Growing Older without Aging? Positive Aging, Anti-Ageism, and Anti-Aging

Abstract

Powerful rhetorical and marketing practices support ideals of timeless living. Gerontologists, political activists, community workers, and policy makers predict that the twenty-first century will be an era of unprecedented, positive aging. Their forecast is supported by the populational and longevity revolutions that are already occurring, accompanied by a dynamic shift in images of aging in the media, advertising, and public consciousness. The new positive images of aging depict activity, autonomy, mobility, choice, and well-being in defiance of traditionally gloomy stereotypes of decline, decrepitude, and dependency. Key to the understanding of this development is the idea of introduced by Robert N. Butler in 1968 during a housing dispute when he was chair of the District of Columbia Advising Committee on Aging (Butler,1969, 1990). Butler went on to become the first director of the American National Institute on Aging, in 1976, and remains a gerontological pioneer, while the notion of ageism has become a valuable way of putting a name to the widespread bigotry faced by older adults. Today, ageisn joins racism and sexism as a term that identifies how prevailing forms of injustice and inequality victimize human differences. At the same time, the ideals of positive aging and anti-- ageism have come to be used to promote a widespread anti-aging culture, one that translates their radical appeal into commercial capital. In so doing, and aided by powerful rhetorical and marketing practices, anti-aging culture is effectively reinventing notions of maturity, aging, and elderhood with ideals of timeless living and growing older unburdened by the signs of aging. This paper takes a critical look at these ideals and their production within marketing and lifestyle literature, beginning with a discussion of the life as a frame of reference. TIMELESSNESS AND THE POSTMODERN LIFE COURSE In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, profound changes in labor relations, social programs, retirement and demographic patterns, and the medical and cultural stretching of middle age into later life have led prominent cultural gerontologists to observe that the modem chronological and generational boundaries that had set apart childhood, middle age, and old age have become blurred and indeterminate (Basting, 1998; Blaikie, 1999; Cole, 1992; Featherstone, 1995; Featherstone and Hepworth, 1991; Gilleard and Higgs, 2000; Gullette,1998; Woodward,1991). In other words, the modern life course, with its origins in the industrial standardization of age-graded institutions and populations in the nineteenth century, has given way to a life organized around the priorities of a consumer society. This movement has inspired real estate, finance, cosmetics, and leisure enterprises to target a growing, so-called ageless seniors market (usually pegged at ages 55-- plus) and fashion a range of uni-age bodies, fashions, and identities that recast later life as an active, youthful consumer experience (Meyrowitz, 1984). Of course, the postmodern life course also has created new avenues for self-- care and self-definition in later life, thus empowering elders to innovate resourceful roles and ways of life both for themselves and for those who will follow In both cases, by mobilizing new segments of the population of older Americans in anticipation of extracting the gold in gray (Minkler, 1991), the private sector has expanded the realms from which the images that portray what it means to be old are derived. Market jargon such as boomers and empty-nesters has itself become part of a popular sociogerontological vocabulary aimed at disguising the negative realities of poverty and inequality in old age. Most important, the postmodern treatment of traditional age categories has fostered new cultural experiments with time and timelessness. Historians have demonstrated that modem society operated within a calendrical world, where the values of mechanical factory time and historical progress were intrinsically linked to the family and generational practices of everyday life (see Chudacoff, 1989; Daly, 1996; Gillis, 1996). …