Growing Old

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Growing Old

• A Linguistic Consideration
• Of the Alternatives
• By
• Alleen Pace Nilsen
• Don L. F. Nilsen

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Some of the Alternatives

• Growing old as a man
• vs.
• Growing old as a woman
• and
• Growing old in a primitive culture
• vs.
• Growing old in a capitalistic society

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Alleen An Afghan Proverb

• If you see an old man, sit down and take a
  lesson. If you see an old woman, throw a stone.
• In my youthful naivetéwe were there
  between 1967 and 1969I dismissed this as totally
  unrelated to me because surely as an American, I
  will never become old in the way of Afghan
  women with their missing teeth, grey hair,
  walking sticks, and general lack of health and
  beauty care. Besides I will make myself useful
  so that when I am old I will still be making a
  contribution.

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Dons Reaction

• Looking at the male part of the proverb, I
  chose to think about the Afghan phrase Safid
  riche, which is a term of respect for a white
  beard, that is someone able to give
  grandfatherly advice.

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Alleens Reaction

• But then, I thought about my paternal
  grandmother, whose life in many ways was much
  like the lives of present day Afghan women.

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• Alleen She never smiled in a picture because she
  was missing a tooth.
• She gave birth to ten children.
• In effect, she was a single mother because her
  husband was out of town teaching school.
• She never had running water or electricity in her
  house.
• Yet she was a community leader and instrumental
  in founding the PTA in two rural Arizona
  counties.
• Four of her five daughters graduated from college
  and had successful teaching and family careers.
• What brought me up short, was that after we moved
  to Arizona, my father came to my 48th birthday
  party and sadly shared the fact that his mother
  died when she was my age, and she was an old
  woman.

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Alleen Becomes a Feminist

• I was so intrigued by all the evidences of sexism
  that I saw in Afghanistan that when we returned
  to the University of Michigan, I viewed myself as
  a feminist. However, the real feminists in
  1970s Ann Arbor frightened me so much that I
  decided to study sexism in the dictionary rather
  than in real life.
• I foolishly thought that I could study language
  without having to get involved in social issues.
• But one of my first discoveries was that the
  contrasting American terms of Grandfatherly
  advice and Old wives tales send the same
  message as does the Afghan proverb.

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• Alleen Sexism and Ageism
• Discovering that language and social issues are
  intimately connected was my first big surprise.
• And now that I have lived with that surprise for
  something like 40 years, I have begun to observe
  some interesting connections that the language
  shows us between sexism and ageism.
• Some of the revealed prejudices are against
  females of any age, but they are stronger when
  the target is old and so they are more obvious
  and recognizable as a prejudice.

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Don Old Age and Death Are Serious Dilemmas for
Both Males and Females

• Consider how most of the religions of the world
  promise an afterlife, a resurrection, or
  reincarnation.
• And think of all the stories we have about Heaven
  and Hell.
• And look at all the folk stories of the world
  that feature ghosts and communication with the
  dead.
• Because we do not like to think about death and
  dying that we euphemize.

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Don The Search for Eternal Life is a Popular
Theme even in Childrens Books

• Rick Riordans books, as seen in the film, Percy
  and the Olympians, are filled with mythical
  creatures who illustrate many different versions
  of immortality.
• In the Harry Potter books, Lord Voldemort (whose
  name means something like Running from Death)
  is a major character. The books revolve around
  him trying to gather up the seven parts of his
  soul that he has planted as Horcruxes (one of
  which is Harry).
• One of the reasons Alleen is depressed by the
  success of Stephenie Meyers Twilight books is
  that Bella repeatedly tortures herself--and
  readers--by obsessing on the awfulness of her
  growing old while Edward (the vampire) will stay
  his beautiful and perfect 17-year-old body. She
  would rather give up her soul and become a
  vampire than grow old. The reason these same
  books depress me is that Edward is so perfect
  that as a male I could never compete with him.

