"We Turn Away from Our Future Selves"

what Victoria Smith's "Hags" has to say about middle-aged women--one of whom, it seems, I have become

Portrait of the writer as a young feminist. Me in 2003.

The movie Erin Brockovich was my first real introduction to feminism. I was sixteen when it debuted, on a college visit to Nashville with my best friend and her family. I’d never been to the South, a born-and-raised city kid, so when we stayed with my friend’s relatives in rural Tennessee, I felt like I’d entered another world. Going to the movies was a reprieve from the culture shock.

The tensions between strong, resilient Erin and George, her kind and considerate partner, both fascinated and confused me. Erin had been burned badly by men before George came along. But George was different! Still, she kept him at arm’s length. She took for granted his loving care toward her children, his steadfast presence, and his support of her work. I couldn’t understand it.

One night, Erin comes home late to find George with a bag packed, unwilling to continue in a lopsided relationship. George makes his case that she’s overextending, not being there for her kids. She says her kids will one day understand. So he takes a different tack.

George: Well, what about me?

Erin: What about you? You think either of the men who gave me those children asked me what I wanted before he walked away? All I've ever done is bend my life around what men decide they need. Well, not now. I'm sorry. I won't do it.

George: Well, Erin, I'm not them. So what more can I do to prove that to you?

Erin: Stay.

I’ve been stuck for days, both on this scene from a movie that’s nearly a quarter century old and why, in my mind, it somehow connects to a book I just read, Hags: The Demonisation of Middle Aged Women.¹ So instead of writing the book review, I’ve been googling things about Erin Brockovich. How old was Julia Roberts then? (32.) Who wrote the screenplay? (Susannah Grant.) What is it about this particular scene that strikes me as poignantly at 39 as it did when I was sixteen? (Well I didn’t google that bit; I’ve just been thinking it.)

I’m making headway.

If anyone tried to kill the mother, it was my generation. The trouble is, we still got older.

—Victoria Smith

Careful readers may have noted that earlier in this piece, I revealed my age. I’m at a life stage one might call “middle,” if you catch my drift. Ergo, when I heard that writer Victoria Smith was publishing a book on that very life stage and its political significance, I felt more than a passing interest.

Smith has a strong thesis: for a variety of reasons, middle-aged women are cultural scapegoats, branded as overprotective Mommys, dried-up biddies, and/or dangerous witches (“Karens,” if you will) who are to be ignored or quashed.

“People are dismissive of older women,” she notes early on. “We know this because many of us have been dismissive of older women before realizing—too late!—that we’d become such creatures ourselves.” Oof.

It gets more painful!

“I understand the sense of alienation that comes from suddenly being reminded that you do not look like the person you picture in your head. … However, the ‘true self’ justification for battling the ravages of time [with cosmetics and procedures] seems to me tied to something far more insidious: the misogynistic message that a woman who matters wouldn’t look like you.”

Erin comes home from work, upset. She sits on the bed and tells George that she just got fired. He can’t believe it. “What do you mean, you got fired? You’re working so hard,” he says. It doesn’t make a difference, Erin tells him, staring into the distance.

Erin: I don't know what happened to me. I mean.... God, I was Miss Wichita, for chrissake. Did I tell you that? … I still have my tiara. And I thought it meant I was gonna do something important with my life. That it meant I was someone.

George: You’re someone to me.

The trouble I’m having with Hags, I’ve realized, is the same kind of trouble between Erin and George. Between the opposing sides of so many social issues, especially in the West: the tension between how things were and how things are. How our cultural past has shaped our present, as ancient Roman roads determined the routes of some contemporary highways. Contrasted with the fact that we are not our forebears any more than, say, a 20-year-old driving a Ford Fiesta down King Street in Lincolnshire is a Roman.

Let’s return for a moment to the movie. Erin saw the well-worn grooves of a misogynist culture and how she’d fallen victim to them time and time again; George saw the contours of their individual relationship. Erin, whether rightly or wrongly, held George to account for the sins of other men in her past. George, refusing to shoulder that unfairly applied penalty, leaves.

In the end, they are both alone.

My notes and highlights in Hags reveal the tension between my own life experiences and what I know is also true—that even the most privileged women among us have been caught out at times in the potholes left by past codified-by-law misogyny. Or at the very least, past disregard for the essential fact of women’s equality.² So there’s that, but there’s also the fact that when I look around in my own, real life, the men I encounter are not condescending or misogynistic or violent.

This fact is, I realize, a privilege, to use a contemporary word for what we might otherwise call good luck. There are countless women and children victimized by abusive men, males who didn’t get the memo that actually females are not worth less and worthless.

Therein lies the Erin-George Paradox: the truth that cultural underpinnings are significant—and absolutely affect some people much more directly than others—and the reality that applying a cultural theory to specific, individual human relationships, in all their messiness and complexity, can be a mistake.

