Is It Just a Male Condition?

I find as I get older that I get tetchy very easily. Often a fairly trivial thing may happen, which gets me overly irritated, cross, complaining. It often happens when I watch TV, especially those documentaries where the presenter seems more interested in projecting themselves than in the subject of the programme. It doesn’t make it any easier for me when, looking over their shoulder at the camera and constantly on the move, they become so enthused by what they are seeing that they leave little room for our own assessment. Why can’t they just sit down, talk, and leave room for our own pleasure?!

Other presenters imagine that they are terribly amusing and have long digressive chats with fellow presenters, their relationship dominating the show. That’s particularly true of local TV when it’s assumed that the viewer is amused when two people argue about each other’s opinions, with nods and winks at the camera. Is there no production control preventing such indulgence? Perhaps all this is a British thing, unknown to our Spanish readers. .

Radio journalists can tread on my tetchiness too, especially when as happens regularly on the BBC’s Today programme, they answer their own questions or rephrase the interviewee’s answers to fit the answer they wished for. Then there’s the celebrity culture we live in, which for me is a cause for major tetchiness, when people of no special consequence become famous merely for jumping through the hoops the media has provided for them. For me this is part of the artificiality of modern life where appearance is more important than substance and ‘virtual reality’ is totally unreal.

I’m not proud of my tetchiness and wonder what causes it and whether it is more a male than a female trait. The beautiful women who are most of our family members exhibit such impatience sometimes, but not to the same degree or frequency as I do. Could it be that men more easily lack connection with the changing life around them, especially when they are retired and are less secure in their own identity? And less patient.

But I suppose tetchiness is fairly harmless. Anger and despair is another thing and, prompted by the current discovery of parliamentary corruption in this country, there’s plenty of that around at the moment.

Bryan

' the most free, creative and rewarding time...

…so says the actress Isabella Rossellini in response to a new book. ’50 is the New Fifty’ by the journalist Suzanne Braun Levine. ‘To listen to the society we live in’, says Levine, ‘you would think that you have to stay young – and look young – to be happy. And we literally buy into that message, spending millions on age-defying cosmetics, surgery, drugs…We live in a society that is very ageist. ..Now we are creating a whole new age for women that really defies the stereotype that as women get older they should be invisible, they should sit by the phone and wait for an opportunity to baby-sit for their grandchildren…If each of us stops trying to hide chronological years, we will liberate the future for all of us'.

Clearly written for the American market with its emphasis on assertive life skills and its direct appeal for older women to stand up and make something positive out of the inevitability of ageing, this book is apparently a sequel to Levine’s earlier book ‘Inventing the Rest of our Lives’. The publisher’s blurb on the new book claims that it is ‘rich with anecdotes from the front lines of self-reinvention, that it captures the voices of women who are confronting change, renegotiating their relationships, and discovering who they are now that they are finally grown up. Among the lessons are: "No" is not a four-letter Word, on the energizing power of standing up for what you mean and what you want; Do unto yourself as you have been doing unto others, a new way of getting yourself to the top of the to-do list; changing your outlook doesn't have to mean walking away from your marriage’.

I was a bit reassured by that last throw-away line, but am glad to add to these blogs a specific female slant on anti-ageism, which balances my male perspective a little. Women always, still, have to fight harder for basic rights than men. Not pretending to be young when you are not, is one of them. ( And where does the pressure for that come from? - from men, I suppose.) Mary Eileen Williams has a complementary website on this same subject that looks interesting, feistysideoffifty.

Let Levine have the last word. She claims that women are finding that their 50’s and their 60’s and even their 70’s are a very exciting and authentic time’. ( EVEN their 70's!!). May it be so.

Bryan