This was such a wonderful essay, Erin. I loved this bit most of all: “I’d do well to avoid the snare of footnoting my own life story with borrowed pain.” It is so easy to get angry on behalf of all the people who have suffered injustice in the world, and it is tempting to want to participate in the feeling of being treated unjustly. I’m currently reading a book about one of four people who escaped from Auschwitz, and I’m going through these same feelings as you report while reading Hags, but for antisemitism. I think it’s a trap we need to avoid both for our own mental health and so that we keep potential allies on our side, rather than feeling defensive.
Wonderful review. Your friends also sound brilliant and insightful.
I read most of Hags while simultaneously completing a Harry Potter movie marathon with my kids during a very rainy weekend. So naturally Smith’s framework was floating around in my head when the middle aged lady villain to end all middle aged lady villains appeared in movie 5: Dolores Umbridge. Everyone loves to hate Umbridge; she is truly one of the most effective villains in fiction. Stephen King himself once called her “the greatest make-believe villain to come along since Hannibal Lecter”. I, too, of course hate Umbridge with her banal evil, her weaponized use of the color pink, her ugly old toad-like face. She’s well beyond the 3 Fs: she is certainly not fuckable, she’s too old to be fertile and as for femininity - while she speaks in an artificially breathy feminine voice and decorates everything with kitten motifs, the clash of this affectation of young femininity with her inherent lack of it in her actual lumpy toad of a person is the key to her character. Umbridge is…a Karen. So naturally I started channeling my inner Victoria Smith and interrogating the middle aged stereotypes that Umbridge is based upon.
Smith wades into the shallows of the JKR controversy a bit, always in favor of Rowling, but I’m wondering if Rowling hadn’t been a figure she’s invested in supporting she wouldn’t have skipped over this obvious example of the fictionalized hag. And yet - isn’t this character effective because it represents something we all know to be true? Doesn’t granting women their full humanity also mean recognizing our own villainous tendencies? And further, doesn’t scanning the world only for the unfair Umbridgification of older women make us blind to all the McGonnagals and Mrs. Weasleys, respected and beloved and standing strong as archetypes among us? I think that was my greatest barrier to jumping on board Smith’s misogynistic hell ship. The acknowledgment that women are capable, of their own free will and calculation, of weaponizing the role society places them in, not just “so they won’t be ignored”, as Smith emphasizes in chapter 1, but also sometimes through the pure human desire for power and control. She also fails to acknowledge any positive archetypes of the older woman. There’s no nod to the fairy godmother in her analysis of the wicked stepmother.
I absolutely acknowledge some real truths and revelations in Smith’s work - it’s the clearest framework I’ve seen recently for understanding why the female identity is a lifecycle and not just a collection of body parts, nor a profile of personality traits. It focuses on the intersection of ageism and sexism in a way most feminists avoid. And it gave me a lot to think about regarding the failure of feminism to mature as a philosophy as long as we age feminists out of relevance and keep feminism under the domain of young women only. But its lack of nuance falls apart when I try to apply its single lens to my life and the world I see around me.
These are WONDERFUL examples. How perfect to note Dolores Umbridge *especially* in contrast to the likes of MacGonigall and Mrs Weasley.
As you so beautifully expressed, part of Umbridge’s despicableness was her playing to the stereotypes. Using them as cover, and as power.
I think Hags would’ve been much more powerful had there been even as much as half the book talking about all the many, many women who did in the past and do still today garner respect for their work and leadership.
It was an opportunity to disprove the minimization of women to 35 names on a mug.
"There’s no nod to the fairy godmother in her analysis of the wicked stepmother."
Great observation - I haven't read the book yet (it's in the mail!), but it applies to other work I've read. I love that I get to read two excellent reviews of the book for the price of one!
Kai Winn (played by Louise Fletcher) in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is a very similar character to Umbridge, except in the role of a religious leader. A fantastic villain.
Thank you for this thoughtful review. Although I like her writing and believe her insights are sharp, I have hesitated to read Hags because I thought it would be too close to the bone.
