Aging, Women, and Cultural Archetypes

“The great advantage men have is that our culture allows two standards of male beauty: the boy and the man. There is no equivalent of this second standard for women. The single standard of beauty for women dictates that they must go on having clear skin. Every wrinkle, every line, every gray hair, is a defeat.” — Susan Sontag

The two archetypes culture offers older women

1. The hag / Baba Yaga — eccentric, scary, monstrous; exists in opposition to patriarchal society and is punished for it with grotesque looks and a pitiful, lonely life
2. The babushka — background figure defined entirely by role as devoted mother or grandmother; identity flattened in service to the structure

Both are losses. In the first, you’re cast out. In the second, you disappear.

The evolutionary biology problem

The evolutionary biological perspective carries a “divine truth” quality that the historical perspective doesn’t — history is understood as fallible and contextual, but evolutionary arguments get treated as timeless. But if perimenopausal women in the past were de-valued because they were no longer “useful” reproductively, that reflects a past with no IVF, no institutionalized childcare, no post-menopausal productive decades. The past is not a justification for how poorly we treat women no longer deemed attractive by mainstream standards.

The deeper question

Does the HSP literature on “highly sensitive folks” and the cultural archetypes for aging women share a structure — both are frameworks that say “this is what you are, and here’s the role available to you”? How much of what we call identity is acceptance of the only archetypes on offer?

See also: beauty-self-image