Ageisms I Have Known
I was at a party the first time I experienced blatant age discrimination. A young woman sauntered over to where a friend of mine and I were chatting about which cuties we fancied. She had a sort of lesbian look but did not seem to be a hardcore dike.
After introducing herself, she said that she had noticed me from across the room and was interested in having sex. I immediately expressed a reciprocal interest. Things seemed to move forward at a rapid pace when she suddenly derailed everything with an unexpected zinger.
“How old are you?”
I was not accustomed at the mere age of twenty-nine to anyone asking such a question except to find out if I was old enough to buy beer. In fact, when I started bartending at 24, patrons questioned whether I was old enough to legally sell alcohol. I have always looked significantly younger than my years, and even now at the age of 68 pass for someone a couple decades younger.
Not expecting it to be an issue, I told her that I had reached the age of majority eleven years previous.
It wasn’t long before I realized that my non-ageist views were not shared by others, particularly not by women I wanted to date.
“I’m not comfortable with that,” she replied firmly, informing me that she was just the tender age of twenty-two. She turned and walked away, leaving me dumbfounded, to say the least.
I had just been a victim of ageism and I hadn’t even turned thirty yet!
At that point in my life, I had assumed age discrimination was something I would eventually deal with in a work context much later. I had never made age a litmus test of whether I liked someone or would have sex with them. That seemed no better than racism or homophobia, and I didn’t like either of those things.
It wasn’t long before I realized that my non-ageist views were not shared by others, particularly not by women I wanted to date, and that ageism was going to negatively affect my life for the duration of my time on this planet.
My next encounter with ageism came at the age of thirty-eight, again at the hands of a female who seemed interested and then abruptly disappeared. At the time, I had a short beard that had sprouted a small sprig of gray on one cheek. Otherwise it was completely brown, almost black, as was the rest of my hair.
I was having lunch with her one day when I noticed her frown at the small gray curlicue in my otherwise dark beard. Her demeanor suddenly changed and she started looking uncomfortable. After that, she acted aloof and awkward every time we were around each other, and I never met with her again.
At the age of 41, it happened again. I was fooling around with the personal ads in the back of a local alternative weekly when I met a 32 year-old woman who said her boyfriend had decided to be polyamorous. Although she wasn’t happy about it, she had started casting about for an extracurricular partner of her own.
In our one and only meeting, she expressed her doubts about whether she could date someone of “that age,” but agreed that we should see each other again since we had had a nice time. Unfortunately, that never came to pass for other reasons, mainly because she was truly desiring a traditional monogamous relationship and not a polyamorous one. But still, the age issue had been on the table once again.
Here I am today at 68, a fact I can only hardly believe, retired and wondering what it actually means to age, to get older. I don’t have quite the snap I used to, and certain endowments have largely disappeared, like hair, or morphed in some way, and I’ve gained a pound or two although I’m doing better than most my age thanks to a regular workout regimen. ED haunts me, although that started happening in my early forties, and I’ve even lost some teeth due to poor oral care in my youth, nothing to do with getting older.
Whether you are 29, 38, 41, or 68, people are going to use age as a way to define you.
But other than having slowed down a bit, I’m in good health, look years younger than chronology might suggest, and still have certain desires that are common to the male of the species (wink, wink), so what the heck is the big deal?
If I don’t mention my age, people treat me differently than when I do, that’s the big deal. When I tell them, they always act surprised, and they compliment me, but still, it changes things. And that is what is worst about getting older—the way people perceive you and judge you differently. Whether you are 29, 38, 41, or 68, people are going to use age as a way to define you. It’s just a label, as some like to say, but that litte two-digit label might as well be a blinking neon sign.
It’s a bit odd, really because we’ve been aging ever since we were zygotes, and it works the same for all of us. No one is getting any younger, as they say. You would think that as a universal aspect of the human condition, people would be more accepting of it, but they’re not. The advantages of being older and, presumably, wiser, are dismissed and unappreciated while the advantages of being youthful are celebrated in beer commercials.
I realize that this discussion leaves aside generational issues that define people to some extent, e.g., Baby Boomers vs. GenX, vs. GenZ, vs. Millennials, etc. While these differences account for some of the reason people are preoccupied with age and aging, there is something other than that going on and it’s something we need to look at. Or perhaps that’s just the opinion of an aging non-ageist Baby Boomer, I don’t know.
