Age Is Expensive

Age Is A Billion Dollar Business

Right before the pandemic, I was at a book signing in LA. I started talking to this man about forty. We discussed books, writing, and other things. “What do you do?” I asked after a while.

“I’m an age coach.”

“A what?”

“I advise people how to cope with their age.” He glances at a group of very young women.

“You make age sound like grief counseling,” I say.

“It is,” he says with a heavy sigh.

.

Age is a billion-dollar business. I’m 83, and I want to be a movie star. I’m sick of the label ageism. On talk show debates about ageism, forty-year young authors hold up their How To Age bestsellers, claiming to be age experts. Ageism exploits age! It makes a fortune on anti-depressants, diets, clothes, technology, and products. Twenty-four hours a day, on TV, pretty young women with faces smooth as eggs, sell slick anti-age serums, cremes, promising to erase ‘Telltale signs of age, and promise forever youth and happiness. As a result instead of celebrating age, we fear age. We shame age.

I have a friend who is sixty one, and the sight of a line on her face puts her into a depression. The drug industries, anti-age products, cosmetic procedures, anti-age foods, gimmicks, make billions; the message produces age segregation, age discrimination, stereotyping, marginalization, and invisibility. The anti-age message has to stop. Ageism not only is a topic, a bestseller, a sitcom, a new ism, but has become a hot product.

Media slick age activists promise to end ageism. But how? Ageism is internalized. When I was thirty-one, a single mom and in college, I had to wear a Velcro name tag printed Re-Entry woman. At fifty I published my first novel and earned my Masters in creative writing, along with a teaching credential. To be tenured as a professor of creative writing was my dream but the department head said “You’re too old for tenure.” When I was sixty, I published Suddenly Sixty a column about ageism. I got tons of mail but was eventually fired. “We hired you to write about senior cats and plants. Seniors are in diapers not obsessing about romance and sex!” the twenty five year editor shouted.

Each subsequent decade, I wrote about ageism. But ageism was not a topic then. In my seventies, I wrote The Viagra Diaries about a 70-year-old woman looking for great sex and love. I was told by agents and publishers that no one wanted to read about an old lady having sex. When it did sell to Simon Schuster and HBO came calling, the writers changed my protagonist to thirty something, and the option fell apart. In my seventies I wrote Love, Sometimes, about the ageism in Hollywood and in the industry. At 80, I’m treated, as if it’s freaky that I’m still working. Still wanting. Still being. Even the manager of the apartment building I’ve lived in for thirty some years, suggests that I move to a place “with people your age,” he emphasizes.

I say, legislate!” I’m on zoom with Michael Borstein, an author who has a best selling How To Find Your Integrity At Any Age. I met him at a zoom Meet Up For Single Authors Over Sixty. “We banned the N word, thank God.,” I rant. “We have the Me too movement. What about an Age Too movement? We need to start enforcing a new age attitude.”

He scoffs. He sits on a Lazy Boy leather yellow leather chair. His squat body almost disappeared in the cushions. A man bun on top of his head, like a doughnut.

“Sexist men are content with ageism,” I continue. “You Tarzan, me Jane, attitude. You act like the label youth is a magic potion.”

“You wear those high heels, dress young,” he says after a long silence. “You’ll break a hip and then try to get a zoom date.”

“Whoopee, a zoom date is my goal in life,” I say sarcastically. “You sound like you think age is a curse.”

“It is.” He sniffs. “I’ve never dated a woman …your age. Usually they have walkers from broken hips, or, forgive me, bad smells.”

“You write about integrity. Yet you stereotype, and diminish age. So how do you find integrity?” I ask.

He snorts. “By dating young.”

“Well, happy age,” I say, zooming off.

BarbaraRoseBrooker, SF author’s latest novel Love, Sometimes, about ageism in Hollywood and the industry, published Feb 2020, Post Hill Press/Simon Schuster, is available at all bookstores and at Amazon, Target, and other ets.

See her 2020 TV appearances, and podcasts on www.barbararosebrooker.com