One day, surfing across the web in no particularly linear or rational way (I guess that's what surfing is), I came across this quote from Rush Limbaugh: "Will this country want to actually watch a woman get older before their eyes on a daily basis?"
He said that in 2008, referring to Hillary Clinton. With a masterful stroke of the mouth, he attempted to disempower this woman by using one of the patriarchy's greatest weapons, the deeply held belief that age makes women ugly, worthless and powerless.
I remember hearing it then, and it made my blood boil. When I saw it again, I wondered about it. About Rush. About men. About women. About being a woman and growing old. About why watching a woman grow old scares the hell out of people. His statement is still a powerful window into how women who are growing older are perceived in our culture.
I am reminded of my mother as she grew frail towards her death. She showed such dignity. Even when she could hardly stand up, she wanted her hair combed, her lipstick on. She didn't want anyone, including her children, to see her use the commode. She walked towards her death with grace.
I thought of Robbie Kaye and the amazing work she is doing with women and aging at Beauty of Wisdom. Robbie takes photographs of women getting their hair done -- beautiful, proud women.
I wonder about how Rush felt watching his mother grow old, how he feels watching the women in his life that he loves growing older. How do we feel when we fear the crone out there, and in here, while we are in relationship with our mothers, grandmothers, aunts, great-aunts and wise old women friends? While we are in relationship with ourselves and our own aging bodies?
And (this is a big "and") somewhere a part of me is fully capable of saying something just as hurtful. If I push that away in him, I push it away in myself. I've grown up ingesting this patriarchal pabulum every day of my life. I've adopted the fears and beliefs and admonitions of a culture steeped in ageism, sexism, racism and any other "ism" that has been the foundation of this patriarchal thought-structure. It takes a deepening awareness and an opening consciousness to begin to see what I project onto others, how I push others away, how I say stupid things because of my own conditioning.
The structure of patriarchy is insidious. It causes men to oppress all women, because, as Allan G. Johnson points out in "Gender Knot: Unraveling Our Patriarchal Legacy," it is "linked to a cultural devaluing of femaleness itself." It causes men to oppress even the women in their own lives that they dearly love, for you can't uphold a structure of beliefs, acting within that structure everyday, and somehow not inflict that pain on some women and not others.
Johnson writes:
One of the deepest reasons for denying the reality of women's oppression is that we don't want to admit that a real basis for conflict exists between men and women. We don't want to admit it because, unlike other groups involved in social oppression, such as white and blacks, female and males really need each other, if only as parents and children. [Emphasis mine]
Think about it: men and women are inextricably linked. We can't not engage with each other. If we were no longer engaged, life wouldn't continue. That's what makes it so hard to look at patriarchy and the oppression of the feminine. And yet, we need the reemergence of the feminine to heal ourselves and to heal the earth. We need the nurturing, nourishing, wise and instinctual, wildly creative and fiercely unconditionally loving feminine to heal ourselves from our ways of destruction and domination. We need this reemergence in women, and we need it in men. We need to find balance within ourselves, the balance between the masculine and feminine.
The old woman was once revered, when people revered the Great Mother, when they saw the beauty of birth, death and rebirth, the power of transformation. Now, we sit around and pretend we don't get old and don't die. We feel the shift happening, and we dig our heels in and pretend we can't be touched.
As I've aged, I've felt invisibility creep in. The older I get, the more invisible I become, in a culture where youth and external beauty reign. All the while, I've become more beautiful to myself, because I am embracing and honoring the wisdom that my life experiences have brought, and the kindness, compassion and tenderness that grief and loss have engendered. It takes a certain amount of awareness and effort to keep coming back to what is real, what is true. It isn't easy at all. Yet, there comes a time when no other way is palatable. I can feel the energy of the crone. I feel her power. I feel her fierce love.
It's not that I don't have moments of grief and sadness around aging. Some of those moments come when I get caught up in the never-ending bombardment of the advertising blitz. I notice my body growing a little stiffer, I am aware of the years passing, and I know death is always a breath away. But so is life. Life is always a breath away.
Women's power in the patriarchy is youth, physical beauty, a sexy, toned body, the ability to become more like a man than a woman, so how we act and what we do will move us up the ladder of what this culture deems is successful.
But in an entirely different way, we women are powerful beings, especially as we age. Not powerful in the patriarchal paradigm, but powerful in the sense that we are more authentic, more real, more truthful and more beautiful. And powerful as the crone, the wise woman, the woman who embodies crone energy. The crone is the woman who no longer sees herself only in relation to others, but as a woman unto herself, a woman who stands alone in the center of her own beingness, in the center of her own truth, and from this center relates to the people in her life from what is real for her.
The patriarchy fears the crone. She is truthful, she is powerfully creative, she is intuitive and instinctual, and she loves fiercely. The patriarchy does everything it can to deny this, even to denigrate this and the women who embody it, because old women are wise women are powerful women. They have gifts to share, gifts that this world desperately needs.
What if we could be with ourselves in such a way that we no longer projected our deepest fears onto an entire portion of the earth's population, a group of people that has gifts to share with the world right now, gifts of wisdom, grace and beauty?
What if we could be with ourselves in such a way that we no longer projected our deepest fears onto each other, woman to man, man to woman?
Being with ourselves is the first step.
Being with the misogynistic and misandrist thoughts that ramble around our own minds and consciousness, and questioning whether they are true, whether we know them to be 100-percent fact.