We try to be supportive of everyone’s right to look like their ‘true self.’ Only the path to universal acceptance is not so straightforward, not least because it turns out that few people think their true self looks like a middle-aged woman.

—Victoria Smith

Smith makes some very compelling arguments about how ageism and misogyny go hand in hand, revealing her own often-ageist thoughts as a young feminist in the 90s (“The past is another country. They were massive bigots there”) while also quoting frequently from feminist writers of decades past—which is a neat trick because another strong point she makes is how disconnected younger women tend to be from older women and our accumulated “relationships, social obligations and, crucially, compromises.”

Contemporary culture definitely sends the message that being younger is better. In Hollywood, everyone seems to be Benjamin Buttoning their way to fewer wrinkles and more muscle mass as time passes.³ I’ll admit to contributing in some small way⁴ to the multi-billion-dollar industry that hawks age-defying lotions and potions, unguents and poultices, jams and jellies,⁵ to the women of the globe.

“I come back to my younger self,” writes Smith, “scrutinising the body of the self I would one day become, unwilling to believe this could have been anything other than a very bad decision.” How much more do The Youths of Today erroneously believe we have control of our bodies, now that we’re in an era of screens, social media, astonishing face-altering filters and fillers?

“I thought I would never change, and that those suggesting otherwise were the rigid ones, refusing to validate my essential self." The essential self?! Why, she isn’t part of the body at all! To keep bringing up the ol’ meat suit is not just a drag, but practically an insult. So goes the messaging to Zoomers.

Meanwhile, a whole generation is both dissociating from and hating the reality of their bodies.

As someone who has breastfed three children and still expresses political opinions, I am obviously one of the damned.

—Victoria Smith

Smith’s strongest arguments are the ones that keep forcing us to consider the actual embodied life of a female. These arguments leave the realm of theory and perception, grounded by inescapable reality: “The experience of living in a female body is marked by instability and change in a way that living in a male body is not: menstruation, gestation, lactation, menopause, years in which you are one thing and then suddenly are not.”

Portrait of the writer as a mother. Me in 2019.

I hadn’t considered the totality of the female body’s remarkable dynamism until last autumn, during the reproductive systems segment of an Anatomy and Physiology class. My professor, a regenerative medicine researcher specializing in ovaries, invited me to tour his lab.

I looked through a microscope at an ovum, extracted from the ovary of a 37-year-old woman who had died in a car accident. My professor’s experiment sought to induce this primordial ovarian follicle through the stages of development to a mature follicle ready for fertilization, all in a Petri dish. At the time of this writing, he hasn’t yet unlocked the secret of artificially coaxing the ova to final readiness without deformation or death.

This maturation process happens naturally, effortlessly, every month for about 30 years of nearly every human female’s life.⁶ The female anatomy, my professor said, is simple in form, and complex in function. Indeed.

And yet. “Patriarchal cultures both ancient and modern adore creation myths in which male deities form the world, the creatures and all human life,”⁷ Smith reminds us. “A recent shift towards gender-neutral language to describe pregnancy and birth may be branded inclusive, but has the effect of once again refusing to name exactly who does the work of making new human beings.”

That last sentence is, what some of the kids these days would say, problematic. I understand why, but I also understand the force of Smith’s point: how easily cultural, medical, and social institutions have changed their language to downplay the significant, defining physical reality of half the species. Ignoring the repression and violence women around the world continue to face because they are, will be, or have been birthing people.

“We overlook the smaller, more personal reckonings taking place over individual lifetimes, ones which, added together, can be more dangerous to the status quo than the occasional felling of disposable heroes.”

—Victoria Smith

I will say that just by reading this book, I became more agitated in my daily life. Being steeped in stories of injustice—stories that do not reflect my experiences—changed my perceptions, which drastically changed what I felt about my own reality. “Why do you insist on perpetuating misogyny?” I asked my husband when he didn’t put the clean towels away in a timely manner.⁸

Misogyny and patriarchy are important narratives about our culture. However, they’re not the only ones. As one older woman friend recently told me, “It wasn’t the abuse that took me out. It was the fact that my abusers convinced me that I had no right to exercise agency.” She began telling herself a new story, and her life has improved—flourished, even—beyond what she believed possible as a young woman.

Sex-based abuse remains far too common, even in places where women aren’t being arrested by Morality Police. My friend Natalie is always clear-eyed about domestic and sexual violence, but shared this key piece of perspective: “Generally, I think it's good to keep in mind that a small number of men are repeat offenders. So whatever the percentage is of women who have been victims, it doesn't mean the same share of men have been abusers.”

The weakest arguments in the book are when the limits of Smith’s particular lenses begin to show. (Yes she’s a white female Briton, but she addresses that thoroughly. It’s other lenses I mean.)

In one scene, Smith considers a coffee mug on her table, featuring the names of 35 influential women, and “despair[s] at the thought that this is really it.” Of course this isn’t it! It’s a stupid coffee mug! It’s merch! In another section, she uses the phrase “false consciousness,” one of my least favorite concepts emerging from theory: the idea that some people are incapable of perceiving “the truth” of their social or economic situations. Because their perceptions don’t align with the theory, naturally.

