do i look geriatric to you?
come on this fun fertility ride with me
I’ve been compelled to reflect a lot about the way we perceive aging women since I decided to freeze my eggs with my soulmate, Monica Padman, in a very public way. Since we announced our decision to make a podcast documenting the entire process for women to feel less isolated in what can be an arduous experience, I’ve been bombarded by why-don’t-you-get-married-guys in my comments. I won’t give them the satisfaction of being quoted in our sacred space, but let’s just say there are a lot of men who suddenly very concerned about my decision to choose when and how I become a mother.
But my reply-guys are not original, they’re simply reverberating what society has told them about me. I will after-all, according to modern science, be of “advanced maternal age” by the time I sprinkle my eggs. But if the vast majority of women who get pregnant after 35 or even into their 40s have healthy babies, why do we still call it a “geriatric pregnancy”, a term that has been defined as “outdated” by a medical community who still inexplicably continues to use it? Sure, pregnant women over the age of 35 are at higher risk for complications like miscarriage or genetic mutations, but it’s strange to give them a label for their bodies especially when there is no such term for men of that reproductive age that to my knowledge are half of the equation.
As I’ve written about before, men have a biological clock, too. But you wouldn’t know it based on the epitome of manhood being embodied in the “most interesting man in the world” being an 84-year-old man.
While women are acutely aware of their bodies expiration date, men aren’t bombarded with the same kind of brainwashing about their skin suits. The paragon of womanhood is women who look like girls (or play them half-naked on tv). As I watch the most famous women on the planet literally shrink before my eyes while staging photos of themselves feasting on dollar-pizza, I’m reminded of the eating disorder frenzy of the early 2000s and the effect on the brains of millions of millennial women, including my own. More than twenty years later, extreme thinness remains a physical ideal because we love a woman that we can control.
Beauty standards aren’t a mere reflection of our expectations of women, they shape our expectations of them. Whenever I’m contemplating on the political implications of body image I come back to the feminist scholar Sandra Lee Bartky, who inspired by Foucault’s theory about disciplinary practices, argues that the pressure for women to be thin is about encouraging them to maintain docile and juvenile bodies.
“Under the current ‘tyranny of slenderness’ women are forbidden to become large or massive; they must take up as little space as possible. The very contours of a woman’s body takes on as she matures - the fuller breasts and rounded hips - have become distasteful. The body by which a woman feels herself judged and which by rigorous discipline she must try to assume is the body of early adolescence, slight and unformed, a body lacking flesh or substance, a body in whose very contours the image of immaturity has been inscribed. The requirement that a woman maintain a smooth and hairless skin carries further the theme of inexperience, for an infantilized face must accompany her infantilized body, a face that never ages or furrows its brow in thought. The face of the ideally feminine woman must never display the marks of character, wisdom, and experience that we so admire in men.”
If we love aging men, why the apprehension about aging women? If we are going to keep using the term geriatric pregnancy for women it’s only fair that we coin “geriatric ejaculation” for any man over the age of 35 who has a baby.
I’d love if you checked out our new podcast Race to 35 wherever you get your podcasts. It’s free and we’d love to have you by our side on this big journey with us.
You are so correct that “geriatric pregnancy” is an absurd term. We’re cheering you on as you not only take this journey but make it easier for other women to do the same.