Being with our hardened hearts, with the walls we've built around them that allow us to engage in such a way where we are just as complicit in this fear and rejection of the wise old woman, and wondering if our hearts really feel this way.
Being with ourselves, with the feelings we don't want to feel, the feelings we numb ourselves to, day in and day out.
Being with.
Being with the beginning of something, a beginning of a world where we honor and respect each other as men and women.
As Kate Chopin reminds us, "the beginning of things, of a world especially, is necessarily vague, tangled, chaotic, and exceedingly disturbing."
A world where patriarchy is a distant memory begins with the chaotic, the vague, with the tangled mess of people willing to engage differently, even when we don't yet know how to do it or what it might look like.
It may feel exceedingly disturbing, but then don't the happenings in our world right now disturb you greatly?
Follow Julie Daley on Twitter: www.twitter.com/juliedaley
Could aging be good for women? | Psychology Today
Hillary Rodham Clinton - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
It's sad that some might come to the end of their lives and realize how much time they wasted dreading growing older, instead of embracing it. www.linesofbeauty.com
She is as beautiful now as she was when we met 35 years ago. She sometimes wonders about it. My subjective perception is admittedly fairly unforgiving. Knowing this, she is able to believe me (sometimes for hours at a time) when I tell her that if a woman is truly beautiful, that doesn't change with age. Also, I have seen women of unremarkable appearance (again, my personal opinion) become more lovely as they grow older.
Grace and true beauty are natural qualities; youth is not the sole proprietor of these. Life is a process, ageing is part of it, and, pretending that time does not pass will not prevent it from doing so.
Thanks again.
Unless, as a society, we adopt different values and a different economic system, the old will continue to be disregarded and disposable (the reality is we won't be around much longer!).
Best wishes.
http://anyshinything.com/2010/12/11/poor-jane-fonda/
She has been lying about her age since I can remember. She joins dating websites and gets involved with much younger men. She has 5 grown daughters but denies our existence because if the men she dates saw my sisters and I, they would know my mother couldn't possibly be the age she claims to be.
She has been doing this since I was a teenager. I think it is very sad but a good role model of how NOT to be.
My mom was similar to yours, albeit without the plastic surgery. The way she backtracked my age, she was pushing my own kids practically back into the womb.
Now, in my middle years, it excites me that I really am much more wise than I was in my 20s and less concerned about superficial things. I do still care about how I look on the outside, but know that it's far more about the person I am on the inside. I wish my mother had figured that out before she died.
My mother will never figure it out either. Sad.
http://anyshinything.com/2010/12/11/poor-jane-fonda/
http://anyshinything.com/2010/12/14/what-does-wisdom-mean-to-me/
Beautifully written and very powerful for me to read. I especially liked this line:
"What if we could be with ourselves in such a way that we no longer projected our deepest fears onto each other, woman to man, man to woman?"
Somehow it seems like it always comes down to this, our projected fears and pain. Until we can be with and feel the hurts, fears and pain we keep projecting them like so many men have done, especially men like Carl Rove. We keep projecting them and continuing the cycle of abuse, fear and pain. We have to feel it to heal it and the more we are willing to feel the more capacity we are given and the more healing we can do.
Thank you for feeling and healing so much of this for all of us. You inspire me to feel more and to be a better man.
Charlie
http://anyshinything.com/2010/12/24/a-gift-from-jean-sheldon/
In what seems like a prior life, I was in the corporate world, the world of men. I witnessed woman after talented and brilliant women simply walk away from that world. Some left to pursue that which was meaningful to them. Some did not know what they were pursuing, but were on a mission to find their passion and value.
I thought it was sad because the corporate world needed these women and their ability to contribute to the organization. It was sad because role models for younger women were walking away. And it was sad because the men in that world were oblivious. I too eventually walked out that door after working in middle management in finance in three major corporate world headquarters over a period of 20 plus years.
It's ok not to look like youth's perfection as we age, its ok to be confronted with men' own fears as they sense the full potential of the feminine. But, we need to step up into our power, and own it fully. For that, I think a good dose of self love is needed, it's actually the only answer.
I was born in Italy and raised in France, and I can see an enormous difference between the way women age there and the way they are viewed in the eyes society. They own their sexuality, their sensuality, and their place in society. Men love them, respect them, and notice their inner beauty. It makes for a very different experience of growing older without feeling more obsolete. But the first step is to awaken our inner confidence, to reconnect with our own source of inner contentment as opposed to looking for it on the outside.
Our power is commensurate to our ability to really feel it and own it.
From one crone to another, bless you Sister!
Yes, the insidious patriarchy is ever present - they did try to destroy the feminine throughout the ages - they fear us and far too many women have bought into it and aid and abet the system.
For years I had to wear the pants in my family because my mother refused to take charge. I even wore suits for years which was so contrary to my style.
I deliberately chose to reject that male-oriented attitude. It took a lot of work which is why I also ditched the suits as business wear - too restricting and constricting for my spirit.
Now, only dresses or separates - unabashedly feminine - no man can ever take me down. I've got bigger cojones under those skirts and best of all, I have nothing to prove. I'll be 52 in January and am so looking forward to it!
I have passed that age of needing approval. You will take me as I am or leave me where you find me. That wise woman is well and alive and thriving inside me.
All she says is bring it on. She is that powerful and I sincerely hope my other sisters out there grow into her. There is nothing to fear. I am growing into my wisdom and they will too. My coat of scars is my badge!
HAHAHA nothing and no one can bring me down.
Great post!
Thank you
Catherine