The Anti-Aging Industry Aims to Take Away Your Power!
Women over 50 are powerful beings. We’ve grown into ourselves as mature women who’ve learned a thing or two, exude more self-confidence, and care less about what people think. We’re no longer as steeped in the business of pleasing others and more into self-expression, achievement, and leaving our own mark upon the world.
However, as with all of life, the years of fifty and beyond present choices. Perhaps the biggest choice of all is whether to celebrate our maturity as fully formed women in our own right or to mourn the loss of our youth and all that represents. Again and again, studies show that older women are happier and feel more fulfilled than our younger counterparts. But there’s a major industry out there that’s hoping to take away our power by turning us into youth-mourners.
It’s no secret. The aim of the anti-aging folk is to make us feel so inadequate, unlovable, and invisible (solely as a result of growing older, mind you) that we buy their products in droves. But Barbara Hannah Grufferman, bestselling author of The Best of Everything After 50: The Experts’ Guide to Style, Sex, Health, Money, and More, is on a mission to expose their wily ways.
Barbara is an outspoken advocate for women in midlife and also a frequent blogger/contributor to the Huffington Post at Huff/Post 50. In one of her recent articles entitled: “Is the Anti-Aging Industry Bad for Our Health?” Barbara goes into several ways these malevolent marketers create impossible models of perfection in a concerted attempt to play upon our fears. They must believe that, if they make us feel bad enough about ourselves, we’ll part with our precious dollars in a vain attempt to hold back the hands of time. Selling fear and feelings of inadequacy sets up them up for a ready stream of income. To their way of thinking, Father Time keeps marching on and the boomers are one heckuva lucrative target market.
I’ve written a couple of posts on this topic myself, “Who Do They Think They’re Kidding? We’re Too Smart for This!” and “Miss Representation—A Tale for All Ages.” Barbara and I both feel strongly about exposing these underhanded threats to our self-esteem. In fact, we just held a lively discussion on this very topic on Feisty Side of Fifty Radio. I invite you to take a listen—it’s an explosive 15 minutes that will get you steaming.
So, as Barbara wrote in her article, it’s high time for us “to get noisy.” Let’s use our celebrated flower power to best advantage, let the anti-aging industry know we’re proud of who we are, and that we won’t buy into their methods to make us feel inadequate. Such underhanded tactics might have worked on previous generations… but this time they’re dealing with the boomers. Menopause has never been so powerful!
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