As a San Diegan, I’ve heard ad nauseum about our headlocking former mayor, Bob Filner. So I’ve seen multiple references to one of the recipients of Filner’s amorous advances, widely described as a 67-year-old great-grandmother … with the implication that no one in his right mind would be attracted to a woman this old. (One of these links is so funny, I’ve got to share it in its entirety: “67-year-old-great-grandmother-on-san-diego-mayor-bob-filner-he-hugged-me-and-kissed-me-i-was-appalled-i-was-shocked”)
I’m no doubt a tad sensitive about this in my own sexagenarian years, but this was just the first of several infuriating references to people in their sixties and above, in which people seem amazed that we do meaningful work, pack political clout, and yes, are sexual beings.
Just when I was stewing about the great-grandmother in San Diego, I visited my home state of Wisconsin and heard about the grandmas arrested for participating in Solidarity Sings at the state capitol in Madison (these protests have happened daily since Gov. Scott Walker signed his union-busting legislation – on, Wisconsin!). Granted, the Madison grandmothers consciously play with the age issue, calling themselves the Raging Grannies. But again, there’s that assumption that older women are harmless, toothless, something of a joke.
My suspender guy, Jack Cassidy, in Oshkosh, WI
Women get the brunt of this, but there are also cute, harmless codgers like Lawrence J. Zottarelli. Zottarelli, 77, is a NASA engineer who was brought out of retirement because of his unique ability to write the streamlined code needed by the Voyager I spacecraft. Voyager I, launched in 1977, has left our solar system, and, as the project manager said in a quote to the New York Times, “These younger engineers can write a lot of sloppy code, and it doesn’t matter, but here, with very limited capacity, you have to be extremely precise and have a real strategy.” The Times article, which I read on my iPhone while I was waiting for an application of hair coloring to sink in, mentioned Zottarelli’s “striped suspenders and graying hair.” Gray-haired guys who wear suspenders are adorable; I know because I’m married to one. The suspenders didn’t make it into the print article (and now it’s no longer in the online piece, either), but both versions also gave us the project director, Edward C. Stone, another 77-year-old, looking at a computer screen through his trifocals. Makes you want to pinch his cute, wrinkled little cheek.
Maybe because of the hair coloring – plus, it doesn’t hurt that I teach dance-fitness classes – I haven’t yet been personally seen as doddering. But at a talk I gave about my novel, The Tin Horse, I was asked why I made protagonist, Elaine, 85. The book’s inciting incident is a discovery Elaine makes when going through old papers; having made that discovery, she takes a number of actions, and shouldn’t she have been, say, in her 60s? I pointed out that Elaine had a career as an attorney, and in her 60s she was still working; when would she have had time to sort through papers? She was way too busy doing stuff – like me at 63, promoting The Tin Horse, writing a new novel, and, um, having sex with my gray-haired guy in suspenders.
You are right, Janice, that women get the brunt of it. Long before I was in my sixties, it bothered me that women-of-a-certain-age who make the news for some reason are identified as grandmothers, if they happen to have a child who has a child. But men who make the news are never labeled as grandfathers, unless the subject is directly related to their family.