Suzanne Harrington: Hag hate and the stubborn belief that age only happens to other people
Mary Beard and Madonna both receive vociferous 'hag hate' says Suzanne Harrington. Pictures: Jo Hale/Getty Images and @Madonna
International Women’s Day is coming up. Its tagline this year is #EmbraceEquity, and illustrates this noble idea with lots of gorgeous young women giving themselves a hug. Of the 18 images on the IWD website, there’s only one representation of a hag — that is, a middle-aged woman — amid 16 shiny glowy Gen Zs and Millennials (and one bloke). Even feminism won’t represent us.
Women in their 40s and 50s, writes Victoria Smith in her new book , have “been fucked then ghosted by life itself. Feminism won’t answer our calls, it’s changed its number.”
We’ve become invisible to feminism, but this invisibility does not mean the wider world has stopped objectifying us.
“You’re still an object,” writes Smith. “You’ve just changed in status from painting or sculpture to, say, hat stand.”
At 55, I am deep into hag territory. I am a hat stand. My partner is also 55, but men don’t age in hag years, so he’s still in his prime. This is ‘the double standard of ageing’, said Susan Sontag in 1978, and it affects every aspect of women’s lives — political organisation, paid work, unpaid work, violence, beauty, sex, the lot. Victoria Smith calls it ‘hag hate’, which sounds like something from Roald Dahl, but it is real life: we are saggy, bitter, dried-up Karens, with resting bitch faces and shrill opinions that nobody wants to hear. No matter how hard you look, you won’t find a male equivalent.
Obviously, we hags don’t feel like this on the inside, even as our necks fall down — mid-life is frankly joyous, the most liberating and zero-fucks era of all, before old age kicks our hips and knees out from underneath us. We have decades of lived experience, perhaps even wisdom, having dealt with everything and everyone all our lives; we are human wine, ageing into our best selves.
Yet we are told by everyone else that because of our collapsing collagen and retired ovaries, our presence is no longer required. Count the middle-aged female faces on your TV screen, and then count the faces of middle-aged men. Doesn’t match up, does it?
A 2018 UK survey showed how women aged 55 and up — one-third of the female population — are represented by 18% of women on telly. Men ‘appeared in equal proportion…as in the real world.’
Whether women do or don’t get their faces done, they are still done for: Mary Beard, undone, is 68; Madonna, done, is 64. At different ends of the appearance spectrum, they both receive the same vociferous hag hate.
“It’s one of patriarchy’s perfect self-perpetuating cycles,” writes Smith. “The demonisation of older women ensures we do not wish to identify with or learn from them, so cannot gain any knowledge to prepare us for our own experience of ageing. Instead, we turn away from our future selves.”
This is the supreme stupidity of ageism — the stubborn belief that age only happens to other people. We are all hags — if not now, then sooner than you think.
Hag up, IWD.
