Page 38: On Women from the essay The Double Standard of Aging
A few months ago I was talking to my mum about the joy I feel when I see a woman confidently alone at a restaurant; or even alone on the bus, looking out of the window and into somewhere within her thoughts; or walking down the street, on her way to, or from, some place or some person.
I love it more when they’re middle-aged because I imagine, having left their twenties and thirties behind, that some of the exhaustions, or pressures of what it is to be a woman have been discarded too. Or at least, some of the ways a woman feels ill-equipped to deal with those pressures has fallen away and a stronger sense of self has emerged in its place. I imagine them stepping through some veil, from Here to There, where they dress much more like ‘themselves’ though I don’t know them at all. Their clothes seem to be worn by them, made beautiful by them, rather than them wearing the clothes, rather than the clothes making them appear more of something— more confident, more intelligent, more career-focused, more easygoing, more feminine, more successful, more nurturing, more, more, more. They seem to smile and frown and stare blankly with equal measure, or be lost in thought with much less self-consciousness than I find myself and other women my age fretting about. They seem to have acquired some new understanding about the way things are, like a rite of passage that one slips through silently, the way one slips into a dream.
*
Page 38 of On Women by from the essay The Double Standard of Aging by Susan Sontag:
‘Women have another option. They can aspire to be wise, not merely nice; to be competent, not merely helpful; to be strong, not merely graceful; to be ambitious for themselves, not merely for themselves in relation to men and children. They can let themselves age naturally and without embarrassment, actively protesting and disobeying the conventions that stem from this society’s double standard about aging. Instead of being girls, girls as long as possible, who then age humiliatingly into middle-aged women and then obscenely into old women, they can become women much earlier—and remain active adults, enjoying the long, erotic career of which women are capable, far longer. Women should allow their faces to show the lives they have lived. Women should tell the truth.’
This final section of the complete essay, which also contains Sontag’s closing argument, opens with a simple, declarative sentence. ‘Women have another option.’ Simple sentences like these are common in critical essays, either at the beginning or towards the end, or sometimes even right bang in the middle, because they allow the writer to state or declare their points and arguments before delving into them further or, as a summary of everything they’ve just said. Unlike fiction, an essayist will tell you what they mean, and then show you. The tone is often authoritative, but not scolding, sometimes combative, but not berating. A simple sentence communicates a fact, an observation, or an opinion. Which of those then, is this?
When I read it as a fact it takes on a challenging tone. It says these are, in fact, the cards that women have. It’s saying: women have another option, irrefutably, without a doubt. If, instead, this were simply an observation, the tone alters again, becoming more personal. The sentence contains the essayist's own observations about society. The speaker steps into the words and, the meaning shifts.
Sontag’s essays often explore complex ideas in art, literature, and culture, blending literary criticism with philosophical inquiry. She was a student of philosophy and her philosophical ideas about the double standards of aging for women, that men do not panic about aging in the same way that women do, because they aren't punished by society to the same degree, are frequently explored in her work.
If, then, we consider this opening statement as Sontag’s own opinion, rather than fact or observation, it takes on a different feeling altogether. It becomes specific to this writer, this woman, this human being. It steeps itself in truth, which may include fact, but also includes belief. Is it a belief then, that women have another option? And how fragile or how strong is that belief? How then, to take it? I think that can be where the beauty of the essay lies, in how one interprets the information, the language chosen by the writer, and the order they’ve chosen to communicate their arrangement of facts, observations, and opinions.
*
Essays usually adopt one, or a blend, of the following four forms: argumentative, expository, narrative, or descriptive. Sontag often places an argumentative tone within an expository form, where she explains and analyses culture and society with a combined analysis, fed by her knowledge across a range of subjects. Although in modern culture we might associate the word argumentative with aggressiveness and bickering, or we might use it to describe someone negatively as a type of character flaw, the word argumentative stems from the Latin word ‘Argumentativus’, from ‘argumentari’ which means to ‘conduct an argument’. Conducting an argument is characterised by reasoning, and reason, when considered a verb, is the ability to think, understand and form judgements logically, through the pursuit of finding an answer to a problem by considering many options and persuading someone with rational arguments.
