On a late afternoon in February, as snow was just starting to stick to the highway, I had finished teaching my social psychology class at a university in Baltimore, Maryland and was driving to an evening game of tennis. I was fifty-nine at the time and I had played tennis for thirty-five of those years. I have a love affair with tennis, a sport that mentally transports me to a place where troubles and petty annoyances are lost in the sheer joy and focus of the game; what I imagined Csikszentmihalyi was talking about when he described the concept of flow.

My doubles partner that evening was a player new to the group. She was probably in her early thirties, around the age of my own daughter. We won the racquet spin and we chose to serve. I took my place at the net and when my partner served, the receiving opponent ripped a forehand return right at me. I blocked the ball and at that moment, an electrical malfunction caused the lights to go out in the tennis facility. We all moved slowly through the dark to the net to wait for the lights to come back on. Then my partner, in front of seven other players (the other court joined us) asked me in a concerned voice:

“Are you all right? I was worried that you would get hurt by the ball hit right at you, you know, what with your age.”

No one said a word and I was grateful it was dark because I’m infuriatingly prone to blushing. I forced a laugh and said something like, “We’re all used to having balls hit at us, not to worry.”

Her comment left me feeling disoriented, as though I had walked into a room filled with strangers, a room that I had never been in before. My partner’s remark was a one-two punch. First, there was the shock that I was perceived to be old. Secondly, my confidence as a tennis player was undermined. Maybe I’m not as strong, not as fast and my reactions are slower.

A younger player’s remark threatened a treasured aspect of my identity and at that moment, I assumed an altered identity.

I was now old.

As a sociologist, I wasn’t surprised by this ageist remark. What surprised me was my reaction. I was embarrassed, shocked, and in some inexplicable way, shamed. I can recall thinking, What’s the matter with you? Is this the best you can do? Embarrassment?  Shame? 

On my way home that evening, I thought of the French feminist writer and intellectual Simone de Beauvoir who, at fifty-two years of age, was shocked when she overheard a student say to one of his friends: “So Simone de Beauvoir is an old woman, then?” De Beauvoir’s conclusion was that “Old age is more apparent to others than to the subject himself [sic].”

***

I began to wonder if other people were as stunned as I was when they discovered that others thought they were old. I began questioning friends who, like me, were in their early sixties. Maybe when we are in our seventies and older, we have accepted the idea that we are older and moved on in a way stunned, newly minted sixty-year-olds have not?

I gathered stories from friends and asked others to post the following question on their Facebook accounts:

Please describe the first time you felt others perceived you to be old. It could have been a comment, an event, or even a feeling.

Many women friends claimed that the greeting “ma’am” was the first time they believed others perceived them as old.

I was called “ma’am”…I mean, my hair and nails were done, my make-up was impeccable…I was wearing a mini-skirt…it was horrifying.

I was twenty-nine or thirty and had joined a gym. The guy who was showing me the exercise machines was about nineteen, and you guessed it…the little shit called me “ma’am.”

I remember when a box boy, who was fifteen, called me “sir.”  I had just turned thirty and it freaked me out.

These reactions seemed peculiar because I had always thought both greetings were expressions of politeness and respect. However, when I went to the Internet to explore the history of the salutations of “ma’am” and “sir,” I also found advertisements for walk-in-tubs and free obituaries.

***

For the record, I’m no longer surprised to learn I’m old because my granddaughter, Grace, told me so. The story goes like this:

My husband and I were visiting our son, daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren. Our granddaughter, Grace, was four years old at the time. I was sitting on the sofa smiling adoringly at her when she walked over to me and said, “Nina, you’re old.”

My son, who happened to walk into the room at just that moment, heard Grace’s comment and, with a horrified look on his face, quickly said to Grace, “Nina isn’t old, Grace. That isn’t very nice of you to say.”

Grace looked at her daddy, confused, and ready to cry.

I waved my son off, winked at him and told Grace that maybe I was old, but I was a young-old.

What! Was I really trying to explain to a four-year-old that in the demographics of aging, people between the age of sixty-five and seventy-five are considered young-old and old-old after seventy-five? More importantly, why was I even drawing age distinctions between older persons?

Grace knew on some level that I was older, at least older than her mommy and daddy. She was stating something in its purest form; in fact, I think she was rather proud to be able to tell me she had this information.

My son, worried about my feelings, sent the message to Grace that calling someone old was not very nice. Over the years, Grace will receive other messages about older persons, but at that moment, I was witnessing the birth of a stereotype.

Grace’s story caused me to wonder what researchers had to say about children’s beliefs about older persons. In fact, a 2005 study led by Mary Kite, a social psychologist from Ball State University, discovered that children’s stereotypes of older persons were more negative compared to stereotypes of younger persons. And a 1961 study for the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology found that when children as young as four viewed pictures of older adults, they responded with a stronger preference for pictures of younger adults. Other studies looking at children as young as six found that they could recite age stereotypes; they viewed older persons as sadder, lonelier, and duller. However, they also viewed older persons as unaggressive, polite, kind, good, friendly, and wise.

These research findings shouldn’t be surprising when we see how some children’s literature supports images of older people as scary. For example, the well-known children’s author, Roald Dahl, opened his novel George’s Marvelous Medicine describing the Grandmother as “That grizzly old grunion of a grandma…She had pale brown teeth with a small puckered-up mouth like a dog’s bottom.”

***

In 1969, Robert Butler, a gerontologist and psychiatrist, coined the term “ageism” which he defined as the “systematic stereotyping of and discrimination against people because they are old, just as racism and sexism accomplish this with skin color and gender [sex].” And the irony of ageist behavior is that no matter our race, ethnicity, sex, or sexual orientation, eventually we will all become old and be members of this group.

