On Thursday we received at UAB the visit of our colleagues from the CELCA (Centre for English Languages and Literatures) of the Universitat de Lleida, an institute that gathers together the research groups Ratnakara, which specializes currently in Indian Ocean literatures, and Dedal-Lit, which deals with Age Studies (please take a look at the forthcoming international conference they will be hosting in April for ENAS and NANAS, ‘Ageing, Old Age, and Intergenerational Relationships through Narrative and Practice: Challenging Ageism’). We participated in the meeting as members of the research group for the representation of conflict (G4RoC), though we are also members of the research project Beyond Postmemory: English Literary Perspectives on War and Memory in the (Post)Postmodern Era (POSTLIT).
I want to focus today, from a point of view which is not strictly academic, on the thoughts stirred by the colleagues who spoke about ageing (in drama, short fiction, novels, graphic novels). I must stress that I consider Age Studies to cover all ages. I have a couple of chapters on ageing men: “Fighting the Monsters Inside: Masculinity, Agency and the Aging Gay Man in Christopher Bram’s Father of Frankenstein,” in Masculinities and Literary Studies: Intersections and New Directions, and one on Agent Fox Mulder in a forthcoming book on SF and TV series, which I have co-edited with Michael Pitts. Yet, it could be said that I have done more work on children, from diverse pieces on Harry Potter to the book I edited with my MA students’ essays last year, Beautiful Vessels: Children and Gender in Anglophone Cinema (see my post on this book). I have not written so far on ageing women simply because it’s not my area of research, but as an ageing woman I have given the matter plenty of thought, and I wish to share some experiences and ideas here, linked to matters as diverse as my grey hair and Demi Moore’s film The Substance.
I always make a point of telling students my age, so that they know how to place me generationally without the need to speculate. I’m 58, will soon be 59, and so my most immediate horizon in terms of decades is reaching 60 in 2026, if the world and I still exist. One thing I have noticed in academia is that the moment you hit 55 (perhaps just 50) everyone starts talking about retirement. As happens, I contacted the personnel services of UAB about eighteen months ago to check that my working record was correct and they emailed me the regulations about retirement, noting that I could retire with a full pension at 60 (I started working full-time at UAB when I was 25) as many teachers are doing.
In my Department, with few exceptions, my colleagues have been retiring at 65, with the current trend being retirement at 70, which we are allowed to take, followed by an extra stint as honorary of emeritus professor up to 74 (in that case you get your full pension at 70 and a tiny yearly stipend). I plan to retire at 68, which will be the mandatory retirement age for all workers in a few years’ time in Spain, and also because 68 is 50 years older than our youngest 18-year-old students. I am already 40 years older than them and the generational gap is beginning to be too much. In practical terms, this means I have nine and a half academic years to complete, though I don’t see myself ceasing to write this blog and to publish academic work at 68. As for teaching, I only teach now two subjects a year (17 ECTS) and I think I can continue doing that with no problem; what concerns me is that I’m running out of time to teach a few subjects I have always wanted to teach (on nonfiction, SF by women, etc).
As a researcher, I have never been more active in my life. After 40 years of training, if I count my first undergraduate year as the beginning of my career, I find it easier than ever to think of new topics for research and to write publishable work. I’m certainly enjoying more than ever that aspect of my work, and I think I made the right choice in opting to focus on writing books, and pushing articles and chapters to a secondary place. This has been facilitated, of course, by my diminished teaching workload, which has oscillated between 16 and 18 ECTS for years now, thanks to UAB’s generosity in the application of the law as concerns the rewards for accumulating ‘sexenios’ (or six-year assessment exercises).
UAB is also generous in rewarding admin tasks with points that generate a little bit of extra income past the count of 30. In my case, though, since I got my first 30 points two years ago, and accruing 30 more points will take quite a while, this means that I no longer volunteer to do any admin tasks. I don’t feel guilty, as we have recently tenured staff that can take over. As a teacher, things have become more complicated because of the growing age gap between my students and I, but I’m making an effort to reach out to them, consider their preferences, and innovate my methodology. Not everyone likes me, but this seems to be too part of ageing as a woman in front of much younger students. Another thing I have noticed is that as the Department’s staff changes with the entrance of younger part-time and full-time members, I feel more isolated. I don’t know many of my younger colleagues and it feels a bit awkward to go chasing after them for coffee, lunch or a chat.