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Don To Keep from Being Reminded of Death, We. .
.

• Illogically avoid calling someone old, and
  instead say they are older, elderly, or
  grandmotherly.
• Refer to old people as seniors or senior
  citizens, who are living their golden yearsnot
  in old folks homes, but in assisted living or
  retirement communities.
• Give such communities names like Sun City,
  Leisure World, Green Valley, and Golden Hills.
• Instead of saying someone has died, we say the
  person has passed away, crossed over, or gone to
  join a loved one.

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• Don Another example are the jokes based on
  General Douglas MacArthurs response to being
  fired by President Eisenhower, Old soldiers
  never die, they just fade away.
• Old teachers never die they just lose their
  principles.
• Old athletes never die they just lose their
  supporters.
• Old robbers never die they just steal away.
• Old editors never quit, they just write away.
• Old blondes never fade they just dye away.

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• Alleen But still there are differences in the
  attitudes that people express toward aging in
  females and males.
• In relation to the question of whether women
  should be given the right to vote, Mark Twain
  remarked that it was a moot point because women
  would never give their age.
• When our local legislature changed a law about
  drivers licenses, the Arizona Republic ran the
  story under the headline, No longer a felony for
  women to lie about their age.
• Years ago when Gloria Steinem turned 40, the
  media made a big deal about it. She responded
  with something like, Yes, Im forty and this is
  what 40 looks like.If all women would be honest
  about their ages, people wouldnt be so
  surprised.

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Alleen Changing Attitudes

• Ive recently been encouraged to see a few women
  proudly making associations between themselves
  and concepts related to being old.
• In September, when Barbara Boxer was conducting a
  Senate inquiry into a military matter and kept
  being addressed as Mam, she asked them to
  address her as Senator rather than as Mam
  because she had worked very hard to become a
  senator.
• Sandra Day OConnor in a recent interview said
  that she thinks that a decision made by a wise
  old man or a wise old woman will be the same,
  but still its nice for the public to know that
  women are being included in decision making.

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Don Males Aspire to Adulthood While Females
Cling to Youth.

• Boy Scout leaders address 12-year-olds as Men,
  while 50-year-old exercise instructors address
  their 50-year old participants as Girls.
• Black male teenagers address each other as Man!
  while black teenage girls address each other as
  Girl! Womens cosmetics are marketed under
  such names as Cover Girl and Breck Girl.
• Mother-daughter look-alikes are often featured in
  advertisements and illustrations. Mothers are
  flattered to be mistaken as their daughters
  sister but fathers do not want to be mistaken as
  their sons brother.

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Alleen How Healthy Is Our Present Emphasis on
Body Image?

• We have made progress since the early 1900s when
  H. L. Mencken declared that Womans body is the
  woman, and when respectable women had to be
  laced into tight corsets and hobbled by long
  skirts and petticoats.
• But todays commercialization of beauty products
  and procedures makes me feel like womeneither
  young or oldare welcome in American society
  mainly because of how much money we will spend on
  non-basic items.
• One of our doctoral students, Laura Walsh, just
  completed her dissertation in which she showed
  that in the most popular teen magazines for
  girls, the same body image is repeated over and
  over again.

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Alleen Womens Body Image

• Laura compared the image and the message in teen
  magazines to those in prize-winning, serious
  young adult novels by Laurie Halse Anderson. Her
  book Speak is about a girl who was traumatized by
  being raped and then ostracized for stopping a
  wild party. Her Wintergirls is a serious study
  of two teenage girls with anorexia.
• Laura was shocked to find that virtually every
  girl pictured in the magazines she studied,
  whether in an advertisement or in an article, had
  straight long hair, was slender, and looked as if
  she had just walked through the white picket
  fence that surrounded Dick and Jane in the old
  readers.
• Popular teen magazines are totally controlled by
  advertisers, which means that for a magazine to
  keep selling, even the editorial content must
  promote the currently popular image.

