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Notes
1 My Pilates teacher waxing lyrical! However, it’s an oft-repeated cliché in British vernacular.
Color versions of one or more of the figures in the article can be found online at www.tandfonline.com/gwst
2 Walking interviews are when an interviewee talks to a researcher while walking. They are useful for elucidating the subject’s relationship with the environment.
3 This is a complex subject. When I told a fellow academic that I was about to start work on this topic, he happened to be about to ring his elderly mother and asked her how she felt about her body, to which she replied, “I don’t think about my body at all anymore.” He revealed that she has just received treatment for cancer, and was still undergoing treatment. Oakley. suggests that, along with ageing, that accidents, illness, childbearing, or other “disruptions” can make us more aware of our embodiment. It seems extraordinary that even while being treated for life-threatening illness the woman in question was able to say, “I don’t think about my body at all anymore,” although she may have been evading a distressing conversation, but if taken at face value it is extraordinary. A friend living with cancer recently said something very similar.
4 Cited in de Beauvoir (337). De Beauvoir gives no source for this reference, but it is probably from his Mémoires d’outre-tombe (published posthumously 1848–1850).
5 The British Crime Survey, for example, consistently shows older people to be the group most afraid of violent attack when out alone at night, and the least likely of the age groups listed actually to be prey to such violence.
6 I was delighted to learn that “the revival of Cartesian dualism lying beneath certain accounts of the body in age, notably that of Featherstone and Hepworth (Citation1991) in their mask of ageing work” is regarded as highly problematic by Twigg 63.
7 Women undergoing HRT to postpone menopause or ameliorate its effects have significantly increased risks of heart disease, breast cancer, pulmonary embolism, stroke, and incontinence (Mayor 673).
8 Women’s occupational pensions in the United Kingdom are likely to yield less than those of men (Gilleard and Higgs 46); also Land; Rosenman. Gibson produces further analysis, pointing out that women work in sectors characterized by lower pay and fewer well-developed “fringe-benefits.” Women have lower pensions and less accumulated capital and investments. Women are “consistently poorer than men in old age, and these adverse financial circumstances are further exacerbated by their greater longevity” (Gibson 83).
9 Men are less able to maintain a dependent spouse in the home; thus, it is “predominantly women’s labour that maintains aged couples in their own homes, with consequent savings to the public sector” (Gibson 75). Gibson also challenges the concept of “interdependence,” providing evidence that even disabled and frail elderly women continue to provide a proportionally larger share of domestic responsibilities, especially cooking (84). New legislation in Britain (2009) funding carers is likely to be of particular benefit to women, to enable them to remain at home and to provide respite to their caring role.
10 A caveat needs to be added here that, while some ethnic groups tend to be among the poorest sectors of the population, extended family arrangements characteristic of some communities can be beneficial to those needing care and support.
11 Gibson also worries about what she describes as a “potentially dangerous ideological component,” which “lurks within the community care rhetoric—the neo-conservative assumption that it is women’s duty to assume such obligations” (78). I think it worth adding that, for some women, the caring role would have been a dominant one in their lives and one in which they may feel they have genuine expertise. Cruikshank also points out that for those older women still in the work force caring roles can have a negative effect on how their work is evaluated (123).
12 Gilliard and Higgs (49) assertions about the attractiveness of older men is not substantiated, and it is interesting that they feel it is a given—perhaps they do not share my utter sense of revulsion in seeing a photo in the newspapers of Bernie Ecclestone with his latest 17-year-old mistress!
13 I asked my 12-year-old daughter at what age she considered women most sexually desirable to men and she answered “Twenty”!
14 Hewlett’s study suggests that “high achieving women” (defined by income) want to be with successful men, but that successful men want, generally, to be with less ambitious women who work shorter hours and are consequently more available (this is based on America where executives work longer hours than in Europe). The men are looking for someone who will complement them rather than someone who is experiencing similar pressures and stresses and working very long hours. It is not as Sontag suggests merely about men’s desire to treat women as sexual “objects” (20); this is one of her more reductive assertions. The ideology of the available wife ready to comfort her husband on his return from work is at play here.
15 I recall trips to Paris and Morocco undertaken in my twenties, in particular, and literally needling a chaperone to be able to move about freely without being hassled by boys and young men in Morocco! On the other hand, as an older woman, contemplating re-entering the relationships arena, I feel a sense of trepidation!
16 In the eighteenth century Mary Wollstonecraft made relatively similar remarks about her own sex, “the fondness for dress so extravagant in females, arises from … want of cultivation of mind,” she asserted, chap. xii section iii (para. 30).
17 Bordo; Davis; Bartky; Jeffreys; Budgeon.
18 The Wellings survey of 18,000 British people, for example, interviewed people up to the age of fifty-nine only. The follow-up survey of sexual attitudes and behavior, focused on c. 12,000 randomly selected men and women aged between 16–44. It was conducted in 1999–2001 (“Natsal 2000”) with 11,161 people aged 16–44 years interviewed as a “core” sample, and an additional 949 people of Black African, Black Caribbean, Indian, and Pakistani ethnicity interviewed as part of an “ethnic minority boost sample” (UCL website).
19 There has been surprisingly little research on this topic and Gott’s survey was small-scale. She did not ask about auto-eroticism, so the sample may not have been completely “retried” …
20 When older women dress “too young”!
21 Cited in Gilleard and Higgs 50.
22 Gibson points out that cardio-vascular fitness for older women is important. Certain forms of exercise are therapeutic for arthritis, rheumatism, and osteoporosis. “Age, sex and social stereotypes conspire to make municipal pools, aerobics classes, gymnasiums, tennis courts and bicycle tracks less than ‘user friendly’ to women in their fifties and sixties, let alone their seventies and eighties. Such difficulties are, of course, likely to be compounded by the effects of class and ethnicity among some subgroups of older women” (85). Notwithstanding, some Muslim girl and women’s groups have been very active in negotiating the separate (segregated) use of municipal spaces for their group use.
23 There is a long historical tradition in Britain of women exploiting the “carnivalesque,” particularly with respect to liminal events (see Hogan for a detailed analysis).
24 Charter Against Ageism and Sexism (ChASM), developed in collaboration with Women Ageing and Media, National Union of Journalist and Women in Journalism, UK, is one of a number of current initiatives.