Is Media’s Extended Senior Moment Coming To An End?

By Karen and Erica

One of the reasons we started Lustre was because we were appalled by the images of older people, especially women, we saw in the media.

At best, older women were seen listening attentively while their equally old but far more dapper husbands took the lead in speaking with an investment advisor or doctor. Most of the time, though, older women were seen alone, wearing shapeless floral things, having fallen on the floor, or perhaps sitting aimlessly on a bench in a field. Never were older women seen looking stylish and doing something purposeful. Seldom were they seen even having fun. In one ad, manic older women were presented as enjoying life, apparently because they had dyed their hair purple rather than from doing anything thoughtful. Not what we were looking for.

Were we missing something? We did some research, as we are wont to do. No, we were not missing anything. Portrayals of age in media are agist.

Why did we care? Because we believe inauthentic images create assumptions that can limit opportunities for people like us. Even in a society concerned about racism and sexism, agism is acceptable—despite the fact that it magnifies other isms—and these images contribute to that acceptance. This is nothing new. But sidelining a population with much to offer is harmful to the psyches of billions of people and depletes the wallets of everyone. We wanted to change the picture.

And we wanted to begin at the beginning. The anti-aging messaging starts young. Women are barraged even before they are twenty with ads suggesting that women need to stave off aging at all costs. Of course, nubile young women can be movie stars. But their tenure is short. It is followed by invisibility, at roughly 30 to 40, then the age of monsters, roughly 40 to 50, then permanent invisibility.

Why is this happening? Why are the younger people who make a lot of media decisions so petrified by age? We will all age—unless we die young, which seems a bad alternative. We can understand young people not necessarily wanting to be their grandparents. The men of that era had hard lives until they retired from the world at 62, and played for a few pleasant years before they died at 65. Many of the women never yearned to be part of the world. We love them, but we don’t want to be them.

Their children, however—that is to say, us—are different. Thanks in large part to their sacrifices, we are living much longer, and using our considerable assets to remain connected and productive and stylish. Our children do want to be us. But the media world has not caught up.

But maybe it is starting to.

An article in The Atlantic says that TV has suddenly discovered the appeal of middle aged women (though women in their 40s are barely middle-aged, but let’s not quibble). The Wall Street aJournal reports on the return of romcoms—starring glamorous women actors, some in their fifties! Who are powerful business people! !Why? Because COVID created a huge demand for content, so even shows depicting women over 30 have become acceptable.

[T]he streaming wars have created a huge demand for new dramas, and the increased opportunities are obvious. In her 40s, Reese Witherspoon has starred in Big Little Lies, Little Fires Everywhere, and The Morning Show. (As a bonus, the last of these also rescued Jennifer Aniston from a film industry that never quite seemed to know what to do with her.) The HBO remake of Scenes From a Marriage gave 44-year-old Jessica Chastain a role every bit as challenging as an Ibsen heroine. At 46, Sandra Oh began playing a weary spy locked in a deadly pas de deux with a glamorous assassin in Hulu’s Killing Eve. And at the same age, Kate Winslet undertook one of the standout roles of her career, as Mare Sheehan, the stoic detective in HBO’s Mare of Easttown.

How fascinating. COVID was good for our image! And we don’t think there is any going back. Of course, the next frontier is women in their sixties and seventies and older. Again, COVID may help. Now that everyone is quitting maybe the experience and skills—not to mention buying power—of older women will become obvious, and marketers will portray us as vital members of the human race, not caricatures of real people.

Whatever the reasons, it is most exciting that some part of the media world is catching on to the value of women over 30. Let’s hope it is just the beginning of a groundswell of change.