Alarmist Demography Stalks Women Over 60

[Triana]

Run Date: 05/31/06
By Margaret M. Gullette
WeNews commentator

Young people are being cued to fear and demean older women, through a public war on elders in general, writes Margaret Morganroth Gullette. The realization put a sour note on otherwise sweet plans for her 65th birthday.
Margaret Morganroth Gullette

(WOMENSENEWS)--OK, here's the news that broke on the day when the main thing on my mind was figuring which champagne I could afford to celebrate my 65th birthday: the Medicare-Social Security birthday.

I had a girlfriend flying up from New York and we were going to eat rich desserts and kill the bottle.

That's the day two male bio-ethicists at the National Institutes of Health published an article in Science declaring who should and should not get the flu vaccine first during the next pandemic. As the Boston Globe writer phrased it, should it be "the 60-year-old grandmother with a weak heart and lungs or the healthy 4-year-old with decades ahead of her?"

The Globe writer got the gist of the doctors' move, pitting life against life by age, but personifying that contrast with two females was her decision.

When it comes to triage by age, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel and Dr. Alan Wertheimer think the government should opt first for 13 to 40-year-olds, then 7 to 12-year-olds, then 41 to 50-year-olds. Presumably those over 50 are out of luck.

"Not because the lives of older people are less valuable," say Emanuel and Wertheimer.

Oh right!

Leave aside that not every 60-year-old is a grandmother. Leave aside that 60 is way young to die for someone whose life expectancy is still measured in decades. Poor woman, just when she's finally got the kids out of house and is able to do something for herself.

I know "grandmother" is a place-holder for any "old woman," and plenty of younger people think 60 is old.

For a woman.

...

http://www.womensenews.org/article.cfm?aid=2758

[LisaM]

1. Why not just have enough flu vaccine for everyone?

Oh, wait. Then Big Pharma couldn't artificially inflate the price.

[CountAllVotes]

2. some of the oldest people in are world are the most valuable

for they have something that comes with age called "wisdom".

I value the elders in our society.

How sad and disgusting it is that people can even think like this.

:kick:

[Virginia Dare]

3. So this is what is has come to...

supposedly one of the wealthiest and best educated societies in the world, and we're debating which aspect of our population is more useful than the other. Who deserves to live and who doesn't? I guess if you're a woman, and you've outlasted your childbearing/sexual object years, you can be thrown away like a piece of trash.

Culture of life? Bullshit!

[Stanchetalarooni]

4. Ancient Militaristic Triage Model

Everyone over sixty gets a morphine drip.
The rest get flu vaccine and then it's back to the front.

[Warpy]

5. A lot of men think 30 is too old for a woman

Our sins are eating and birthdays. Oh, and god forbid we whould ever have sex we enjoy.

Other cultures recognize that their wisdom resides with the grandmothers.

Only our culture despises women in general and older women in particular.

And we wonder why we have such a sick culture.

[Triana]

6. 35 at the oldest....

...seems we're out to pasture beyond that. Some cultures value their elderly as the wisest - they consult them on all issues because of their experience. They are respected and revered. Here, they're just human trash. Especially the women.

Absolutely sick.

[nashville_brook]

16. new to dating after 24 years... totally out to pasture

just turned 40 and am divorcing the man i've been with since i was 19. maybe he's divorcing me. whatever.

a woman who is 40? i'm not even on the radar. men my age, if they are "dating" are looking for a breeder -- a 26-34 year old.

despite the FACT that most people don't have enough experience to consider themselves "adult" until late 30s... granted, i'm in the worst possible geographic location for my gender/age -- coastal florida. the only feminine attributes that get "play" here are boobs, tans, and ass. woe is the woman who played that game young, b/c by her 40s her skin is dead, her boobs are fake and her ass isn't on anyone's radar.

am i wrong to think that there's other places where women's wisdom and experience is revered and considered sexy?

[bobbieinok]

14. didn't some famous author say 'altho she was 27, there were still

traces of an earlier beauty'?

I think there were several DU discussions about this a few years ago.

[havocmom]

7. When you are at a point where you can no longer be exploited

by the mega corporations, you are expendable. And they sure as hell don't want you around teaching the young people the things you have learned over the years... they would be harder to exploit if you are around to help them avoid the pitfalls of believing they have to rely on The Company for everything.

Think how much Big Pharma would lose if the old wise women managed to show young mothers how to keep the kids healthy without drugging them into malleable stupors!

[Lydia Leftcoast]

8. Yes, that last sentence is a great point

About ten years ago, I noticed that increasing numbers of children didn't behave in church, to the point of running up and down the aisles whenever they felt like it. The parents seemed unable to stop them. The older women in the parish were very distrubed by this, because their own children had not acted like this.

And I know they weren't just looking at the past through rose-colored glasses, because I'm the same age as their children, and although I was in church every Sunday (as a preacher's kid), I never once saw a child running up and down the aisles.

I remember how today's 80-year-olds talked about their and other people's children. The children who today would be misdiagnosed as ADD or hyperactive and put on a drug regimen would have simply been referred to as "a handful." The solution was not to drug them but to provide close supervision and plenty of physical activity. Schools were more rigid then than they are now (one stayed in one's seat) but we had recess twice a day, and most kids walked to school and back including a round trip home at lunch on foot.

Also, parents understood that a certain amount of squirreliness was inevitable in children, but they still enforced standards of behavior in public.

[BrklynLiberal]

9. S-O-Y-L-E-N-T G-R-E-E-N

[bobbieinok]

10. when my mother was 60+, she spent a week visiting my brother in SKorea

where he was teaching. She said it was fantastic b/c everyone, especially the young people, had such a respect for older women/people.

When she was somewhat younger, she and my dad spent a year in Holland (my dad had a Fullbright). She said in Europe she as an older women felt much more 'real' than she did in the US (ie, she was seen, not invisible, as so many older women are in the US).

There is a mystery series set in the US about an older woman who is a contract killer; no one ever 'sees' her, even when she points a gun in plain sight.

[liontamer]

11. what a clever premise for a show

[bobbieinok]

13. in c ase I wasn't clear, it's a book series

But it would indeed make an interesting TV series.

[liontamer]

12. the reason older women are ignored, is that all women are ignored

but when you're attractive you're seen as a sex object (not a person) once you lose your sex object status, there's nothing left.

On the other hand, vaccinating children makes sense because it's children that spread disease. If you vaccinate the children you don't have to worry about other people getting sick.

[Ayesha]

15. It is sad, and wrong

I'm a young woman (29) and I work at a nonprofit whose staff is all women - only one man works there and he is not the boss. The clinical staff is mostly women 50+ and several over 60. Although I've always respected and valued my elders, I used to think of 60 as "old", until I met these women. First of all, I didn't know how old most of them were right away and I thought they were all at least a decade younger. My very favorite person at work is 72 and I was SHOCKED when she told me. People think of 72 as retired and spending time knitting and cooking for the grandkids, but this woman works and commutes to her home in the mountains 2 hours away every week. She also has an awesome sense of style (no old lady flowered dresses for her!), swears, and smokes pot. When I'm 72 I want to be just like her.

I have noticed, in fact, that MANY charities and nonprofits are run by older women. Perhaps it's because they know what it's like to be oppressed and ignored. They are doing some of society's most important work and deserve more credit!