It's very good, and Smith is clearly a great thinker and writer. I think in some of the ways her perspective didn't jive with mine, it might ring very true to others, particularly with 90s-era feminism, which I was just a wee bit too young for.
Also, some of her points are extremely apt for British women in this cultural moment. Technically I'm half British (well, Northern Irish, you're aware of that whole mess) but because I live in America, some of the cultural issues either have not fully arrived here, or perhaps won't in the same way. We'll see.
I can only speak for myself, but after I read your post I realized that as I've gotten older, I find older men and women to be more attractive than the young. For example, I'm watching Daisy Jones and the Six (the miniseries that riffs on Fleetwood Mac). There are scene from the 1970s and I think 20+ years later, and without exception I find the stars in the later year scenes, made to look in their 40s, more attractive overall, both in appearance and in personality I found that happening to me when I was 50 and now that I'm 61, I notice it more and more. I wonder how common this is.
I do too!! I watch F1 racing, and there are a couple guys in their late 30s and early 40s, and I find them more attractive than the young bucks I would've used to find attractive are just, like, boyish to me now.
Reading the post I was thinking a lot about the same thing you describe noticing: that to some degree (not entirely) the "Ovary Window" seems to shifts upward as I get older and no longer relate in quite the same way to people at the peak of their youth. It's not that I'm suddenly attracted to tons of 60 year olds, necessarily, but people don't look "middle-aged" or "old" in the same way they did when I was 20. They just look like regular people, like me, in such a way that I *could* potentially find them attractive. Whereas lots of college girls (I live in a university town) just look like children. It reminds me of how I've always found my friends attractive by virtue of them being people I love, even though it isn't sexualized.
But it also made me think of how we view our own mothers. My mom, admittedly, has probably aged better than 99 percent of the population (more than one friend of mine has told me she's hot in a Helen Mirren kind of way, even when she was in her seventies). Certainly, some people have a way of growing into their age that seems natural and beautiful, more than others. But I don't recall ever viewing my mom as getting middle-aged or "losing" something, in the way that she and most women presumably have to struggle with no matter who they are. I wonder how many people perceive their parents through different lenses with respect to all this.
Chris, I had similar thoughts myself re: how I viewed older women, specifically my mother and grandmothers. I didn't feel any kind of revulsion or contempt toward them; more of a fascination with how their bodies differed from mine, which was apparent especially when hearing their stories about pregnancy and childbirth.
As I mentioned in the essay, Hollywood and Media absolutely have very clear preferences and standards of youth and beauty, and that spreads to the wider culture to some degree. But how much, though? Not so much as if you are actually a woman in Hollywood or the media.
This is so good, Erin, there is so much to think about here that I hardly know where to start. I guess I'll start with twitter. I deleted my account in 2021, after 11 years. It was, hands-down, one of the best things I have ever done with regards to anything on the internet. What once was fun became a cesspool to me, and even just checking in once in a while gave me just awful, gross feelings.
I haven't read Hags, but I think I will. As an almost 48-year-old woman, I feel like I am full on in middle age. I mean, I hope to live to 100 but 48 is pretty close to the middle. I have all the feelings with regards my aging body - both wonder and shock and everything in between - but I am more contented with myself and my life than I've ever been. In some ways, it makes me feel weird because I am so content and happy in a world that is very vehemently not.
Lots to think about, love your smart writing, as always. Keep on keeping on, Erin.
Thank you Nicole! I would love to hear your thoughts should you read Hags. I do recommend it! I love books that challenge me to think and clarify my own thoughts and feelings, and this does both.
My friend Kathleen (who commented elsewhere here) is a professor of library science and was part of the second wave of feminism in the 70s. I find it illuminating to hear perspectives of women in varying stages of middle age, both the ways in which things have changed and also stayed the same.
Oh man, I've been spending my entire life working up to brainstorming "Think Big, Live Small" as the brilliant title for some hypothetical future blog, and now I have to start over! Best name ever. Maybe I can lift it someday and just pay you royalties? Or I'll just call it "Think Large, Live Petite."