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Alleen Magazines for Adults

• In October, I found something similar in the 25
  magazine covers displayed in an Of Interest to
  Women rack in the Omaha, Nebraska airport. All
  but four had pictures of women with long hair,
  big smiles, and at least a hint of cleavage.
  Even their dresses were similar.
• Of the four different covers, three showed food
  prepared from recipes published in the magazine,
  and one showed a group of young men apparently on
  their way to pick up dates.
• In the matching display of 25 magazines Of
  Interest to Men, there were magazines devoted to
  sports, cars, body building, motorcycles, and
  women. Apparently, the manager could not find 25
  mens magazines and so the bottom two shelves
  were filled with collections of cross-word and
  sudoku puzzles.

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Alleen The Beauty Business Then and Now

• When I was a teenager, dyeing ones hair was
  something to be kept secret. A famous slogan
  was Hair coloring so natural only your hair
  dresser knows for sure! Today it is almost
  mandatory for women to color their hair. Jamie
  Lee Curtis stands out because she dares to go
  grey.
• Plastic surgery was even more of a secret, but
  thanks to Joan Rivers and tons of advertisements
  for plastic surgeons, today plastic surgery is
  way out in the open.
• Last month, Kathie Lee Gifford was pictured in
  our local Sunday paper saying, I have no lines
  in my forehead. What do you think I do? Iron it
  every morning? You think people dont know I use
  Botox?

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• Alleen Last summer, an especially nasty campaign
  sign displayed at a venue for a speech being
  given by Nancy Pelosi read, BOTOX DOESNT WORK
  ON THE BRAIN!
• My job at ASU used to include getting our student
  teachers ready to go into high school English
  classrooms in the Phoenix area. I would give
  them a talk about modest dress and how they were
  to be careful so that their breasts would not
  show even when they leaned over in class.
• Don accused me of trying to rid the world of
  small pleasures, but he need not have worried
  because capitalism soon made all such concerns
  old-fashioned. Even the Director of all of ASU
  student teachers no longer gives her dress
  appropriately speech because she grew tired of
  arguing with girls who would say things like, I
  paid a lot of money to look like this and Im not
  going to cover it up!

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Alleen Newsweek Magazine Pointed to the Oprah
Winfrey Show as an Example of Hysterical
Marketing of Health and Beauty

• Last year, the editors devoted nine pages to a
  discussion of what they called Crazy Talk as
  exemplified on the opening page.
• GET A LUNCHTIME FACE-LIFT!
• TURN BACK THE CLOCK!
• WISH AWAY CANCER!
• ERADICATE AUTISM!
• HARNESS POSITIVE ENERGY!
• ERASE WRINKLES!
• BANISH OBESITY!
• CURE MENOPAUSE!
• LIVE YOUR BEST LIFE EVER!

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• Alleen The lead was about a January visit from
  Suzanne Somers, a 62-year-old actress and
  self-help author.
• Each morning she rubs a potent estrogen cream
  into the skin on one arm. Two weeks a months,
  she smear progesterone on the other arm.
• Next she swallows 60 pills40 supplements in the
  morning and the other 20 in the evening.
• In her books, she also tells about starting each
  day by giving herself injections of human growth
  hormone, vitamin B12, and vitamin B complex.
• She wears nanotechnology patches to help her
  sleep, lose weight, and promote overall
  detoxification.
• This is only a sampling of what she does
  because she believes that with chelation
  therapy and biochemicals she can be her same
  beautiful self while living until she is 110.

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Don Men as a New Market

• Men are now where women were when Alleen was in
  high school. We tiptoe around the idea of hair
  coloring as we begin experimenting with Touch of
  Gray. Donald Trump is teased for his elaborate
  comb-over and almost any man wearing a wig is
  accused of wearing a rug.
• Even more than with women, the emphasis is on
  staying young and virile. Virile is based on
  the old Latin word vir, meaning man, which is
  seen in such words as virtue, vital, virtuous
  and werewolf, as well as in the carefully chosen
  brand name of Viagra.
• We suspect that the promised rewards for using
  Viagra was a major factor in opening the door to
  the way that commercial interests are now
  beginning to treat men much like women have been
  treated for decades.

