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NocturnalStalker -> RE: Age is a Stereotype (9/6/2011 3:44:00 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: wulfenstraat
When you get right down to it, identifying yourself by your chronological age is overt dissimulation. Virtually no one is her chronological age. There are 60-year-old women who do not fit the stereotype of a 60-year-old woman. We all know that. If she says she's 60-years-old, she knows she's putting a mental image of a 60-year-old stereotype into our minds, we who are her potential friend or mate.
It's a lie, if she tells you her chronological age. She doesn't fit that stereotype and should not use it as an identifier of who she is. Instead, she may actually fit the stereotype of the 50-year-old woman better than she does that of the 60-year-old. Consequently, she would be communicating a better and more accurate representation of herself, if she identified herself with the stereotype she most resembles rather than the stereotype of the age-delimited class she was formerly bound to identify herself with.
This is a new era. Her chronological age no longer holds her in thrall to the schoolmates and other peers she grew up with. If they're now old before their time, they're old. That's them. It doesn't mean everyone else in that peer group is old. It also doesn't mean that any singular one of them should now serve as the poster girl of what a 60-year-old woman should be. In fact, they are all the exception, the rare oddity that originally attracted the media to identify as what a 60-year-old is.
If you don't think and act the way your former schoolyard friends now act and think and live their lives, then you're obviously of a different age...usually younger, much younger. In the final analysis, a woman is simply the age she knows herself to be. She knows this by easily identifying herself with the age-group to which she knows she belongs. Ultimately, age-ist thinking is based on erroneous stereotypes and, like other lies, needs to be challenged with the following mind-set: "Don't ask how old someone is, just accept how old you think they are."
Next time warn me to get the blanket and milk when you tell us a story, gramps.
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