I wasn't aware of Smith's book so thanks for bringing that to my attention. I think middle age is a fascinating topic, and all the more so in the context of gender. (Partly this is because I am wrestling with middle age). You make such a good observation about the tension between broad cultural critiques (however valid) and the reality of diverse individual experiences, including those who have been lucky in one way or another. But really, your post speaks to a number of paradoxes: the tension between larger patterns and our own individual experiences; between the weight of history and inherited legacies, and ways in which the world has changed; between our own unique challenges and the borrowed pain of others; between a more inclusive understanding of intersecting identities and experiences, and the reality that half of the world still has distinctly female experiences; between the realities we observe in our everyday and online reality.
BTW, I've never especially thought of Julia Roberts as a feminist, so it's funny that two of the most punchy feminist lines from mainstream cinema come from her: the one you mentioned, and "You just did" in Pretty Women (after Richard Gere protests, "I never called you a whore."
"While general references to what happens on Twitter can be relevant [...], 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."
I've been thinking about a former colleague who recently died. She was a very prominent lawyer in our state, divorced and in her 60s, and she went to a fancy boat show to see the new/best/biggest options. She had done her research and found the booth ready to pick out options and hand over her check. There were lots of salesman and interested customers (all men). She waited, as each customer was greeted and chatted up. None of the men were buying boats, just there to bullshit. Finally, after each of the non-customers were given key chains and slapped on the back, the salesman looked around and decided to get some lunch. She was still standing there, completely invisible to them, with hundreds of thousands of dollars burning a hole in her pocket.
She said becoming invisible was in some ways harder than all of the overt sexism she had faced as a young graduate because there was no way apparent way to overcome it.
This was such a wonderful essay, Erin. I loved this bit most of all: “I’d do well to avoid the snare of footnoting my own life story with borrowed pain.” It is so easy to get angry on behalf of all the people who have suffered injustice in the world, and it is tempting to want to participate in the feeling of being treated unjustly. I’m currently reading a book about one of four people who escaped from Auschwitz, and I’m going through these same feelings as you report while reading Hags, but for antisemitism. I think it’s a trap we need to avoid both for our own mental health and so that we keep potential allies on our side, rather than feeling defensive.
That line was so good! Such a perfect description of a common way of interpreting past tragedies . The quoted passage from Eddie was great too.
I thought your quote was good too!
Wonderful review. Your friends also sound brilliant and insightful.
I read most of Hags while simultaneously completing a Harry Potter movie marathon with my kids during a very rainy weekend. So naturally Smith’s framework was floating around in my head when the middle aged lady villain to end all middle aged lady villains appeared in movie 5: Dolores Umbridge. Everyone loves to hate Umbridge; she is truly one of the most effective villains in fiction. Stephen King himself once called her “the greatest make-believe villain to come along since Hannibal Lecter”. I, too, of course hate Umbridge with her banal evil, her weaponized use of the color pink, her ugly old toad-like face. She’s well beyond the 3 Fs: she is certainly not fuckable, she’s too old to be fertile and as for femininity - while she speaks in an artificially breathy feminine voice and decorates everything with kitten motifs, the clash of this affectation of young femininity with her inherent lack of it in her actual lumpy toad of a person is the key to her character. Umbridge is…a Karen. So naturally I started channeling my inner Victoria Smith and interrogating the middle aged stereotypes that Umbridge is based upon.
Smith wades into the shallows of the JKR controversy a bit, always in favor of Rowling, but I’m wondering if Rowling hadn’t been a figure she’s invested in supporting she wouldn’t have skipped over this obvious example of the fictionalized hag. And yet - isn’t this character effective because it represents something we all know to be true? Doesn’t granting women their full humanity also mean recognizing our own villainous tendencies? And further, doesn’t scanning the world only for the unfair Umbridgification of older women make us blind to all the McGonnagals and Mrs. Weasleys, respected and beloved and standing strong as archetypes among us? I think that was my greatest barrier to jumping on board Smith’s misogynistic hell ship. The acknowledgment that women are capable, of their own free will and calculation, of weaponizing the role society places them in, not just “so they won’t be ignored”, as Smith emphasizes in chapter 1, but also sometimes through the pure human desire for power and control. She also fails to acknowledge any positive archetypes of the older woman. There’s no nod to the fairy godmother in her analysis of the wicked stepmother.