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Don Is the Traditional Male Endangered?

• This cover of Newsweek from September 27, 2010
  illustrates the changing times that are making
  both men and women nervous. The story went on to
  question whether (or how?) its time to rethink
  masculinity.

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Don I Feel Prettyby Joel Stein, TIME
October 25, 2010

• One month later, TIME printed a half-humorous
  piece connecting capitalism to the idea of
  health and beauty treatments for men.
• In 1997, skin care products for men (aftershave,
  eye gels, wrinkle erasers) was a 40.9 million
  business.
• In 2009, it had climbed to a 207 million
  business.
• LOreals line of cosmetics for men went up 30
  in the first half of 2010.
• Menaji, a rival company, has grown 70 each year
  since its founding in 2000.
• When Joel Stein called founder Michele Probst,
  she was just back from mailing 18 packages to
  soldiers overseas.
• Her concealer is called camo, and it comes
  packaged like chapstick. Her bigger packages
  resemble cigar boxes.

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• Don The M word make-up is cancer to us. . .
  We are skin care that looks good.
• Lisa Ashley, a make-up artist who has started
  her own line of products, includes Charlie Sheen,
  Howie Long, and Terry Bradshaw, among her
  clients.
• What Stein calls his Homer Simpson lines, Ms.
  Ashley refers to as his nasolabial crease, a term
  that made him feel so unmanly he knew he would
  never apply the product himself.
• He was amazed at the cost 55 for 0.33 oz. (9
  grams) of eye moisturizeruntil Ashley dropped
  some Toppik powder on his hair line and his
  balding disappeared. He bought the largest jar
  she could find, which was either 45 or 12,000.
  He cant remember, but he does know that it is
  not makeup and he will never leave the house
  without it.

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Alleen Animal Metaphors and What They Show
about Human Thinking

• In earlier writings I have discussed the biases
  against older females as shown through positive
  metaphors based on young animals, but negative
  metaphors based on old animals.
• For example, as soon as a girl is too young to be
  called a chick, she goes to hen parties and
  cackles with her friends. Once married, she
  feathers her nest, and after she has her brood,
  she begins feeling cooped up and wonders if she
  made a mistake by putting all her eggs in one
  basket. Finally, she henpecks her husband and
  turns into an old biddy.
• An especially mean-spirited comparison of women
  to chickens appeared during the 2008 presidential
  campaign when pundits created an anti-Hillary
  Meal Deal mug Two fat thighs, two small
  breasts, and a bunch of left wings.

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• Alleen We see something similar with cats.
  Parents used to name little girls, Kitty, and
  encourage them to act kittenish. Older girls were
  more likely to become catty, and to engage in cat
  fights or live in cat houses.
• Puss, an alternate name for cats (and vaginas),
  is cognate with pouch and purse. Its connection
  to sexuality was shown in one of the James Bond
  films about Pussy Galore and Her Flying Felines.
• The most recent cat-related term to come into
  general use is the word cougar for an older woman
  who goes prowling for young men. Whether
  cougar is a positive or a negative term differs
  as shown by how a recent Arizona incident was
  treated in the media.

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Don DONT FORGET ABOUT HORNY OLD MEN?

• There arent as many negative animal
  metaphors about old men. For example, I think
  Im on my way to becoming a silver fox, but think
  about a player on the Los Angeles Rams football
  team. He is so loved by LA fans, that they buy
  him a Dodge Ram truck, which he is careful not to
  use as a battering ram. He has inherited his
  grandfathers Civil War ramrod muzzle and while
  he stands ramrod straight on the football field,
  he tries not to ram his ideas down the throats of
  his friends.
• Nevertheless, he eventually turns into an old
  goat, otherwise known as a horny old man.

