Let’s take a look at this group photo from Pensioners’ Association from Maribor. There are 41 people in it, 35 women and only 5 of them are having grey hair.

Pensioners’ Association, Maribor

Hiding grey hair by colouring or dyeing them is part of a beauty work for women or work of femininity that is work women do on their appearance, manner and personal identity to maintain femininity – i.e. the ideal of young, white, middle class, able-bodied, cis hetero femininity – throughout their lives. Dyeing hair is part of feminine technologies, associated with women by virtue of their biology (e.g. tampons, birth control, bras, and hair colour) and/or their social role (e.g. kitchen utensils, sewing needles, household cleaning products), alongside with skills, tools and knowledge about those technologies and how to use them that women acquire during their lifespan.

In Western, postmodern societies, where bodies are categorized through “normative or normalizing gaze” (this means measuring, comparing and consequently including/excluding people) this gaze – directed at women’s hair – includes hair standard that doesn’t welcome natural grey hair colour. Being a grey-haired woman translates into being perceived old – hence ugly – and by that, triggering feelings of repulsion or abjection.

Hair carries many culture-specific meanings about a person; their gender, race, ethnicity, social status, sexual orientation, political convictions, occupation, health and age. Grey hair in our consumer culture connotes aging, future body decay (illness, sickness, death), and all these future events evokes fear or phobic-fear (i.e. fear without the known object of fear), avoidance of the subject, aversion, uneasiness, something that is there, but is in the undefined future. Death, as Julia Kristeva has stated, is one of the categories of abjection, together with sexual difference and food loathing. All three of them serve for the preservation of life and constitute the proper social body to conform to the cultural expectations of the physical body. And the cultural expectation for women’s physical bodies is to remove all signs of ageing, including grey hair.

However, having grey hair is a gendered issue – men sport grey hair without being pressured or self-disciplined to hide it by colouring as women do. Women are still regarded as Body, enmeshed in bodily existence in a still current Cartesian body-mind dualism where body – the bearer of flesh, emotionality, sexuality and procreation – connotes life, instability, changeability, disorder, mortality and death. Women’s grey hair are therefore the most visible signifier of aging that causes fear of death or ageism, but according to Iris Marion Young, ageism exhibits border anxiety of the abject – we are confronting our own death and we fear our future selves, only time divides our current selves from our future, older ones. The abject is a border between self and other, and because of its closeness to the subject, cannot be defined as Other or object.

Women’s grey hair has this abject status – they are close to a person’s head, alive at the roots from where they constantly grow, technically dead at the ends and their colour signifies aging. This signifier of an old age can be avoided by colouring them which also serves as a reducer of death anxiety for them and people around them. Grey roots are the border between the artificial colour and grey hair, always threating to outgrow the artificial hair colour. This fear of showing grey roots creates an ongoing anxiety so they must be consciously kept under control.

Dye your hair until you die.

Of course, this association between grey hair and death is socially constructed; originating from the modern conception about death – prior the 19^th century, death was common among children and young adults, older folks were rarity and with longer life expectancies, and emerging new discourses – medicine as a main knowledge producer – link between and old age and disease/death was created.

Head, covered with strings of grey hair or grey hair full-on, is subjected to ageist microaggressions or body policing, much of it happening almost mundanely or what Anthony Giddens has described as a practical consciousness: informal (unnoticed, unreflective) speech (“you look old with grey hair”), aesthetic judgements, jokes (“is it snowing outside?”), bodily reactions (side-eyeing at people), tone of voice, etc. Practical consciousness involves complex reflecting monitoring of the subject’s body, other subjects and their surroundings while interacting with others, but on the fringe of consciousness.

Women in the first photo we saw were everyday women, their retired status and older age means that they are out of the work force (do not belong anymore to the work circles), perhaps without strong family ties (widows, with adult children), so colouring their hair could be interpreted as an insignia to belong to their pensioners social circle, to be part of the group where the in-group monitoring do occur.

How about women who occupy the highest positions in international politics and business, do they sport grey hair? They do have “status shield”, a term coined by Arlie Hochschild, where higher social status protects individuals from “displaced feelings of others” – anger, shame, mockery, verbal abuse, microaggressions, peer body policing etc.