I absolutely acknowledge some real truths and revelations in Smith’s work - it’s the clearest framework I’ve seen recently for understanding why the female identity is a lifecycle and not just a collection of body parts, nor a profile of personality traits. It focuses on the intersection of ageism and sexism in a way most feminists avoid. And it gave me a lot to think about regarding the failure of feminism to mature as a philosophy as long as we age feminists out of relevance and keep feminism under the domain of young women only. But its lack of nuance falls apart when I try to apply its single lens to my life and the world I see around me.
These are WONDERFUL examples. How perfect to note Dolores Umbridge *especially* in contrast to the likes of MacGonigall and Mrs Weasley.
As you so beautifully expressed, part of Umbridge’s despicableness was her playing to the stereotypes. Using them as cover, and as power.
I think Hags would’ve been much more powerful had there been even as much as half the book talking about all the many, many women who did in the past and do still today garner respect for their work and leadership.
It was an opportunity to disprove the minimization of women to 35 names on a mug.
I was struck by that particular passage too!
"There’s no nod to the fairy godmother in her analysis of the wicked stepmother."
Great observation - I haven't read the book yet (it's in the mail!), but it applies to other work I've read. I love that I get to read two excellent reviews of the book for the price of one!
Kai Winn (played by Louise Fletcher) in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is a very similar character to Umbridge, except in the role of a religious leader. A fantastic villain.
Thank you for this thoughtful review. Although I like her writing and believe her insights are sharp, I have hesitated to read Hags because I thought it would be too close to the bone.
It's very good, and Smith is clearly a great thinker and writer. I think in some of the ways her perspective didn't jive with mine, it might ring very true to others, particularly with 90s-era feminism, which I was just a wee bit too young for.
Also, some of her points are extremely apt for British women in this cultural moment. Technically I'm half British (well, Northern Irish, you're aware of that whole mess) but because I live in America, some of the cultural issues either have not fully arrived here, or perhaps won't in the same way. We'll see.
I can only speak for myself, but after I read your post I realized that as I've gotten older, I find older men and women to be more attractive than the young. For example, I'm watching Daisy Jones and the Six (the miniseries that riffs on Fleetwood Mac). There are scene from the 1970s and I think 20+ years later, and without exception I find the stars in the later year scenes, made to look in their 40s, more attractive overall, both in appearance and in personality I found that happening to me when I was 50 and now that I'm 61, I notice it more and more. I wonder how common this is.
I do too!! I watch F1 racing, and there are a couple guys in their late 30s and early 40s, and I find them more attractive than the young bucks I would've used to find attractive are just, like, boyish to me now.
Alonso can get it, for sure!
My thoughts EXACTLY.
Reading the post I was thinking a lot about the same thing you describe noticing: that to some degree (not entirely) the "Ovary Window" seems to shifts upward as I get older and no longer relate in quite the same way to people at the peak of their youth. It's not that I'm suddenly attracted to tons of 60 year olds, necessarily, but people don't look "middle-aged" or "old" in the same way they did when I was 20. They just look like regular people, like me, in such a way that I *could* potentially find them attractive. Whereas lots of college girls (I live in a university town) just look like children. It reminds me of how I've always found my friends attractive by virtue of them being people I love, even though it isn't sexualized.
But it also made me think of how we view our own mothers. My mom, admittedly, has probably aged better than 99 percent of the population (more than one friend of mine has told me she's hot in a Helen Mirren kind of way, even when she was in her seventies). Certainly, some people have a way of growing into their age that seems natural and beautiful, more than others. But I don't recall ever viewing my mom as getting middle-aged or "losing" something, in the way that she and most women presumably have to struggle with no matter who they are. I wonder how many people perceive their parents through different lenses with respect to all this.
Chris, I had similar thoughts myself re: how I viewed older women, specifically my mother and grandmothers. I didn't feel any kind of revulsion or contempt toward them; more of a fascination with how their bodies differed from mine, which was apparent especially when hearing their stories about pregnancy and childbirth.
