Tag Archives: Hillary Clinton

Aging: Gray Hair Is Still Out, but Sex Is In

Debbie says:

Karen Kay at the Observer has a fine long article on gray hair in women.

Judi_Dench_at_the_BAFTAs_2007Kay starts out discussing the way Hillary Clinton and other women in politics and public life are expected to spend inordinate time on their looks:

Let’s transport ourselves back to 2001 and Yale, one of the world’s pre-eminent universities. New York senator and former first lady Hillary Clinton has returned to her alma mater to deliver words of wisdom to graduating law students. She takes to the podium and begins: “The most important thing I have to say to you today is that hair matters. Your hair will send significant messages to those around you: what hopes and dreams you have for the world, but more, what hopes and dreams you have for your hair. Pay attention to your hair, because everyone else will.”

When we speak in public, Laurie and I often mention the multi-billion-dollar diet industry (which is now somewhere in the high $60 billion range), but hair is an even bigger business, forecast to be $83.1 billion in 2016.  I don’t even know how to think about these numbers, except to imagine them spent on oh, education, agriculture, facing climate change, controlling police violence. Those issues pale before the terror that women might actually show signs of aging …

Only last week the Duchess of Cambridge, a mother to two infant children, whose husband has just started a stressful new job, was publicly rebuked by celebrity crimper Nicky Clarke for allowing a few grey hairs to appear in her hitherto lustrous brunette mane. “Kate is such a style icon that even a few strands of grey would be a disaster,” he commented, rather ungallantly. …

Professor Nichola Rumsey, co-director of the Centre for Appearance Research at the University of the West of England, says society places enormous pressure on women to conform to youthful ideals. “I’m in my late 50s and feel tremendous pressure to cover the grey,” she admits. “You need to have huge self-confidence to stand up to that and deflect it and know that you are still good at your job and will be loved by your family if you don’t fit a certain youthful stereotype.”

This fits my own experience; going gray definitely changed how people react to me (though because I have always been a fat woman, it didn’t take away my experience of being a sex symbol). I also have very clear memories of a friend being upset a couple of decades ago when her therapist dyed the gray out of her hair, explaining “It’s the only way I can get men to take me seriously as a possible romantic partner.”

***

On the romantic partner front, however, Marie Lodi at Jezebel has good news, though I can’t say it surprises me …

A new study, published in the latest issue of the Annals of Family Medicine, shows that nearly six in 10 women over the age of 60 and in committed relationships are actively boning down. “People assume as women get older, they automatically become sexually inactive and sex is not as important to them, which isn’t necessarily the case,” Dr. Holly Thomas, author of the study, told Health Day.

More than 2,100 U.S. women between the ages of 28 to 84 were asked a series of questions pertaining to physical and mental health, medical problems, use of medication, relationship factors, sexual activity and sexual satisfaction. A majority of the women surveyed were in their 50s and 60s. The results showed that women in their 60s and 70s experienced sexual satisfaction comparable to women in their 30s and 40s.

Lodi doesn’t say anything (and neither did the study designers) about whether or not these women have gray hair. Clearly, we need a follow-up, including:

  • Do gray-haired women have better or worse sex lives than women who dye their hair? How about women whose hair naturally isn’t gray? (I’ll provide another piece of anecdotal experience; my sexual pleasure seems to be completely unchanged despite my gray hair.)
  • Do women who dye their head hair dye their pubic hair? Does that choice affect their sex lives?
  • Finally, gray head hair changes texture and quality (because it is caused by the death of the cells that color your hair naturally). Mine has gotten curlier and springier; many people’s hair gets coarser. Are these changes reflected in pubic hair?

Inquiring minds want to know.

Sarah Palin: Stick to the Real Issues

Laurie and Debbie say:

Sarah Palin is a terrible choice for vice president. To pick just a few reasons: 1) she’s vehemently anti-choice; 2) it seems likely that she pulled strings to get her sister-in-law’s ex-fiancee fired (and at least one other public figure got fired along the way); and 3) she reportedly believes in banning books from libraries.

These are good reasons to oppose Palin. We are, however, disturbed by the media focus on her family life, her children, and her parenting, just as (even though neither of us were Hillary Clinton supporters), we hated to see the way her political enemies and the media kept creating criticisms based on her being a woman.

People are not consistent and people’s private lives are their own. It is virtually impossible to sort out the mother/daughter interactions of the people you know best, to be sure (for example) which actions reflect parental guidance and which reflect adolescent defiance.

And if you believe that a woman’s body is really her own, then you have to believe that having children at 17, or raising a child that might have been borne by your daughter (which it seems very clear that Palin did not do, but many other women have) is a woman’s private choice. If you believe that Bill Clinton’s behavior with Monica was either not an issue or “only an issue because he lied about it,” if you believe that Larry Craig had every right to be doing whatever he did in that men’s room in Minneapolis, then pointing fingers at Sarah Palin for her reproductive history and that of her daughters is hard to justify.

Both of us despise “abstinence only” sex education. However, we’ve known young women to get pregnant after every kind of sex education and parental intervention under the sun. Debbie can name you a case where the parents left condoms out for their three daughters with a “we’ll shake the box, refill it if it’s empty, and otherwise never look” deal and two of the three girls were pregnant out of wedlock before they were 18.

The same goes for how big a family “should” be before a mother “has” to stay home (or how able the children have to be). It even goes for “exposing your poor children to public scrutiny.” Hell, Chelsea Clinton was exposed to years of completely inappropriate fat jokes and other nastinesses, and is still a John McCain cheap-shot target, and even at the worst times of Bill Clinton’s presidency, there was no groundswell of “he’s a bad father because of what he’s doing to Chelsea.” If Barack Obama had an unmarried pregnant daughter, his political enemies and the media would be having a vicious field day that makes any controversy over Sarah Palin look like a polite disagreement at a formal wedding.

The litmus test is actually simple: can you imagine anyone criticizing a man because he accepted the vice-presidential nomination even though he has a child with Down syndrome? No? Then you know what that criticism is worth.

Men get criticized for who they have sex with, and when, and where, and whether or not they tell the truth about it. Women get criticized for how they deal with the results of sex. We say: attack Sarah Palin, and Larry Craig, and Dennis Vitter for their positions, not their behavior. Given who these people are in their public life, it shouldn’t even slow us down much.