Baby Boomers, Age, and Beauty

Naomi Woodspring

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781787439900
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gerontology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book is a rich exploration of the baby boomers - those coming of age in the sixties and now entering old age - the influences that have shaped how they perceive ageing appearance, how they define ageing and beauty, and the meaning of appearance, beauty, and identity. The book draws from a variety of sources from ageing research, history and gender studies and a diverse group of interviewees.
The longevity revolution and shifting notions of identity coalesce as older women and men seek to find new modes of self-presentation as they age. Ageing is a profoundly embodied process, yet older people's concerns about appearance and beauty is perceived, by many, as trivial or a function of consumer society. Investigating notions of appearance and beauty as a core human concern, the author explores Western cultural notions of beauty. What then is beauty in old age? Is it even a possibility given the history of youth and aesthetic preference? The book seeks to bring forward ideas of age and beauty as defined by baby boomers, how they see themselves and how they are seen.

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

Naomi Woodspring

PROLOGUE

My dinner companion looked up from her plate and questioned why I was researching and writing a book on aging and beauty. “I’m just aging. I don’t think much about it”, she said in a challenging tone. She went on to declare that she never thought about her appearance and rarely looked in the mirror … she preferred to look and age “naturally.” There is much embedded in this statement, – choice, class, morality, history, technology, and vanity are among its riches. Despite my companion’s declaration, her hair was obviously well cut and styled with care and her face bore all the marks of being well looked after. This book is an exploration of those issues as expressed through our faces, or, from the neck up. How we age, our imaginings about who we are and how we look, how we present ourselves, and beauty are addressed in these chapters. These ideas are shaped by the culture we live in. Our notions about beauty and appearance are both universal and particular. There is always an interaction between our seemingly unique selves and our culture and society in both obvious and subtle ways. My dinner companion’s declaration was very much of her time and place.

INTRODUCTION

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.

Whatever I see I swallow immediately

Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.

I am not cruel, only truthful. (Plath, p. 173)

Suddenly they could recognize themselves. They were shocked – some ducked their heads and turned away, came back for another look, ducked away again. Eventually they could hold their gaze on the picture, mesmerized, trembling with tension. Some slipped away, photo clutched to their chest, to find a private place for closer inspection ….These people were confronting their visual image for the first time, and were stunned not only by its novelty, but also by the potency of such an icon – a representation of themselves that perhaps carried the power of their soul; or essence, their deepest identity. (A description of the indigenous Papua, New Guinea tribespeople seeing their own faces for the first time. The Polaroid photos were taken by anthropologist, Edmund Carpenter. From Bates & Cleese, 2001, p. 53)

We rarely think about the potency of our faces. We may consider our ‘good looks’ against the mirror’s reflection but rarely do we consider the power of our faces. We gaze at ourselves in the mirror and arrange our hair or shave or double check that we look okay before stepping out into the world where our faces will, most likely, be the first thing people notice about us. We bump into a neighbor or a friend when we are out and about and they recognize us, as we recognize them, as familiar faces. We are introduced to someone new, and as we appraise their face, they are picking up the cues about our gender, race, age, and, attractiveness. Is our smile warm, eyes bright, or do we meet this new person with a suspicious cold look? All this, the exchange of looks and information gathering, happens within seconds, if that. These are core human behaviors, repeated over a lifetime – none of which change with age. Our faces do, of course, change slowly, continually, and almost imperceptibly until the collective changes catch our attention in the mirror. The sight of our old faces generates a raft of emotions and meanings for us and others. Many of us are surprised by the old face in the mirror but we adapt to the refection that is primary to our acknowledgement of becoming old.

