新视野大学英语43读写教程单词表】unit8(5)

英语

to myself. I would look more like I felt! I became frightened by the whole process. Who was I then? This face? What I felt like inside? How come the two images were not connected? My own ageism told me that how I looked outside was ugly. But I felt the same inside, not ugly at all.

Finally, death entered my life as a direct reality. My oldest friend died of cancer three years ago. My father died two years ago after what turned out to be needless surgery. Another close friend died last month after a year of struggling with cancer. My mother is dying slowly and painfully after suffering a massive stroke. The realization hit me that I can expect this kind of personal contact with death to occur with greater and greater frequency.

Not just my age, but life itself was telling me that I was becoming an older/old woman!

Think of all the adjectives that are most disrespectful in our society. They are all part of the ageist description of old women: useless, powerless, complaining, sick, weak, conservative, rigid, helpless, unproductive, wrinkled, ugly, unattractive, and on and on.

How did this happen, this picture of old women? To understand this phenomenon we must look at our society's insistence that women are only valuable when they are attractive and useful to men. Women spend their lives accepting the idea that to be beautiful one must be young, and only beauty saves one from being discarded. Women's survival, both physical and psychological, has been linked to their ability to please men. It is small wonder that the prospect of growing old is frightening to women. By denying our ageing, we hope to escape the penalties placed upon growing old.

Old people are sent off to their own prisons. Frequently they will say they like it better. But who would not when, to be with younger people is so often to be invisible, to be treated as irrelevant, and sometimes even as disgusting.

We have systematically looked down on old women, kept them out of productive life, judged them primarily in terms of failing capacities and functions, and then found them pitiful. We have put old women in nursing "homes" with absolutely no intellectual stimulation, isolated from human warmth and contact, and then condemned them for losing their mental abilities. We have disrespected and disregarded old women, and then dismissed them as uninteresting. We have made old women invisible so that we do not have to confront our society's myths about what makes life valuable or dying painful.

Having done that, we then attribute to the process of ageing per se all the evils we see and fear about growing old. It is not ageing that is awful, nor whatever physical problems may accompany ageing. What is awful is how society treats old women and their problems. To the degree that we accept and
allow such treatment we buy the ageist assumptions that permit this treatment.

What then does it really mean to grow old? For me, first of

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