Among 100 powerful women in 2016, according to and ranked by Forbes magazine, there are only 10 women who don grey hair:

From left to right: Janet Yellen (Chair of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System in U.S.), Christine Lagarde (Managing Director of IMF), Queen Elizabeth II, Ho Ching (CEO of Temasek Holdings – investment firm from Singapore) and Sheikh Hasina Wazed (Bangladesh prime minister)

From left to right: Drew Gilpin Faust (President of Harvard University), Irina Bokova (Director-general of UNESCO), Mary Meeker (venture capitalist, head of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers’ for surging Internet companies), Beth Brooke-Marciniak (Global Vice Chair of Public Policy for Ernst & Young, multinational professional services) and Theresa May (British PM)

Having grey hair is obviously still not “respectable” enough for women in professional settings, because – according to Young – respectability is linked to the idea of order, where the standard remains white, bourgeois male who is rational, restrained, chaste, straight and dispassionate and by conforming to these norms sexuality, bodily functions, and emotional expressions are repressed. Cleanliness as a part of respectability agenda means avoiding anything that can be linked to bodily functions or changes, so sporting grey hair in professional environments is viewed as frumpy, sloppy or non-professional. Women are in danger to be losing respect not just due to their gender but also on behalf of their appearance because the ideal of respectability is still rooted in professional settings (government, multi corporations, high-level politics). However, despite the fact that those ten women out of the hundred do have grey hair, their hair colour can be dubbed as an “expensive grey”, i.e. colour and hairstyles one can acquire in top hair salons without looking washed out or half-styled. They are protected by their class privilege to look professional by donning (expensive) grey hair. But their lives are still pervaded with a specific type of self-disciplinary body regime, common for professional spaces.

It is called “power dressing”, a sartorial phenomenon for professional women that emerged in the late 1970s in capitalist societies when women started to occupy middle and top managerial positions in companies on behalf of second wave feminism in Central/West Europe and North America. This type of clothing practice represents the masculinisation of women’s dress – two-piece suit with skirt or pants in dark colours (black, grey, dark blue) with shorten hair or hair bun. This “uniform” was used to visually divide professional women from secretaries, a job that was most common for women in office spaces.

As we saw, most of them do perform power dressing – they de-feminize themselves, but others who do not belong to the Western culture, present themselves in more traditionally influenced outfits that could be marked as feminine rather than masculine. What is considered professional look is also culture-specific. Perhaps deliberate decolonising practices are here at stake.

Ho Ching and Sheikh Hasina Wazed

Let’s take a quick look at mass media (film in this case). Young has defined mass media as a site for unbridled fantasies, so how is it with the representation of grey-haired women. Are they even present in film? Not particularly, but when they are, they are portrayed in fantasy tales as witches (i.e. women with otherworldly power), for example, Into the Woods with Meryl Streep and Grimm’s fairy tale Hansel and Gretel – this is the image every child is exposed to and has internalized it.

Into the Woods (2014) and Grimm’s Hansel and Gretel

When portrayed in a contemporary or futuristic cinema, they are power-hungry bitches (The Devil Wears Prada with Streep again and Julianne Moore in The Hunger Games). The representation of grey-haired women as powerful “creatures” affirms the aforementioned statement about films as spaces where the abject can come alive. Apparently, women’s power is so threatening that can only be lived on screen – as a fiction.

The Devil Wears Prada (2006) and The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 and 2 (2014)

The other type of grey-haired on-screen characters are minor ones, usually mad, poor women, living on the fringes of society like Crazy Cat Lady from The Simpsons and Judy Davis in The Dressmaker.

The Simpsons (1989-) and The Dressmaker (2015)

Here, another dimension of discrimination against old women can be spotted: sanism (discrimination against people with mental illnesses) and class discrimination or classism. In this case, grey hair translates into the absolute loss of power – socio-economical (i.e. poverty) and personal or psychological (i.e. insanity).

