, is strongly associated with energy, force, accomplishments, which are enhanced by age. 

The double standard is particularly visible in the way marriages between older women and men that are 20 years their juniors is almost a taboo, while the reverse situation is considered completely natural and subject to sympathetic gossip rather than outrage and scandal. Of course, this is not enforced by any law, or even by any conscious decision on the part of the public: when people say that they find older women repulsive not as a part of a greater woman-hating scheme, but simply because it is their personal taste, they mean it. But their revulsion nevertheless contributes to oppression. This process is nicely summed in a phrase I like quite a lot: "rules of taste enforce structures of power". It is a complex sociological theory, standing at the basis of much of feminism's relationship with pop culture and media, packaged in a memorable one-liner, and it is a very good illustration of what I liked about the essay: the combination between sociological insight and compelling writing. 

But while I really liked the argument as well as the style, I do have some problems with the ending. They are mostly the same problems Claudia has with The Second Sex (my feminist history could be better too, but I suspect that Sontag draws a lot on the tradition established by de Beauvoir). Sontag argues, just like de Beauvoir, that society's norms and standards are designed to keep women "in a life-long minority" and, as such, women never become fully realized as human beings. The bottom line of this theory is that the wrongdoing of the patriarchy consists in not letting women become people, rather than in denying that women are people. While I understand that this view doesn't deny the injustice against women and acknowledges that their potential value is as great as men's, I'm still very uncomfortable with what it says about women's actual value. I suppose it will take me some time to work my way through the implications of these two positions: their relationship with wider philosophical systems, the historical advantages adopting one of these positions has had for feminism and so on. 

Until then, I would still recommend The Double Standard of Aging to anyone interested in sociology or feminism (or Sontag).