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In the opening chapter of Jane Tara’s Tilda Is Visible (out in February), the titular character is working at her computer when she notices her pinkie finger has disappeared. Worried she’s losing her grasp on reality, she retreats to the bathroom, where she sees that one of her ears is gone, too.
She can feel both of them when she touches the spaces where they’re supposed to be.
She just… can’t see them.
Her first assumption is that she’s having a mental break. But at an appointment with her primary care physician, she’s given a diagnosis of Invisibility, which is apparently a real thing in the world of this book, though she’d never been aware of it before. The condition primarily affects older women starting in their late 40s/early 50s. And isn’t it rare for us to notice a systemic failure or a debilitation unless it also touches us?
It’s all a bit on the nose, but I truly enjoyed this novel, which interrogates the sense of invisibility older women often feel as they’re passed over for opportunities, as they’re no longer seen as beautiful, as they start to embody the things they’ve come to believe about themselves thanks to the way they’re treated by our culture.
Older Women Are Seizing the Spotlight
Meanwhile, body horror The Substance, starring Demi Moore, has brought even more attention to the matter of how we treat aging women. In this film, Elisabeth Sparkle (Moore), known for her popular aerobics show, is fired on her 50th birthday. Filled with self-loathing, she’s feeling particularly vulnerable when a laboratory offers her a substance that promises to transform her into an enhanced version of herself.
This satire explores the way women are often aged out of Hollywood against their will. In an Instagram slideshow, Impact used the film as a jumping-off point, declaring: “It’s time to confront why society puts expiration dates on women.”
Love it or hate it (and there’s been a bit of both), this film has been receiving all the buzz. Author, actor, and director Amber Tamblyn wrote an opinion piece on the movie for the New York Times, admitting that the Hollywood horror film hit close to home. In her piece, Tamblyn revealed that at the age of 12, she felt so self-conscious about the way her ears stuck out that she underwent ear-pinning surgery. “Going under the knife felt like choosing a weapon I could wield in self-defense against my own disposability,” she wrote. “It showed the world I understood the assignment of assimilation — that I could do whatever it took to fit in, never stand out, the way my ears once did.”
Now, at the age of 41, she admits that she’s content with who she is, but still isn’t immune to wanting to feel beautiful and desired.
The pressure placed on women in Hollywood is merely an outsized version of what all women—particularly older women—experience. That forced erasure. That feeling of invisibility. That sense of disposability (as Tamblyn put it). Which is why—as a 44-year-old—I’ve been thrilled to see more women my age taking center stage in the media I consume… women who are honest about that undercurrent of anxiety they feel at their culturally imposed obsolescence, but who don’t let that anxiety stop them from embracing their inherent power.
In All Fours by Miranda July, for instance, a woman approaching perimenopause becomes terrified that her sex drive will disappear, and she nearly blows up her life in an attempt to give her sexuality/sensuality the care it deserves. The book delves into important questions about marriage and autonomy and female desire, but it is also a glorious accounting of an older woman starting to spiral at this new stage of her life, only to come into her own.
In the forthcoming Vera Wong’s Guide to Snooping (on a Dead Man) by Jesse Q. Sutanto (a sequel to the madcap Vera Wong’s Unsolicted Advice for Murderers), the aging teashop owner who had previously been ignored by her son—and by society at large—finds that life is boring when she’s not solving murders. Though the people in her life seek to protect her from the dangers of crime solving, she’s shows them how very formidable she is by solving another murder and breaking up a sex trafficking ring. Vera is wise and nurturing and an amazeballs cook. But she is also so much more.
In T. Kingfisher’s A Sorceress Comes to Call, a reimagining of “The Goose Girl,” the points of view shift from chapter to chapter between a young woman who is at the mercy of her evil sorceress of a mother and Hester, the older woman whose brother this sorceress means to marry. Maybe it’s because I’m older now, but I found Hester’s chapters most compelling. And I appreciated how it is the invisibility afforded by her age—an invisibility that leads the sorceress to discount her as a true threat—that allows Hester to outsmart her enemy, protect her brother, and free the young girl from a life of servitude. She even ends up with her true love in the end, a match she had previously not imagined possible for herself because of her advanced age.
And then there’s my recent obsession, Agatha All Along, a story centered around an entire coven of older women who are fabulous as fuck and taking the steps they deem necessary to reclaim their power. I would like the entire cast of that show to pretty please teach me their ways.
We Should All Insist on Being Visible
I’ve spent my entire life trying to make myself smaller, more unobtrusive, more palatable to others. But now, as a wife, as a mother, as someone who floats around in the background, wearing her “mom uniform,” making sure things don’t fall apart, I resent this erasure. In fact, it is this particular brand of cultural conditioning that has made it easier for those in power to run roughshod over the rights over those who are most marginalized in our society.
Representation in pop culture seems such a small, silly thing to write about in this moment. But if there are more narratives that represent us… well, we’re not so invisible anymore, are we?
What’s the call to action here? In addition to investing financially in these stories, we can continue to demand diverse casting, calling on production companies to cast a wider range of older actresses in leading roles. We can encourage writers and directors to champion stories that center and explore the full spectrum of older women’s lives. We can demand that women of all ages be given the opportunities to participate creatively in the production of those stories. We can write those stories ourselves.
We can share our own stories on public platforms.
We can be loud.
We can be visible.