In 2002, lead researchers Susan Fiske and Amy Cuddy from Princeton University, developed a particularly useful method called “stereotype content.” This concept allowed for the fact that stereotypes are both positive and negative with characteristics that travel along a number of dimensions. The two principle dimensions are competence (e.g., independent, skill, confident, able) and warmth (e.g., good-natured, trustworthy, sincere, friendly). Within these two dimensions are four combinations that can occur: (1) warm and incompetent, (2) competent and cold, (3) incompetent and cold, and (4) warm and competent. For example, the stereotype content targeting Asians, Jews, and rich people is that these groups are high in competence and low in warmth (competent but cold).

As for “old” people, they have been rated as high in warmth and low in competence (incompetent but warm) as are the physically and the intellectually disabled.

Todd Nelson, a social psychologist who researches prejudice at California State University, Stanislaus says, “Age prejudice is one of the most condoned, institutionalized forms of prejudice in the world−especially in the United States−today.”

It’s worth drawing distinctions between the definition of prejudice and discrimination: prejudice is a negative attitude while discrimination is negative behavior and both can be evident in everyday, taken-for-granted situations that seem harmless or trivial; for example, sending ageist birthday cards to older friends.

Picture this:

[Cover] A nude, older man with a big tummy mows the grass while his nude, older wife with an equally big tummy sits in a lawn chair drinking tea. The message in the card says, “The older we get [inside] the less concerned we are with appearances. Happy Birthday!”

On the cover of another birthday card are two older women sitting on the hood of a car, dressed in 1940 vintage dresses and wearing extraordinarily sensible shoes saying,  “Listen, honey, the only ‘afternoon delight’ I look forward to these days [inside] is my afternoon nap. Happy Birthday!”

I’ve wondered how older people feel when they receive these cards. Do they think these cards are funny? Or do they laugh because they’re afraid if they don’t laugh, they’ll be accused of not having a sense of humor in the same way feminists have been accused of being humorless after pointing out that a joke was sexist?

I confess that I have sent ageist birthday cards. I notice, though, that I sent them to friends before I considered myself or my friends to be “old.” Then the obvious occurred to me. People who send and receive ageist birthday cards are mostly on the cusp of being old, perhaps a “nervous laugh” about the looming entrance into the kingdom of the older world.

***

Maybe I worry too much about older persons’ feelings toward ageist birthday cards. I say this because Robert C. Atchley, professor of gerontology emeritus at Miami University Ohio said that, “The vast majority of the older population does not believe that the common conceptions of aging apply to them specifically, even though they may see these stereotypes as applicable to other older people.” This peculiar phenomenon, called the above-average-effect, is a sort of Lake Wobegon Effect.

Common conceptions of aging are, for the most part, negative. However, studies have found that older persons who have positive self-perceptions of aging have an advantage over older people who hold negative self-perceptions of aging.

Becca Levy, a professor of public health and psychology at Yale University, was the lead author of a number of studies targeting positive self-perceptions of aging. She and her colleagues found that people with positive self-perceptions of aging lived seven and a half years longer, recovered faster following a life-threatening event, had better functional health (the ability to perform all activities of daily living), an increased tendency to engage in preventative health behavior, and were less likely to die of respiratory causes. What could be better than that?

***

Even if we are astute enough to fend off negative self-stereotypes as we age, it’s hard to ignore institutions that under-represent older people or treat them as if they’re invisible. One of the most obvious examples is the media, in particular, television.

Older persons (sixty-five and older) spend more time watching television than any other media (forty-eight hours and four minutes per week according to the 2017 Nielsen Ratings) yet we are invisible or under-represented in starring roles on popular television programs. For example, the winner of the 2017 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama Series, “Game of Thrones” on HBO, had a cast of approximately one hundred and fifty characters over all the episodes. Of the nine actors who appeared in forty or more of the fifty-five episodes, actors who would seem to be the obvious stars, none was even sixty-years-of-age. Lain Glen, the character is Ser Jorah Mormont, came in the closest at fifty-six-years-of-age with three others in their forties, three in their early thirties and two in their early twenties.

Even television advertising is segregated into age groups with older actors and older spokespeople hawking medications like Viagra, chair elevator lifts, and financial services like reverse mortgages.

It’s understandable that advertisers target demographics most likely to buy their products and using older spokespersons or older actors is a logical marketing tactic for some products. What I balk at are the rigid notions of what lead researcher, Monica Lee from the Department of Psychology at Washington University in St. Louis, claims advertisers assume older persons want: medications and medical services, food products, cars, and financial and legal services. Lee claimed that “While it may be true that older adults have medical and financial concerns, they also have a wide range of other interests such as apparel, games, beverages, computers and electronics, and vacation and travel.”

We are more than our age.

***

When I was a child, I remember wanting desperately to be older. Life hummed along and I got older. Now I’m old.

There were few warnings that changes were occurring along the way, especially when I enjoyed good health. Sure, there were objective thresholds such as that invitation to join AARP, senior admission to movie theaters, retirement, and enrollment in Social Security and Medicare.

Still, it’s a dramatic event when a person first realizes others view her to be old. A shot fired over the bow and aimed at a person’s age probably goes unnoticed until it strikes an area of significance, in particular, their identity−an area where competence, pride, and self-esteem reside.

For me, it was thirteen years ago when a stranger at an evening game of tennis informed me that I was old.

– Jane Hegstrom