THE RESEARCH

This book delves into the meanings, emotions, thoughts, and behavior entangled with our aging faces. Appearance is a primary human concern and comes from our sense of self-awareness. We have, as humans, painted and primped from our early distant past – for our gods, for ourselves, and for each other. Appearance, attractiveness, and beauty are wound together in such a way that notions of appearance cannot be separated from beauty – it is part of appearance. The chapters delve into interviewees speaking about facial appearance and, at the book’s core, their definition of age and beauty. As a culture/society aging beauty, particularly in women, for some people, could be described as an alien idea. There has been much media buzz about the rise of older models and celebrities. Their strenuous beauty regimes which include non-invasive procedures and esthetic surgery is part of the reportage as their “new look – fabulous or not?” is given the thumbs up or down. Public celebrity aside, phrases such as, “she was a great beauty,” or “he’s gone to seed,” are commonplace. Though I had heard those notions of beauty in the past tense throughout my life, as I stepped into the phase of life as an old woman, I heard that description from a different perspective and that set off my curiosity.

Beautiful Everyday People

This book is a result of that curiosity and addresses the possibility of beauty in the older people around us, not in the sense of beauty within but the embodied beauty in some everyday older people. A few people mentioned older celebrities in passing but that touting of public beauty was not the concern of interviewees. Their interest was in the people around them – friends, family, acquaintances, colleagues, and strangers. Instead, interviewees discussed their thoughts and feelings about aging appearance, their own and others, what might be called everyday people. These thoughts and feelings about appearance and age are significant in their own right, but they also open the door, they act as an entrée into, a definition of age and beauty. The descriptions give a context to an understanding of age and beauty through the eyes, the perceptions of the research participants.

The Interviewees

Much has happened in my life that set me on this journey, not the least of which as I have stated, was a deep curiosity about aging and beauty. This wondering about aging faces, and if old people could be beautiful and how that might be defined, led to the research. In many ways, it was an extension of the earlier research I had conducted on time and aging bodies. The result of that work, Baby Boomers, Time and Aging Bodies (2016), informed the research I conducted for this book. Baby Boomers, Age, and Beauty draws extensively on interviews carried out with 31 adults from the UK and the US. This diverse group of participants were all born between 1945 and 1955 – the first wave of the baby boom. Eleven of the original interviewees (from the first study on aging bodies) agreed to be interviewed again for this project on age and beauty. The rest of the other 20 people were not part of my first project on aging bodies. The participants were racially and ethnically diverse, gay and straight, from working to upper class backgrounds, and lived in urban and rural areas.

As an American immigrant to the UK, I was curious about my compatriots on both sides of the ocean. Yes, of course, there are cultural differences, but the roots of our Western construction of beauty and appearance come from the same sources. For the most part, our sense of beauty and our current ideas about appearance are generated from the same or similar influences.

Systems Theory and Thinking

From theory to methodology, the research was approached from a systemic perspective. That meant exploration of the data looking at, and for, context, relationships, connections, and patterns. Additionally, the interviews were based on systemic communications theory (coordinated management of meaning). Bateson describes systems thinking as “an aggregate of ideas or ecology of ideas” (1972, p. xxiii). Systems thinking invites one to look at the whole and how the parts work together to influence the whole. As a result, the scholarship employed throughout the book is drawn from a wide variety of multidisciplinary sources – gerontology, appearance studies, gender studies, visual culture, sociology, history, fashion history, cinema studies, media and cultural studies, literature, art, and more. Cinema studies, media, and cultural studies scholars have had some focus on aging femininities, neglecting an exploration of masculinities (with the exception of Dolan, 2018). Though this work is largely tangential to these chapters, they did provide points of departure especially in clarifying the divergence of patterns of meaning between celebrity and everyday people’s appearance and notions of beauty.

BOOMERS

Context, Faces, and Influencers

What is it about those baby boomers? And, why the first wave of that generation? Each generation grows up under a unique set of circumstances tied to the history, the times they were born into (Woodspring, 2016). Those times significantly shape our lives in a multitude of ways – from our perspective (Elder, 1999; Kynaston, 2007) on to the world to the food we eat (Gopnik, 2012). Context, or time and place, influences appearance ideas and ideals, but evolutionary mating theory also plays a part in our notions of attractiveness (Etcoff, 2000; Rumsey & Harcourt, 2005). Our cultural/societal ideas and ideals of facial appearance are not entirely stable, though appearance research has demonstrated some basic facial characteristics that are recognized as attractiveness standards. Extending beyond those basic precepts, facial appearance is, in part, predicated on the context of the times interacting with other aspects of whatever the cultural dictates are at the time and vice versa. There is a give and take between people’s desires or preferences that influences the tastes or dictates of the times. Taste makers or influencers come from the usual assumed sources such as corporate media, but also from surprising sources such as youth street culture.