I commute to UAB by train and this public space has become the site where my ageing is most openly monitored. Students, obviously, don’t comment to me on my looks. My colleagues, most of them women, are supportive of each other and we tend to compliment everyone on our outfits. I do make a point of telling everyone, man or woman, they look good when they wear something nice. Now, on the train I’m just an anonymous passenger and most reactions I get are based on my grey hair. Let me explain. I stopped dying my hair during Covid-19’s lockdown, already five years ago, when hairdressers’ establishments were forced to close. Many women, from 35 to 60, made the same decision as I could see on the public transport, but little by little they started dying their hair again. Once more, it is now automatically assumed that grey hair must mean you’re 60 (the age at which most women stop bothering to dye their hair). I was very annoyed when people started giving me their seat, as my face is not much wrinkled, but I have learned to take advantage of my grey hair. In fact, I get now very annoyed with the cheeky students who won’t budge from the reserved seats. I have overcome the temptation to die my grey hair again with highlights in a fancy colours: purple, blue, fuchsia, red… but right now I’m taking a pause from that.
Unlike other women who are much prettier and have much better figures I don’t mind being invisible in the street. I think it’s a relief not to be catcalled, as I was as a teen, or leered at, as I was in my twenties. Now and then a mature man looks at me with some kind of offer in mind, as they will inevitably do, but I just laugh inwardly and let them be. My partner and I have been together for almost thirty years now, and since we are the same age we’re going through the same processes at more or less the same time. I assume that having a much older husband must affect ageing women in very different ways. And I am totally sceptical about relationships in which the man is much younger than the woman—which leads me to Demi Moore.
Moore, currently 62, might win this evening an Oscar for her performance in Coralie Fargeat’s body horror hit The Substance. She has indeed been reaping many awards thanks to this film, her comeback after a few years in less popular projects. Demi Moore was a big star between 1984 and 1996, when the film Striptease was received as one of the worst films of the year. Moore, a stunning woman of great beauty (which, incidentally, she started modifying artificially for Striptease) was married to mega-star Bruce Willis between 1987 and 2000. In 2003, when she was 41, she started dating actor Ashton Kutcher, then 26, and they eventually married. He left her eight years later, in 2011, for Mila Kunis, an actress 20 years younger than Moore. Demi Moore was during the years of her marriage to Kutcher proof that older women could attract much younger men, but when she hit 49 she became proof of the opposite. Her career entered then a low-profile period, coinciding with her fifties, with plenty of work but no outstanding performance, until The Substance.
I have no words to describe how appallingly bad Fargeat’s film is. The absurd premise supposes that Moore, a TV celebrity, starts taking a mysterious substance that promises to rejuvenate her. Instead, a younger woman (played by Margaret Qualley) emerges from her body, which she soon learns to vampirize rather than respect the weekly limit to which her own presence is reduced. The two women are supposed to be the same woman (just as Jekyll and Hyde are the same man), but actually they have different minds, personalities, and bodies, which makes it easier for the younger one to predate on the older.
Moore has been very brave to accept a role in which she ends up becoming a monster in a process of degradation that recalls that of Jeff Goldblum in Cronenberg’s The Fly, but her performance has no merit except the patience with which she endured the many hours of make-up. My suspicion is that she is being given all these awards for the parts of the movie in which she shows her naked body, which is absolutely fabulous for her age (unless, that is, it has been somehow altered for the movie, just as Qualley’s boobs were covered with a silicon prosthesis to make them look better). As a 58-year-old woman I must protest: The Substance is not only awfully misogynistic but also another example of the current trend forcing us, ageing women, to look not just younger but anatomically perfect. The last thing we need at age 60 is being looked down because we don’t look like Demi Moore, and if we look like her, because we don’t look like young Margaret Qualley.
And this is what it feels like to be an ageing woman academic: the brain works fine, but we’re judged for our looks as if we could all be Demi Moore. Well, even she is judged against other younger women. It’s a no-win situation. In any case, my aim is to ignore this misogynistic ageism and continue enjoying my job for as long as I can.