No country for old women

An upcoming reboot of a TV classic resurfaces the issue of how ageing in women is portrayed in 2021, and as Virginia Fallon discovers, it’s much more than skin deep.

Assigned to write a story about ageing women, I set out to find them. ‘‘Want to speak to me about how it feels?’’ I asked every friend I thought might fit the bill. Surprisingly, nobody was forthcoming, though they all recommended other women I should approach. So I did, and the response was the same.

With nobody to interview, I sat at my window typing out this story, then paused, cocked my head and took in my reflection in the smeary glass.

I couldn’t help but wonder: Has an older woman been staring me in the face all along?

The attitude to ageing women is the topic du jour because a new series of Sex and the City is coming to our screens, 23 years after the original.

The 10-part series of And Just Like That reunites Sarah Jessica Parker, Cynthia Nixon and Kristin Davis, and sees their characters deal with the ‘‘complicated reality of life and friendship in their 50s’’.

The original premiered in 1998, winding up in 2004 with six seasons and 94 episodes under its designer belt. Revolving around Carrie Bradshaw, a columnist with a penchant for expensive shoes and emotionally unavailable men, the show followed her and a group of friends as they dated, shopped and slept their way through their city. As much a love letter to New York as a homage to female friendship, it went on to spawn two (awful) movies and a raft of academic papers exploring its themes.

The series was ground, and taboobreaking. Here were four women aggressively pursuing whatever they wanted, and acting like we believed men did, at least sexually. Topics included first-time flatulence in front of a partner, Brazilians, and BDSM; all carried out in ultra-fashionable outfits amid unrealistic settings.

Sex and the City was never realistic; it didn’t need to be. For people like me who were tuning in from small-town New Zealand in their trackpants, the show was a revelation, a soft-lensed promise that women could have it all.

It was also problematic. The lead characters were thin, white, cis-gendered women who were highly educated and wealthy, and its lack of diversity and portrayal of minority groups makes for uncomfortable re-watching.

But while that original series hasn’t aged well, it’s the age of the returning cast many viewers are now bothered by. We might have readily suspended criticism the first time around – Carrie was a columnist buying Jimmy Choos for God’s sakes – but now our heroines are a bit crumpled; that’s just a stilettoed-step too far.

While the new series doesn’t premiere until December, the three women at its core are already in the spotlight, accused of being either too old or not realistically representing women their age. From speculation Kristin Davis has dared to have cosmetic surgery, to apparent horror at Parker’s grey hair, the actresses we last saw together in their 40s just can’t win.

Parker recently lashed out at society’s double standards, telling Vogue: ‘‘ I know what I look like. I have no choice. What am I going to do about it? Stop ageing? Disappear?’’

Executive producer Michael Patrick King said he’d seen the criticism, highlighting ‘‘one b ..... response online’’ which saw people sharing pictures of the Golden Girls.

‘‘And I was like, ‘Wow, so it’s either you’re 35, or you’re retired and living in Florida. There’s a missing chapter here.’’’

There is, Georgina Langdale tells me, and that’s the good stuff in between, like the menopause.

The Havelock North woman says she recently had a Sex and the City moment of her own when unearthing a handbag buried in the cupboard.

‘‘There were tampons in it, and I thought ‘it really has been a long time since I used this bag’.’’

Langdale is in her 50s and a passionate advocate for normalising menopause. She says women shouldn’t be uncomfortable with both ageing and the body changes that come with it – she’s certainly not.

‘‘About 39 per cent of NZ women are over the age of 45 – that’s about 640,000. If you don’t like us with our widening waists and grey hair, I don’t care.’’

She loves her own grey hair and the liberation of being older, saying there’s a certain peace to ageing that lets you take stock of things. She loves menopause too, and has created a natural balm for women experiencing it.

‘‘In the old days we would have had a ceremony or celebration. These days we don’t talk about it.’’

Langdale hopes at least some of the talk in the new series will be about menopause, though just by having older women featured it’ll be a breath of fresh air.

‘‘If the actresses look 15 years older, so what? We’ll see three women in their 50s who can afford to wear designer clothes, go them!’’

Professor Lynda Johnston knows the original series well and says for all its problematic themes, it still had positives for viewers.

‘‘For the first time, we saw women walking around New York having sex, like men. They were very transgressive about what they liked, and it was good escapism for those of us who didn’t have the same sort of privilege.’’

A human geography academic, she referenced the series in her book Space, Place, and Sex, and isn’t surprised at the reaction to its older returning cast because for women, sexism and ageism are all tied up together.

While society’s fixation on female youth is often explained away as driven by biology, Johnston says it’s Western culture that’s to blame.

‘‘There’s an unfortunate binary bodies get put into: young or old . . . very narrow ways of what’s deemed to be attractive.’’

Making fun of self-assured and sexual older women by calling them ‘‘cougars’’ is one way of doing that; older men might get labelled sugar daddies, but that’s about their money, not their age.