Sontag follows this opening sentence with a long, compound sentence; bringing a flow and rhythm to the writing and allowing for the expression of her complex idea. She argues that women ‘can aspire to’ be: ‘wise’, ‘competent’, ‘strong’, and ‘ambitious for themselves’, and she persuades us of the reasoning for this, the logic in this, by comparing these characteristics to their lesser, more service-based counterparts of: ‘nice’, ‘helpful’, ‘graceful’ and ‘ambiti[ous] in relation to men and children’. Through this, she reinforces her first declarative statement, that women have another option, by stating these other options and how they fare when pulled up shoulder to shoulder with the current ones available. Though this was written in 1972, it still feels relevant fifty-three years later. In the UK at this time, the country saw the rise of the Women's Liberation Movement (WLM), advocating for equal pay, educational opportunities, free contraception and abortion, and 24-hour nurseries, culminating in the Equal Pay Act of 1970. Meanwhile in the US, a similar rise in protests from women continued to take shape over the decade, including the ‘Women's Strike for Equality,’ a large-scale demonstration marking the 50th anniversary of the 19th Amendment and advocating for women's rights, including free abortion, equal opportunity, and free childcare.
*
By varying her sentence structure, not only does Sontag add depth to her ideas, but she demonstrates a firm grasp of her understanding through the way she’s chosen to articulate her point, to build upon it, so to speak, by building on the length of her sentences. You can almost hear her voice through the words as if she’s delivering a lecture or a political speech to a crowd. She then moves into the complex sentence, of women ageing, ‘naturally and without embarrassment,’ of ‘actively protesting and disobeying…society’s double standard about aging’. Sontag argues that by being able to 'age naturally’, women can be ‘active’ adults in society and not passive individuals in their own lives. The words ‘protest’ and ‘disobey’ are natural opposites to being ‘nice’ and ‘helpful’ and ‘graceful’. They are energetic, loud, defiant—daring.
Intrinsic to Sontag’s argument is the absurdity concerning the reality of ageing for women. That anything that happens naturally should produce ‘embarrassment' is at the heart of this ‘double standard’. Words such as ‘embarrassment’, such as ‘humiliating’, and ‘obscene’, suffuse the pages with a woman’s inherited sense of shame. Inherited from who is the question. Inherited from men? Inherited from society? Inherited from other women?
It makes me think of the popular Netflix show Adolescence. Co-creator Stephen Graham has spoken prolifically about not blaming one group in particular, but looking at the responsibility everyone plays in the vulnerability of young men. ‘What my main question was that maybe we’re all slightly to blame—or that we should all look at it from different perspectives, not just the family, but the school, society, politics, community, maybe we should all be accountable in some respect.’
The same is true for young girls. I’m waiting patiently for the same level of detail and nuance to be explored from their perspective, to spark such conversation, such national and international debate and attention. Most social issues are symptomatic, so if boys are being groomed by the dangerous beliefs in the ‘manosphere’, and a lack of accountability by the adult world, what are the dangerous beliefs targeting young girls? They are not exempt, and with the real and physical dangers for their safety on the rise when it comes to young men, what else is happening psychologically, mentally, and emotionally?
*
Sontag’s argument in this passage reaches its climax with a compound-complex sentence that contains all of her questions and answers, which allows for astute connections to be made. Complex sentences demonstrate cause and effect since, by definition, one part of the sentence will not make sense without the other. In a compound-complex sentence (typically the lengthiest type of sentence used in literature), a writer can put forward a richer expression of her ideas. In this way, Sontag uses the words on the page in much the same shape.
A long obsession with girlhood, of being ‘girls, girls for as long as possible’ is the cause that creates the effect of that short yet ‘humiliating’ and ‘obscene’ transition into womanhood and later, old age. Instead, Sontag argues, a ‘long erotic career’ for women is possible. These words take up space on the page and further than that, yearn for the accepted maturation of women. The word ‘erotic’ is significant here, its specificity, its particularly adult-related meaning, reinforces the idea that womanhood leaves much to be desired, aspired to, in anticipation of. It suggests that women lead fulfilling, satisfactory lives once girlhood is left behind and that these tangible and within-reach lives can spark sexual arousal or excitement, perhaps in others, more importantly, in themselves. That women should aim to live lives that are desirable on their terms frees women from thinking solely from a service-based position in society.