As I mentioned in the essay, Hollywood and Media absolutely have very clear preferences and standards of youth and beauty, and that spreads to the wider culture to some degree. But how much, though? Not so much as if you are actually a woman in Hollywood or the media.
This is so good, Erin, there is so much to think about here that I hardly know where to start. I guess I'll start with twitter. I deleted my account in 2021, after 11 years. It was, hands-down, one of the best things I have ever done with regards to anything on the internet. What once was fun became a cesspool to me, and even just checking in once in a while gave me just awful, gross feelings.
I haven't read Hags, but I think I will. As an almost 48-year-old woman, I feel like I am full on in middle age. I mean, I hope to live to 100 but 48 is pretty close to the middle. I have all the feelings with regards my aging body - both wonder and shock and everything in between - but I am more contented with myself and my life than I've ever been. In some ways, it makes me feel weird because I am so content and happy in a world that is very vehemently not.
Lots to think about, love your smart writing, as always. Keep on keeping on, Erin.
Thank you Nicole! I would love to hear your thoughts should you read Hags. I do recommend it! I love books that challenge me to think and clarify my own thoughts and feelings, and this does both.
My friend Kathleen (who commented elsewhere here) is a professor of library science and was part of the second wave of feminism in the 70s. I find it illuminating to hear perspectives of women in varying stages of middle age, both the ways in which things have changed and also stayed the same.
Oh man, I've been spending my entire life working up to brainstorming "Think Big, Live Small" as the brilliant title for some hypothetical future blog, and now I have to start over! Best name ever. Maybe I can lift it someday and just pay you royalties? Or I'll just call it "Think Large, Live Petite."
I wasn't aware of Smith's book so thanks for bringing that to my attention. I think middle age is a fascinating topic, and all the more so in the context of gender. (Partly this is because I am wrestling with middle age). You make such a good observation about the tension between broad cultural critiques (however valid) and the reality of diverse individual experiences, including those who have been lucky in one way or another. But really, your post speaks to a number of paradoxes: the tension between larger patterns and our own individual experiences; between the weight of history and inherited legacies, and ways in which the world has changed; between our own unique challenges and the borrowed pain of others; between a more inclusive understanding of intersecting identities and experiences, and the reality that half of the world still has distinctly female experiences; between the realities we observe in our everyday and online reality.
BTW, I've never especially thought of Julia Roberts as a feminist, so it's funny that two of the most punchy feminist lines from mainstream cinema come from her: the one you mentioned, and "You just did" in Pretty Women (after Richard Gere protests, "I never called you a whore."
Good call on the Pretty Woman line! As regards think big, live small, have your people call my people.
I haven't lived big enough to be justifying stealing the "live small" title yet. But when I do.
"While general references to what happens on Twitter can be relevant [...], 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."
Love this.
Thanks!
Well done. Some things don’t change because they can’t, within any useful time frame.
There’s a great artist rendition of “the beautiful woman and the old hag” that captures some of what you’re getting at. It’s online.
Also, the book “Lucy’s Legacy “ looks at this subject going back three million years. Well worth reading.
Enjoyed this review a lot, and especially the way you wove in the Erin Brockevich examples. Trying to decide whether to read the book or not.
I did enjoy it. It’s thought provoking and in an era where “Karen” is a slur, it’s certainly got some legs.
I’m late to the party. But great essay.
I've been thinking about a former colleague who recently died. She was a very prominent lawyer in our state, divorced and in her 60s, and she went to a fancy boat show to see the new/best/biggest options. She had done her research and found the booth ready to pick out options and hand over her check. There were lots of salesman and interested customers (all men). She waited, as each customer was greeted and chatted up. None of the men were buying boats, just there to bullshit. Finally, after each of the non-customers were given key chains and slapped on the back, the salesman looked around and decided to get some lunch. She was still standing there, completely invisible to them, with hundreds of thousands of dollars burning a hole in her pocket.
She said becoming invisible was in some ways harder than all of the overt sexism she had faced as a young graduate because there was no way apparent way to overcome it.