aging

Beauty provokes harassment, the law says, but it looks through men's eyes when deciding what provokes it.

Besides, it happens fast for some people and slow for some, accidents or gravity, but we all end up mutilated. Most women know this feeling of being more and more invisible everyday.

Women who love themselves are threatening; but men who love real women, more so.

We do not have to spend money and go hungry and struggle and study to become sensual; we always were. We need not believe we must somehow earn good erotic care; we always deserved it. Femaleness and its sexuality are beautiful. Women have long secretly suspected as much. In that sexuality, women are physically beautiful already; superb; breathtaking.Many, many men see this way too. A man who wants to define himself as a real lover of women admires what shows of her past on a woman's face, before she ever saw him, and the adventures and stresses that her body has undergone, the scars of trauma, the changes of childbirth, her distinguishing characteristics, the light is her expression. The number of men who already see in this way is far greater than the arbiters of mass culture would lead us to believe, since the story they need to tell ends with the opposite moral.

Men are visually aroused by women's bodies and less sensitive to their arousal by women's personalities because they are trained early into that response, while women are less visually aroused and more emotionally aroused because that is their training. This asymmetry in sexual education maintains men's power in the myth: They look at women's bodies, evaluate, move on; their own bodies are not looked at, evaluated, and taken or passed over. But there is no "rock called gender" responsible for that; it can change so that real mutuality--an equal gaze, equal vulnerability, equal desire--brings heterosexual men and women together.

The beauty myth is always actually prescribing behaviour and not appearance.

The Victorian woman became her ovaries, as today's woman has become her "beauty.

I think adults must get sort of worn away over time, like rocks out at sea, but remain who they are, just slower and grayer with those funny vertical wrinkles in front of their ears. But the young are a different shape from one week to the next. To know us is to run alongside us, like someone trying to shout through the window of a moving train.

Exiting from any long-term relationship comes at great personal expense, which explains why so many people are understandably reluctant to endure the cost of severance. Beginnings and endings are always dramatic and occasionally traumatic. Youthful brio allows us to engage in transformation. As we age, we carefully weigh the spectacle of continuing enduring harrowing situations or seeking melodramatic renovation of our core being. Analysis of the respective cost benefit ratio, consideration of the known versus the unknown, can delay or permanently deter us from altering our environment, leading our persona to become more rigid as we mature. Transformations in life are disconcerting to people who resist change.

People undergo several sequential steps in maturing from infancy including childhood, adolescences, young adulthood, middle age, and old age. Each stage presents distinct challenges that require a person to amend how they think and act. The motive for seeking significant change in a person__ manner of perceiving the world and behaving vary. Alteration of person__ mindset can commence with a growing sense of awareness that a person is dissatisfied with an aspect of his or her life, which cause a person consciously to consider amending their lifestyle.

There is nothing that anyone can get past a forty-five-year-old woman._ We laugh hard, the first honest sound I make that afternoon, or in many days, each of us feeling the ravages of experience, our debt to enduring. We are not to be fucked with. We rule. Even as we age and help our children push past us, as we worry about the estimate for the roof, forget things we meant to do, regard our widening bodies, we rule. We__e returned again and again to our original selves for another look; we have refined our purpose. Changes we thought we__ been resisting have anyway been wrought, and they have made us unbreakable.

I remember, around age ten, beholding the scene in The Shining in which the hot young woman whom Jack Nicholson is lewdly embracing in the haunted hotel bathroom ages rapidly in his arms, screeching from nubile chick to putrefying corpse within seconds. I understood that the scene was supposed to represent some kind of primal horror. This was The Shining, after all. But the image of that decaying, cackling crone, her arms outstretched in desire toward the man who is backing away, has stayed with me for three decades, as a type of friend. She__ part baths-ghost, part mad-Naomi. She didn__ get the memo about being beyond wanting or being wanted. Or perhaps she just means to scare the shit out of him, which she does.

We need an army of white-haired, wild-eyed radicals cutting a swath against the sexism that crosses our paths. It is a good antidote to the larger community__ apparent belief that older women are slightly dotty, grandmotherly, benign souls.

I have become the woman I hardly dared imagine I could be. There are parts I don__ love__ntil a few years ago, I had no idea that you could have cellulite on your stomach__ut not only do I get along with me most of the time now, I am militantly and maternally on my own side. Left to my own devices, would I trade this for firm thighs, fewer wrinkles, a better memory? You bet I would. That is why it__ such a blessing that I__ not left to my own devices.

I feel different, better, about my personal life as well as my professional life. So much confidence comes simply because I have reached this very good age. Women my age today are forging new ground. Society stops defining us by our reproductive capacity, sexual attractiveness, or other traditional measures, so we become liberated from stereotype. We are freed to grow into our full selves.I couldn__ have allowed myself to feel so positive in the past. When I was at the height of my film career, I didn__ have the kind of respect I now have from the theatrical community. I hadn__ yet proved that I have the chops for the stage. But now I have a stature I__e never before enjoyed.Virginia Woolf herself observed that when her Aunt Mary left her enough money to live on, her financial independence meant she __eed not hate_ or __latter any man._ She said this was of even more value to her freedom and autonomy than the right to vote.

Our society on a whole is trained to see young women. There are proportionally far more of them on magazine covers, on TV, and in films than int the actual population. As a result, we have a citizenry taught to see the young and ignore the not-so-young. It isn__ conscious; it__ Pavlovian. (13)

But if a role model in her seventies isn't layered with contradictions - as we all come to be - then what good is she? Why bother to cut the silhouette of another's existence and place it against our own if it isn't as incongruous, ambiguous, inconsistent, and paradoxical as our own lives are?

LADY BRACKNELLThirty-five is a very attractive age. London society is full of women of the very highest birth who have, of their own free choice, remained thirty-five for years. Lady Dumbleton is an instance in point. To my own knowledge she has been thirty-five ever since she arrived at the age of forty, which was many years ago now.