*
I’m not sure whether Susan Sontag would agree or disagree with the state of feminism, or women’s progress in the West today. With the shift to conservatism in popular cultures, such as the rise of the ‘tradwife’, which promotes a return to traditional gender roles and domesticity for women, it’s hard to say what the future for young girls will be, and how they will feel emboldened to let go of the pressures of remaining like young girls, albeit with women’s bodies, wifely ‘duties’ and mother’s responsibilities—even more so in an age of social media.
In her journal in 1974, she wrote: thinking about my own death the other day, as I often do, I made a discovery. I realized that my way of thinking has up to now been both too abstract and too concrete. Too abstract: death. Too concrete: me. For there was a middle term, both abstract and concrete: women. I am a woman. And thereby, a whole new universe of death rose before my eyes.
To have a glimpse of a person’s journal offers an unobstructed window into the mind of another, balancing both their earnest feeling and a grasping towards some sense of self, as well as the precarious beliefs that we already know. Journals show us holding council with ourselves through those inward conversations. For Sontag, death and being a woman was a continuous dialogue.
That this passage ends with two declarative sentences, both repeating the verb ‘should’; 'Women should allow their faces to show the lives they have lived. Women should tell the truth.' Reveals what Sontag believes to be the ideal, the desired. Our faces tell our stories. And I don’t think Sontag is getting at make-up here, or surface-level ways of either concealing or enhancing the features of the face, I think she’s talking about something much more serious for women to always be cognisant of. Their humanity, society’s affront towards it, and society’s demand that women do not show just how human they are: do not age, do not anger, do not overdo it. It is a frightening notion, and one that I think is there in Sontag’s use of the word ‘should’. It stings with doubt, with a slight hesitation, with a knowing that, well, women may also not.
When it comes to the rise of conservatism, which is intrinsically linked with race and class, since we're seeing a particular emergence of beauty standards return, as well as the trending aesthetics of ‘clean girl’, ’old money’, and subtlety with ‘neutrals’ to the point of personality oblivion— there is a rotting from the inside taking place. There is a distrust of the current social order, and beneath that, a flagrant distrust for the decisions and protesting and ‘disobeying’ that millions of women have done throughout history. To carve themselves out of the looking glass and be part of society and the real world, whatever that may be. To determine their lives for themselves. When women do not do this, when women cannot do this, their faces cannot show the lives they have lived. They cannot tell the truth, and young women and men cannot truly see them.
*
In the end, the joy I expressed to my mum had given way to a niggling doubt, a bit of a lament, that she quickly told me to stop being so dramatic about. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that recently, whether online or in person, I was simply seeing fewer women being so totally and wholly themselves. I’d started to realise that I was glancing their way more and more often, these women in the restaurants or on the bus, hoping that the very way they carry themselves might impart some knowledge about what’s yet to come, some hint that life is brimming with more once you get through your twenties and even your thirties.
I optimistically imagine that the shape of my life will have altered not because life’s demands on what it is to be a woman will have, I’m certainly not that naive, but because I have, and like the Wizard of Oz behind the green curtain, I’ll find that there’s less on the other side to be afraid, or unsure, of. Or perhaps on the other side, I’ll find myself, and realise only I had the power to place, or accept, such exerting demands and pressures on myself as a woman, whether that be my career, my personal life, or my family life. And maybe that curtain will fall down with a shrug, and I’ll realise that I could have ignored it all, or laughed at it all, or perhaps I’ll feel a more urgent, pressing need to reject it all, to protest against it, to torch the entirety of it down, so to speak, for future women to come. And that though I didn’t do it then, I can do it now, because if I feel joy simply seeing these women, I can only imagine the joy of being one of them.
*
Susan Lee Sontag was an American writer, critic, and public intellectual. She mostly wrote essays, but also published novels; she published her first major work, the essay "Notes on 'Camp' ", in 1964. She died in 2004 and is buried in Montparnasse, Paris.