The Importance of Adolescence and Memory

I turn now to the context of adolescence in the contemporary life course. Adolescence and young adulthood is a critical time in our lifespan (Hitlin & Elder, 2007). We develop a growing sense of self-mastery (Shanahan & Bauer, 2004) among many other psychological and physical developmental milestones that will carry us throughout our lifespan. It is a time of ‘firsts’; we are rehearsing our adulthood through the novel/first time adult experiences. Our memories of teen and young adult years are disproportionately large. It is so substantial that it has been named the ‘reminiscence bump’. Middle-aged and older people’s memories of adolescence and young adulthood are ‘remembered best’ – it is “their own era” (Neisser & Libby, 2000, p. 319). Each generation develops and contains their own memories that are formulated as ‘their’ time in history, ‘their’ era, influencing how they were and are in the world (Misztal, 2003).

Koppel and Rubin (2016) attribute this memory bump to this critical period of our lifespan and the many firsts we are enacting at that time. We are doing what is of relevance to our adult lives and that underlines those experiences and events, making them most memorable. The context of our teen years, the period in history when we live out our adolescence, shapes us throughout our lifespan. In turn, some generations exert a force on the changing shape of the culture/history. The first wave of the baby boomer generation and their coming of age in the Sixties may well be one of those generations. Each generation makes its mark but some generations more so than others; some generations are more important than others (Timoneon, 2015).

The First Wave of the Postwar Generation

The first wave of the postwar generation, those people born between 1945 and 1955, were young enough in the Sixties to have limited independence and old enough to have become relatively independent by the end of the Sixties. They were removed from the influence of the Second World War.

I also think ours was the first generation that hadn’t been obsessed by the war, we were in a way selfish in that respect. It didn’t matter to us at all, I looked at my older brothers and they were all fucking shell-shocked – they knew their place, we didn’t give a shit. (Quoted in Rawlings, 2000, p. 50)

The coming of age of the postwar generation was a considerable departure from the air raids, bomb shelters, and evacuation or shipping out overseas experienced by their parents and grandparents. How we have come to think about our bodies and how we live in them has been profoundly influenced by the history of our generation or the times we have been born into (Woodspring, 2016). The postwar generation entered their teen years in the shiny new times of the Sixties, and they left their mark on the times as it left its mark on the generation.

Birth Rates, Times, and Marketing

Though there was a postwar baby boom in the US, in reality, the UK experienced a brief peak in the birth rate in 1946. In the UK, the baby boom did not occur until 1964. Regardless of the actuality, the media named the generation on both sides of the ocean the baby boomers and it has stuck. Peter Townsend, The Who lead guitarist and the guy who penned the words to ‘My Generation,’ described the bulge this way:

There was a bulge, that was England’s bulge. All the war babies, all the old soldiers coming back from the war and screwing until they were blue in the face – this was the result. (Quoted in Szatmary, 1987, p. 102)

Birth rates were not the only differences between the nations during the boomers’ childhood and adolescence but there were also significant similarities. Perhaps, central to the boomer cohort, is the sense of identity and cohesion as a generation. Of course, the Sixties, ‘London Calling’, Haight Ashbury, antiwar protests, and all that was the landscape to their coming of age. The first wave of the baby boomers, those people born between 1945 and 1955, had limited experience of independence as children in the 1950s but they were old enough to have at least some sense of independence during the Sixties. A small number were at the core of the Sixties social rupture and many more of their generation were influenced by the doings of that period. They were the first cohort to have experienced an entire lifetime of the defining term ‘teenager’ and that was to shape their identity as they entered their adolescence. First developed as a marketing strategy, the idea of teenagers was devised by New York Madison Avenue advertising firms and quickly exported to the UK. Twiggy was the fashion model that represented adolescence at that time:

Twiggy came along at a time when teen-age spending power was never greater. With that underdeveloped, boyish figure, she is an idol to the 14- and 15-year-old kids. She makes virtue of all the terrible things of gawky, miserable adolescence. (Dalgleish, 2010)

The Influence on a Generation

A few of the research participants self-identified as being involved in one or another in the subcultures that marked the Sixties, but most of the participants were not part of that small group of people who raised a big ruckus. That does not mean that interviewees were not influenced by the ruckus, danced to the music, didn’t “trust anyone over 30,” or wore some version of the garb or rolled up their skirts at the waist (as soon as they were far enough from home to not get caught), in an approximation of mini-skirts, that marked the Sixties – they did. The big doings centered around London and, in the States, the urban areas. The interviewees came from around the UK, though most of the American participants lived in Chicago. Despite the location of their growing up, the vast majority of interviewees stated that the Sixties was an influence on their lives as teenagers and beyond. So what was the Sixties and its influence on the generation – a generation whose members refer to themselves as “we” or “us” – the baby boomers.

EMBODIED SIXTIES

The baby boomers came of age in the Sixties. This section provides an understanding, the background to attitudes and ideas that the generation has carried with them for their lifetimes and has influenced how they are thinking about aging, their construction of the concept of old, and their sense of their embodied selves. By understanding the background to the critical teen years of the baby boomers, we shed light on their ideas about age, appearance, and beauty.

Throughout the trajectory of history, earlier times have influenced how subsequent events and ideas come into being. In the 1800s, the young Romantics espoused a freewheeling lifestyle that included drug use and bodily freedoms that was taken up again in the 1920s by the flappers and swept across the globe during the Sixties. Generational differences are not only revealed in experience and life attitudes but in the very sense of our physical beings.

What follows is a brief summary of the Sixties social rupture. It is by no means a full accounting of the time. Instead, it is what was influential in forming the baby boomers’ notions of physicality, aging appearance, and beauty. Underlying this section are the underpinnings of the ‘influences’ that have created their sense of themselves as a generation.

Defining the Sixties

The ‘Long Sixties’, is the period beginning in 1958 in the UK with the first appearance of the mods and ending in both the UK and the US in 1974 with the oil crisis and recession. In the US, there is more debate among historians about dating the beginning of the period, but it was around the same time as in the UK. Many historians agree that the period was marked by a “social rupture” (Donnelly, 2005; Green, 1999; Marwick, 1998; Sandbrooke, 2007). Though the postwar period that they were born into was significantly different between the US and the UK, by the late 1950s, those differences had diminished. They are a generation that experienced unprecedented levels of affluence and largesse from the previous generations. The Sixties was not only a US/UK or the Western industrial world phenomenon, but was a worldwide event from India to Mexico and throughout the global South. Change was the order of the day. In the UK, the Sixties social rupture was primarily cultural. In the US, the central underpinnings were political.

Music has come to be an important signifier of the Sixties. It was an invitation to move one’s body that was hard to resist. At the time, perhaps more than anything else, it bound together the baby boomers. The music, for many, represents the atmosphere of the Sixties and the good times of their adolescence. The music was shared across national boundaries and cultures. Though the music was a central point of coherence, each country from India to Mexico had their own specific Sixties rupture (Marwick, 1998). Much of the music also carried an overt message of rebellion to the political and social order of their parents and grandparents. In the UK, it was a cultural revolution finally laying the Victorian era to rest. In the US, the civil rights movement kicked it off, followed by the Vietnam War and universal conscription. It was ‘the draft’ that galvanized the generation and created a political focus to the social rupture. Of course, not everyone who was a member of the postwar generation would characterize themselves as hippies, mods, rude boys, or was directly involved in the Sixties doings. Someone once described their experience of the Sixties to me as a time when they were “looking for the party but they never found it.” It is the influence of these times, the ideas that were generated, and th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 Shaping Appearance and Beauty
• Chapter 3 Women on Appearance
• Chapter 4 Men on Appearance
• Chapter 5 What We Know and What We See
• Chapter 6 Living with Mortality
• Chapter 7 The Appearance of Beauty
• Chapter 8 A Passion for Life
• Bibliography
• Index