My friend Rose also read Hags, and insightfully remarked about our shared reservations: “So much of the way Smith sees the world has to do with 1. Being immersed in theory, 2. Being too online.” As someone who studied theory, I think this is accurate. As to the too-online claim, I can’t say for sure, but multiple times Smith does reference kerfuffles, abuses, and pile-ons on Twitter.

Journalists and academics have been absolutely captured by Twitter, and I hate it. Twitter is a self-selected, non-representative portion of the population. While general references to what happens on Twitter can be relevant (and is typically what Smith does), a lot of times, it’s like trawling the bottom of the lake and expecting what dredges up to be a meaningful description of the whole body of water.

For example, I once was aggressively harassed in an online comments thread when I mentioned my husband’s former police and Naval service. A guy repeatedly called me “Dependa” (click the link for the definition at your own peril) and leaned hard into some misogynist diatribes.

That guy, though, is an idiot.⁹ The vast majority of my online interactions are neutral or good. Because I don’t hang out on the bottom of the lake.

By coincidence, I watched two true-crime miniseries while reading Hags: I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, based on the book about the Golden State Killer by the late Michelle McNamara, and Confronting a Serial Killer, about Jillian Lauren’s work with Sam Little, who murdered 93 women. Both series are unique in true crime because they focus heavily on McNamara and Lauren, and what the important work they pursued was doing to them and their mental health. Spoiler: it was not good.

I realized that by immersing myself in stories of patriarchy and misogyny and violence, my perspective was being more than shaped: it was also being warped.

My friend Eddy recently wrote a thoughtful essay about the discovery of abuses perpetrated by some of his favorite artists, and how he processes the distress: “Like many, I was stunned.” But here’s the key bit: “I was not hurt because this didn’t happen to me.”

This, I think, is a healthy mindset. He goes on: “When terrible things are done to people, they are not done to you. You may feel betrayed because feelings are beyond your control, but you need to understand that it had nothing to do with you. You were not even an observer...You’re barely even a bystander.”

In the end, this is how I feel about much of Hags. There are so many awful stories about the subjugation of girls and women. Misogyny and patriarchy are continuing threats to females around the world. The book reminds me how important it is to listen to them. And to recognize that I share defining physical experiences with all other women, despite even wildly varying cultural ones.

The work of women’s equality is ongoing and incomplete—in law, yes, but also in the collective consciousness of humanity. Women like Smith—or McNamara and Lauren—are bringing much-needed attention to the ways in which our society is falling short.

But we must not ignore the power of “the smaller, more personal reckonings.” Perhaps more importantly, I’d do well to avoid the snare of footnoting my own life story with borrowed pain. The cultural commentator and philosopher Coleman Hughes once wrote that some activists are quick to make “a ritual of noticing how the present is similar to the past,” and in doing so pathologically, “can end up being blind to the many ways in which the present differs from the past.”

The title I chose for a blog I used to write remains a salient reminder: think big, live small. As an individual, far better to look at my actual, lived relationships through my own eyes, and not a theoretical lens.

1. Author Victoria Smith is British, hence the spelling

2. For example, paid maternity leave for women who work is still a question up for debate in the United States rather than a commonsense given. Considerations for childbearing weren’t part of the Workplace Equation when the Workplace Equation was written, because many women were disallowed to work anyway. And the ones who did—the poor ones—didn’t matter enough to consider.

3. This is a problem for men, too. Check out this post by Mikala Jamison about men’s body dysmorphia, which includes a shocking comparison of Hugh Jackman as Wolverine in his early 30s and reprising the role at nearly 50.

4. CeraVe Night Cream. This post is not (currently) sponsored.

5. Credit for this marvelous phrase goes to comedian and middle-aged woman Maria Bamford

6. Of course, there are exceptions. Fertility and reproduction are a whole ginormous branch of medicine and research. But there are about 8 billion of us as living proof that the process is pretty reliable.

7. “Athena pops out of Zeus’ head; God creates Adam and, as an afterthought, Eve; Mary dutifully carries the fully formed godhead implanted inside her. Scientists and philosophers throughout the ages have sought to make the male seed, eighty thousand times smaller than the ovum, central to the reproductive process. Aristotle argued that females merely provided the matter that the active male principle formed into a human being; seventeenth-century scientists swore they could see a miniature man in human sperm, just waiting to unfold himself within the passive female vessel.”

8. I was joking…pretty much. His reply: “Because it’s awesome. For me.” He was joking…pretty much.

9. To further illustrate my point about that guy being an outlier and an idiot, some male military spouses are reclaiming the pejorative, forming a group called the “Dependabros” in a nod to both the sexism of assuming female dependence and the reality that plenty of women serve in the military. Here’s the story.