Film representations of grey-haired women are stuck on the opposite sides of power; they are either powerful or powerless with the absence of anything in-between. This apparent on-screen invisibility – except for the aforementioned extremities in power – render the cultural desire for older women to be absent in society in general.

To conclude: this avoidance of grey-hair can be explained as a gendered abjection, a fear of death and women as the bearers of flesh, life and mortality and proof lies in almost every aspect of our social Western reality: everyday life, professional environments and media representations.

Thank you.

Age is a tool for primitive categorization (i.e. categorization that is made almost automatically, under one second – race, gender and age, Nelson 2005), so it is not surprising that ageist language, behaviour and age prejudices in general are so common that even such “harmless” creative outlets, as are jokes and humour, carry covert societal messages about age: getting old is not OK, children are clueless and youngsters are naïve.

Ageism is Othering that is based on the person’s age and it draws lines between “us” (currently right-aged group) and “them” (or Other). Children, youngsters and old people constitute the category of Other-aged.

Children are primarily subjected to the juvenile ageism that is manifested in an adult’s comprehension of children as helpless, mindless, dependable upon adults and unreliable. Youth has been vilified ever since the idea of a teenager emerged in the post-war era. American 1950s introduced us with juvenile delinquents, 1960s had hippies, 1980s punks, 1990s Generation X and 2000s Millennials.

Ageism against old people is the most damaging one. The general stereotype of old people in the contemporary Western societies portrays them as dependent, lonely, disagreeable persons, who have various physical and mental limita­tions. They tend to be marginalized, stripped of responsibility, power and their dignity. Older adults are still regarded as non-contributing burdens on society, treated as second-class citizens with nothing to offer. The most harmful aspect of ageism is how it affects older people in the workplace (i.e. economic sphere). They are perceived as less motivated and com­petent at work, as harder to train or retrain and as more expensive for employers, because they have higher salaries and, due to declining health, use more health care benefits.

Ageism against older people can even evolve into gerontophobia, an irrational fear or hostility against older people. Elderly people represent our future selves and are a reminder of our own aging and death, as youngsters represent our past selves. So, the ageist language that is directed to both of those Othered age groups is just fear. We are not young anymore; we have made our life choices and must live with them. Time is known for its irreversibility – when it passes, it passes.

Currently right-aged group is now being “concerned” about Millennials; they are described as self-involved, shallow, selfie-obsessed, vain, spoilt etc., the predictions about future are pessimistic because nothing good will happen by the time Millennials grow up. When the right-aged group is “morally condemning” youngsters for being young (i.e. different from them), they are (un)consciously using ageist language. Ageist language (e.g. old people are incompetent, children are helpless, and youngsters are shallow) is generally very patronising language; it positions Other as a voiceless and powerless subject. And this is exactly what is being done to youngsters – they are defined by those who possess the power to construct “truths” about Other-aged groups. Nobody knows how responsible, reliable or sociable youngsters will be as adults in the future.

This ageist narrative about contemporary youngsters has become so populistic and accepted that it is hard not to remember that every right-aged group had the same fearful prejudice about their youths; 1950s parents were terrified of juvenile delinquents and their power to disrupt the illusion of the perfect nuclear family, to parents of Gen X everybody was lost and confused, 1980s punks were prone to destroy the society with their anarchistic political views … But none of that has happened. Not on a larger scale.

Ageism segregates different-aged people into “us” and “them”, so any cross-generational connection (except the familial one) is absent and by that, any enrichment from one age group to the other is unavailable.

Except in films, or at least, in one film – an anti-ageist love story Harold and Maude (1971, d.: Hal Ashby). Here’s to love and death (of ageism).

Party Girl (2014, d.: M. Amachoukeli, C. Burger and S. Theis) is a French woman-centric film, focused on Angélique Litzenburger, a sixty-year-old unmarried cabaret dancer, who has decided to get married; however, she does not follow through with her marital plan. The film plot may sound simple, but the story narrative deals with the ‘marriage mandate’ (i.e. a societal urge for a woman to be married at some point) and reveals an implicit societal sexism, ageism and classism.

