I’m coming increasingly round to the view that there are deliberate tactics at play to stop young women from listening to older women’s views and experience on this matter.
In a world where gender stereotypes are ever more rigidly enforced and young women are expected to attain a level of grooming and surface attractiveness in order to meet unrealistic standards of beauty, I believe the growing divide between older women and young women is deliberate.
You unmoor young women from the experience of older women by telling them the only thing that matters is their attractiveness to men. They see older women struggling to manage careers and children and caring for their elderly and living in poverty as they age, (older women is the fastest growing category of the homeless).
They desperately want to believe that it will be different for them; that it’s because older women have failed in womaning. And while those young women are young and childless, they are doing well. Their careers progress, men pay them attention, because as young women they have utility for men.
Older women are their worst nightmare. Men dislike or ignore us. No amount of grooming or desperate surgery will disguise the decades. The struggle of being carers is obvious. This mightn’t have mattered during second-wave feminism: we looked at the generation before and saw fierce, brave women who were going to make things better. But now high profile women are more often to be seen centring men or enduring hideous abuse in social media if they are apostate.
Today’s young women are so afraid of being women they are mutilating their bodies to avoid being adult females. They are groomed to believe a life as Kylie Jenner is to be desired. That how they look is more important they what they think or what they can do. The boys who court them are soaked in porn; capitalism pushes constantly to further consumption of makeup and fashion and beauty services. Social media gives them impossible role models created by photoshop; their bodies are celebrated for how close they come to an unattainable and constantly changing ideal. The body positivity movement has morphed into an unhealthy cult and sold out for profit, (Dove anyone?).
Older women are the mirror which shows only struggle and deterioration for young women who have been taught from childhood that only their appearance and willing sexuality matters to the world. Unless, of course, they are too willingly sexual. No wonder young women, like poor Emma Watson are wiling to throw older women under the bus in the hope that by covering their eyes, the reality of being a woman will pass them by.
I am so desperately sad for the young, who are tossed into a world that is very dangerous for them, before their wings have even started to dry.