Girl in the Locker Room! ... because she and her friends don’t know the reality of a few short years back, they don’t recognize the threats to 21st century female life in the current political climate. We have to tell them. We have to tell them now. ...This is a cyber history project. Contribute stories about your own experiences by e-mail or comment on my running blog entries as a barrier-breaking generation gives context to contemporary female life. (how to contribute your real-life stories/recollections/anecdotes)

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Friday, February 04, 2005 Funny, You Don't Look 40, 50, 60, 70     Gloria Steinem courtesy USA Today   Janet Kornblum writing a profile in USA Today recounts the famous story:   When she was 40, Gloria Steinem decided to come clean.   Somewhere along the line, the world's most famous feminist had subtracted a year or two from her age, so she announced her birthday. Her real one.   When a reporter told her, "You don't look 40," Steinem shot back: "This is what 40 looks like. We've been lying so long, who would know?"   Her comment was quoted so often "it made me realize that there really was an age problem for women," she says. "So I said it again at 50 and again at 60."   "And I said it again," she recently told a San Francisco audience, "when I was shocked to find that there was a 70-year-old woman in my bed."   So Gloria, our glamorous feminist leader, is talking freely these days about being 70.   And we're still lying about our ages.   It starts early. First we age up. My daughter, no different than me, asked at age 15 if I thought she could pass for 18...or 20...possibly 21?? What's the rush, I asked.   I was in a rush too. I remember even now with embarrassment how I aged myself up at a summertime dance when a tawny 16-year-old boy I liked approached me. I said I was 15. I was actually 14. A year can be pretty crucial in the teen world. By the end of the slow dance, I confessed. He said that was ok; he liked me anyway.   As we get older, of course, we age ourselves down. It has ever been so. My mother only recently confessed to having fibbed practically her whole life (we didn't know). Since marrying my father, she had skimmed off five birthdays. Seems my father was a few years younger, and back then, just after WWII, it wasn't considered "nice" for a woman to marry a younger man, she explained (has anything really changed?). Besides, I think my mother's vanity was at play here. She was movie star beautiful in a kind of Ginger Rogers way, and she could get away with it.   Now, no one will believe her when she states her actual age. This can sometimes be a problem at the doctor's office.   Surely we'd all be better off if we came clean about our birthdates; it might help relieve the perverse social pressure to remain Botox young. Yup, better if we all came clean....you want to go first? -RH 10:07:50 PM    comment [] © Copyright 2005 Robin Herman. The Girl in the Locker Room™ name and design are trademarks owned by Robin Herman. Last update: 5/31/2005; 11:25:27 AM. Powered by