‘Marriage mandate’ is something every western woman is seduced by with the help of ideological mechanisms (e.g. media, education system, religion, family, peers) that serve as self-disciplinary tools. Instead of someone directly commanding “You as a woman should get married”, an inside voice within a woman’s head (‘patriarchal other’) is gently whispering ‘Maybe I should be getting married because it is ____‘ (time, everyone else is, I don’t want to be alone …). And this is exactly what is happening to Angélique. She is is getting old(er), despite her single marital status she has four grown-up children, none of which prepared or able to take care of her in the future – emotionally, financially and physically, but the most important fact is that her job as an unregistered cabaret dancer did not enable her pension or retirement benefits. By not being entitled to any kind of pension, she could only collect a welfare support and live on the edge of poverty.

Her decision to marry a man at her age is a survival tactic, used by people of her economic underprivileged group. Although aging alone is a lonely experience, for a woman it is more of an economic risk, especially for low-income women, who also originate in a low socioeconomic class and could not climb upon the social ladder due to their socioeconomic and cultural limitations. This is where old age and inadequate financial power, gained through a person’s lifespan, meet and create an unfavourable living situation. For an uneducated woman, employment options are limited; she can only do jobs that require manual skills – and that also includes sex work.

Credits: Denis Carot & Marie Masmonteil

There is no sex-shaming in what Angélique and other women do on their account; it is a paid job and should be respected as any other one. However, this is not how her life is viewed through the eyes of a handful of young male clients, her children and soon-to-be-husband, who benevolently judges her nomadic lifestyle (“I live where I work”) and her thirst for fun. Her home is more with her women co-workers and the place where she works (public sphere) than a house where a woman of her age should spend her time (domestic sphere). Fun and self-indulgence (e.g. drinking, partying) of an older woman are not a picture society wants to paint. Women should abandon their need to have fun, to be irresponsible, reckless and spontaneous, because they must constantly think about their financial future (wage gap and limited options for work are almost every woman’s reality) and care about the social stigma for not being too sexual.

By marrying a man, she would gain more of the economic stability. But economic powerfulness of her fiancée is tricky – she immediately slips into the role of a housewife, which is a symbolic reminder of her economic dependency. A housewife in a traditional household has no status and no power, when it comes to economic decisions and even personal matters. Here is an example where a man’s economic power spills over into the personal control over a woman. There is a scene where her fiancée scolds her in front of his friends for smoking in the house. Surprisingly, his friends take her side arguing that it is now her house too, so she can do whatever she wants. Her fiancée does not share this view. “It is my house”, he stresses, “She just moved in.” It is clear that economic power overshadowed the romance. But (hetero) romance has always been about power – those who have more economic power, possess more power to command and control the other partner, even in such a trivial matter as someone’s behaviour. In this particular case, gender is amplified with economic privilege, so it constitutes rather traditional dynamics between a woman and a man, where Angélique should obey.

Another angle of their traditional coupling is fiancée’s overall possessiveness over her. Not only does he want to control her economically, he wants to eradicate any signs of her being a sexual being for anyone else but him. He gets upset when she is innocently flirting with a much younger man, although they never defined their relationship as monogamous. His suffocating sexual possessiveness results in her rejecting him sexually – she cannot have sex with him. The lack of emotional connectedness and his patriarchal views on marriage and women detach her from her sexual self and him. Angélique as a cabaret dancer is also stereotyped as a sexual worker – he expects ‘a wild animal’ in the sack, but she is not. She likes to perform seductiveness, not to live it. She enjoys the erotic overture, not the banal manifestation. She caters men’s fantasies, not their carnal fulfilment.

At the end, she does not go through with the marriage and walks away alone in the night. The equation between her being in a traditional marriage and her being a single nomad did not add up in her mind. She would have given up her joyfulness, emotional and mental independence, sexual vigor and … herself.

Credits: Denis Carot & Marie Masmonteil

Party Girl caters the premise of marriage as being emotionally, sexually and personally unbeneficial for a woman. When a woman must abandon parts of herself that do not fit into the simplistic and use-value model of a monogamous wife-sacrificial mother-dutiful housekeeper, then becoming a traditional wife can be compared to a social death of a woman, slowly withering away as a spiritual, sexual, emotional and economic being.