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Alleen From Soccer Moms in 2008 to Mama
Grizzlies in 2010

• The biggest surprise in the 2010 election was the
  tough talk between male and female candidates
  as when in August, Sarah Palin told FOX News that
  President Obama did not have the cojones to get
  tough on illegal immigration.
• In an October Nevada Senate debate, Sharron Angle
  zinged Harry Reid with Man up, Harry Reid!
  This incident got heavy media attention, but
  Missouri Democrat Robin Carnahan had already used
  it in a Senate debate with Rep. Roy Blount.
• In September, Delaware Senate candidate Christine
  ODonnell told a radio interviewer that her
  primary opponent needs to put his man pants on.

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Don The New Politics

• The quote accompanying
• This photo came from Rush
• Limbaugh
• If 51 seats was really the
• objectiveif getting the
• majority is really that
• important, then lets go
• balls to the wall for
• Christine ODonnnell!
• Newsweek, Sept. 27, 2010

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• Don Linguist Deborah Tannen related this
  shelving of polite sensitivities to the blurring
  between public and private.
• Communication professor Kathleen Jamieson says
  that tough language frames the attacker as
  tougher than the person attacked.
• Linguist George Lakoff explained that the
  Republican worldview emphasizes masculinity and
  strength, while Democrats underscore the more
  feminine quality of empathy. This is why, If
  youre a woman candidate whos a conservative,
  then you have to say youre more masculine than
  the other guy.

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Alleen Why Do We Have a Double Standard?

• It has not worked for male candidates to reverse
  the sexism on women. For example, no one has
  told a woman candidate to be more ladylike.
• In Colorado, Ken Buck was widely criticized for
  telling voters to support him because unlike his
  opponent Jan Norton, I do not wear high heels.
• Jerry Brown apologized to Meg Whitman after an
  aide was recorded calling Whitman a whore.
• New York Governor candidate Carl Paladino was
  chided by Katie Couric for referring to a woman
  candidate as someones little girl.
• In Arizona, Harry Mitchells opponent chided him
  for being Nancy Pelosis lapdog.
• Tougher talk when male, female candidates
  collide, by
• Kathleen Hennessey, Tribune Washington Bureau
  10/17/2010

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Alleen Woman Up by Nancy Gibbs (TIME Nov. 8,
2010)

• In her essay, Gibbs admitted that it was
  refreshing for women candidates to call out their
  male opponents for hypocrisy or political
  cowardice . . . But what are we to make of
  rhetoric that is less Margaret Thatcher than
  Lorena Bobbitt?
• Her hope was that todays young women, many of
  whom think that the gender wars are over, will be
  radicalized by what, at least to some of us, are
  consciousness raisers.
• However, she speculated that what some people
  view as an orgy of emasculation, is just the
  opposite. The imperative to man up honors
  that old male model and is a powerful allure to
  men who want to hear it respected.

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• Alleen She went on to say that,
• While it may sound like a Sisterhood-Hear-Me-Roar
  rallying cry, it may actually be calculated to
  appeal not to women but to menthe strong, silent
  types who have been left behind in the Hecession,
  dismissed or derided by a metrosexual media
  culture, and whose ability to hunt and gather and
  provide for their families is threatened by an
  economy skewing more female and more verbal,
  toward service and away from muscle.

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Alleen In Conclusion

• We started this out with the idea that we would
  do a Ms. and Mr. Debate about Gender Issues,
  but the more we worked on our debate, the more
  we realized we are all in this together.
• For now, we will stop by simply revising the
  Afghan proverb to this American version that is
  more appropriate for a capitalistic country.
• If you see an old man, sit down and ask about his
  money. If you see an old woman, sell her a
  beauty product.

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Comments and Questions Welcome

• Since this is still a work in progress we would
  love to hear comments and suggestions from any of
  you. Send notes to
• Alleen.Nilsen_at_asu.edu
• or to
• Don.Nilsen_at_asu.edu