‘‘Age diversity needs to increase. We need to see older people on our screens and media in all activities.’’

A2020 study by the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media shows we’ve still got a long way to go. After examining topgrossing films it found women over the age of 50 were less likely to be cast in a main role and were often depicted to be lonely and depressed.

The roles they did get were also less likely to appear in a sex scene; characters under 50 trumped them by three times in the number of sex scenes portrayed.

And that got me wondering: How do we know what an older woman is meant to look like if we never get to see them?

Jennifer says she became invisible about six years ago. She spoke to me on the condition I don’t use her last name because, as well as being unseeable, older women are expected to be silent.

It was about the time she turned 50 that she noticed society had begun to discount her – an attitude she found perplexing as she was just coming ‘‘into her own as a person’’ after decades as a mother and wife.

‘‘It’s not about missing the odd wolf whistle, more that people stopped treating me as a thinking, smart person with valid opinions.’’

Although she’d heard other women describe the same sort of experience, it still came as a shock. She still felt attractive and accomplished – still does – and rails against that old double standard for ageing men and women.

‘‘Even saying that will sound like I’m a bitter old woman . . . I’m neither, just a bit angry.’’

Dr Trudie Cain says while women have always been under-represented in popular culture, older women have been almost entirely erased.

‘‘In some ways these women are doubly marginalised with expectations of youth and at the same time they should reflect their age. It’s impossible.’’

Dr Trudie Cain

If and when an older woman is visible, she’s expected to be, well, everything, the senior sociology lecturer says.

‘‘In some ways these women are doubly marginalised with expectations of youth and at the same time they should reflect their age. It’s impossible.’’

And while there is praise from some corners that the reboot is centering older women, it’s hardly radical and still a long way from realistic. Our heroines are still white, slim and attractive, after all.

‘‘The stretch marks, the weight gain; these women will be post-menopausal age, but I suspect all the physical changes will be erased.’’

Despite that, she’s still a fan and takes comfort in the way she sees her students refusing to conform to expectations of beauty, relationships and sexuality.

They’ll be the ones really shaking things up.

‘‘They have such clarity of how they want to be in their world and their absolute unequivocal right to be as they are . . . it’s incredibly powerful.’’

Alison can’t be bothered by what anyone thinks of the body she describes as ‘‘less than taut but still fantastic’’.

The 62-year-old Wellingtonian has seen the online criticism over the new series and age of its cast, and finds it all a bit depressing. Like Langdale, she’s delighted by the process of getting older, describing her 50s and 60s as a time of settling in, not settling down.

Still, the cruel online jibes aimed at the actresses don’t help any woman feel good about themselves, especially those with similar wrinkles but not the salaries, stylists and designer clothes.

‘‘I thought ‘I hope nobody says that about me when I’m older’ and then realised they probably already do.’’

She suspects the worries women experience about ageing come from other women. There’s a certain viciousness we deal out to each other that men don’t seem to indulge in. When she was younger, she saw female contemporaries as threats, something she now knows was just insecurity and ‘‘some deepseated unhappiness in myself’’.

‘‘Now I feel a bit sorry for younger women. You couldn’t pay me to be 20 again. It was exhausting.’’

In saying that, Alison believes there is something very wrong with the way older women are treated and portrayed. It’s all well and good to say we aren’t bothered by what people think of us, but that’s about being brave, not accepted.

‘‘If I really didn’t care, I’d let you use my last name, eh?’’

Associate professor Catherine Fowler tells me her age and then asks me not to print it: ‘‘That tells you everything, doesn’t it?’’

The head of Otago University’s media, film and communication says the reaction to the cast has to be taken in context of the original series’ focus on glamour, desirability and aspiration.

She says more parts are being written for older actresses, but their sexuality is often trivialised, even as the boundaries of what counts as old are shifting all the time.

‘‘I would love to think when I tune in the girls are sitting there complaining about their wrinkles, lifting taboos on things about the menopause . . . don’t forget it was the first US show to use the ‘c word’ on screen.’’

Essentially though, Fowler says what carried the original series through all those 94 episodes (don’t mention the movies) was its focus on female friendships. That’s what kept us coming back and that’s what we’ll want to see again.

Struggling with my own friends’ refusals to appear in a story about getting older, I promised a pal she could use a pseudonym if she shared her thoughts. ‘‘Just pick a name,’’ I told her. ‘‘Thanks, I’ll use yours,’’ she said. Just like the women in Sex and the City we’ve been mates for ages. As teenagers we navigated first-time love affairs and heartbreaks; in our 20s battled eating disorders and poor choices in partners; in our 30s I raised children while she refused to ever settle down.

The other night, and apparently middle-aged, we dropped all attempts at a proper interview and chatted about being older. My hair is going alarmingly grey, I told her; she’s becoming increasingly invisible, she said.

We listed all the awful, hilarious things about ageing, shrieking with laughter as we tried to out-do each other on the physical symptoms of getting old.

Later, we talked a while about our girlfriends who never got the chance.