Follow The Reaper
...you all have got to stop calling each other sluts and whores. It just makes it ok for guys to call you sluts and whores.
~ Ms. Norbury
Okay, so believe you me we will talk about those words another day, but today I want to talk about something else.
Women. For crying out loud, we all have GOT to stop calling ourSELVES old!!!
Seriously, to continue in the spirit of my beloved Tina Fey, how many of you out there have called yourselves old? How many of you have been calling yourselves old since you were 22? Remember that? Now if you are in your thirties or forties, that seems so young, but remember turning 22, the panic that set in when you realized that you had no more "fun" ages to look forward to? How long exactly have you been living in defeat, because I’ve got news for you:
I will never forget the moment this phenomenon of frantic women first filled me with rage. It was 1997 and I was hanging out with my friends from high school. Mind you, I was no longer in high school; I was 22 years old. And that is OKAY. Anyway, we were all sitting around, 22 year olds although Mum may have been 23, who’s to say, but point is, we weren’t even old enough to rent cars. Yet we were all sitting around and the subject turned to our impending elderliness. And this one girl goes, "Now is the time we need to be getting married. Guys don’t want girls by the time they’re 27, because women get too set in their ways."
Okay now I had barely begun to get angry about women issues at that point, but even then my jaw dropped to the floor and I called complete bullshit on that one. I told her that she may be right that insecure guys needed to get all Torvald about life, but whether I got married at age 23 or 83, you damn well better believe that I would be retaining ownership of my mind, thank you very much. And I said that I would rather stay single forever than marry someone who wanted to "set my ways."
And you would think that maturity might kick in at some point, because isn’t that one of the ideal side effects of aging? But throughout my twenties and definitely into my thirties, I’ve been surrounded by terrified women. Many of them so beautiful, but so many of them marring their beauty, ironically, by fearing getting old.
What is old?
No, seriously. Have y’all ever noticed how few men sit around wailing about how old they are? How there is no "cute" banter at their birthdays about how they are "staying 25," and don’t even get me started on that one.
No, actually, let me get started on that one. Ladies, THAT SHIT IS REALLY REALLY REALLY ANNOYING!!! You are the age you are. Stop idealizing certain ages. Stop talking about wanting to be 25 forever, because what does that mean? Do you not see, do you not realize what a disservice you are doing to yourselves by idealizing certain ages? We call ourselves old, we connect youth and hotness with our words and our actions, and all that does is make guys think, well, shit, I don’t want someone "old," if women themSELVES can’t stand themselves when they get "old."
I don’t know about any of you guys, but I like myself THOUSANDS of times better at age 32 than I did at age 22. And for that matter, I’m a lot hotter than I was at 22. Yes, I have young genes and still get IDed for everything, but I don’t think that youth -- true youth -- is all chance. I think it is a state of mind, cliché as that may be. I realized at a pretty young age that lots of people can be hot at 20. But as the years go by, the pond gets smaller, and you get to be a bigger fish simply by staying the course. Keep learning, keep maturing, keep embracing life. These are the things that can keep us young. I always was horrified working at the Shop Rite in Plainview. Teenagers would come in covered head to toe in...something orange, covered in makeup, hair more overprocessed than Donna Martin’s, with nails that didn’t even pretend to be natural.
THEY looked old. They looked haggard. They looked defeated.
But then the women would come in and it would be like, ohhhhh THAT’S why. Women who were probably really pretty underneath all the self loathing that came out in the form of even more orange, more makeup, more processes, more fake nails. Women who were probably really pretty underneath all the hardness, the snottiness, the self-entitlement that got a little bit more desperate with each passing year. Women who were probably really pretty before they starting cuckolding men at every given turn. And what kind of message is that to send to your daughters? It’s like, it’s no wonder one in four teenaged girls has an STD and sucks the dicks of strangers. What’s to look forward to, anyway? Just misery. Just "being old." Why not get it all in now, no pun intended? Ladies, you have daughters out there now who really need you to get OVER yourselves and be mothers, not creepy Miss Havisham-esque little girls who are terrified to grow up. YOU ARE GROWN UP! Stop fighting it! Rise to the fucking occasion!
Age is not our enemy. We, oh man this sounds corny, but we are our only enemy, if we let ourselves. Why do that? There’s a saying, "Do not resist growing old. Many are denied the privilege."
What are we resisting? What are we fighting? And why expend so much energy into fighting a losing battle? With every day that passes, we get another day closer to a higher number of age. There is nothing we can do to stop that unless we are Captain Daniel McCormack, and look how well that turned out for him. If we embrace life and ride it like a wave, it won’t knock us under, and we don’t have to be those bitchy, bitter women, all awkward looking from Botox and collagen.
But for the time being, at least let’s stop calling ourselves old. It just makes it okay for society to view us as old. And that’s a lot of bullshit ™Lucio.
©2008
Labels: aging, feminism, Ms. Norbury, self-respect, women
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