In Our Prime

by Patricia Cohen

  Part III

  The Midlife Industrial Complex

  10

  Consuming Desire

  Consumerism and self-help meet in modern advertising. A 1928 ad for Lysol in Ladies’ Home Journal.

  Middle age doesn’t exist, Fast Eddie. It’s an invention of the media, like halitosis. It’s something they tame people with.

  —Walter Tevis, The Color of Money (1984)

  Millions of boomers who grew up with tired, compromised, and unappealing portraits of the middle decades marched into their 40s, 50s, and 60s determined to rehabilitate middle age. Their campaign has managed to mobilize more people and more resources with more singularity of purpose than the War on Poverty, the civil rights campaign, or the feminist movement. The advertising and entertainment industries and the medical establishment have been eager collaborators in the enterprise. In two decades, the concentrated effort has refashioned common expectations about middle-aged faces, bodies, and behavior.

  These days, middle age on-screen and in magazines frequently looks good. Sometimes too good. It is thinner, smoother, sexier, wealthier, happier, and hipper. Women are as lustful as hormone-addled teenage males; men are boyishly charming and irresistible to women half their age. These perpetually improving midlifers tone their triceps and deltoids at daily six a.m. workouts, freeze their faces during discreet trips to the dermatologist, lunch at expensive restaurants, and hop into bed for multiple orgasms. Fictional middle-aged women look more like the affluent runway-ready sex addict Samantha Jones (Kim Cattrall) in the Sex and the City series and films than her fleshier, middle-class, similarly aged precursor Blanche Devereaux (Rue McClanahan) in The Golden Girls. Middle-aged men in films like Wild Hogs and Grown Ups can be adolescent, but their immaturity is endearing. This imagined middle age is certainly better than the cliché of a defeated man in a gray flannel suit with a frigid, nagging hausfrau, but it is not one that is meaningful to most people. As GQ noted when it featured a nude photo of 40-year-old Jennifer Aniston on its cover in 2009, “that body—well, as you can see it defies both time and nature.” In reality, middle age is brimming with opportunities and disappointments that include the size 6 and the size 16, the enthusiastic entrepreneur and the anxious laid-off worker, the new mother and the veteran grandmother. These multiple middle ages are all part of the aging process, that “estuary that spreads and enlarges itself grandly as it pours into the great sea,” as Walt Whitman called it. By comparison, the media-produced middle age is a tidy puddle, more suited to Stepford, Connecticut, the seemingly idyllic town where husbands replaced their wives with shapely, perfectly groomed robots as conjured up by the novelist Ira Levin.

  The Stepford middle age for both men and women is unforgiving and narrow in its perfection, a standardized, 1,200-calorie-a-day, nipped-and-tucked version that is defined primarily by its appearance. It, too, is a “cultural fiction,” one of the varied stories a society tells about the course of a life. And like its predecessors, this one has its own set of drawbacks, for it creates unrealistic expectations about the way sex, bodies, workers, and social status are supposed to look in midlife.

  At the Corner of Self-Help and Macy’s

  The source of today’s idealized archetypical midlife lies at the intersection of self-improvement and mass consumption, two of the most powerful movements of the twentieth century. Faith in the perfectibility of man through his own efforts, combined with the promise of the marketplace’s transformative abilities, have molded our current conception of what it means to be middle-aged. Intimately connected, these two forces have formed—to crib President Dwight Eisenhower’s phrase—the Midlife Industrial Complex.

  This amalgam is a complex in both the institutional and emotional sense: a massive industrial network that manufactures and sells products and procedures to combat supposed afflictions associated with middle age; and a mental syndrome that exaggerates angst about waning powers, failure, and uselessness in one’s middle years. Zeroing in on the physical body, the market whips up insecurities, creating a sense of inferiority, then sells the tools that promise to allay those fears.

  The origins of the Midlife Industrial Complex date back to the 1920s, when America became a visual culture—what the poet Vachel Lindsay called a “hieroglyphic civilization”—and consumerism attached itself to the growing self-help movement. “She looks old enough to be his mother,” two women remark about a friend in a 1928 advertisement for Lysol disinfectant. “And the pity of it is that, in this enlightened age, so often a woman has only herself to blame if she fails to stay young with her husband and with her women friends.” The poor Lysol-less woman was not fated to a life of neglect and aging; she could have done something about it. In this democratic arena, youthful beauty is not confined to genetic luck or wealthy pampering; it is within everyone’s reach, part of an individual’s inalienable right to pursue happiness. As Helena Rubenstein reputedly said, there are no ugly women, only lazy ones. In the language of self-improvement, middle age doesn’t simply happen to you; it is what you make of it. Here, self-improvement is more than a path to happiness; it is a responsibility. Pauline Manford in Edith Wharton’s Twilight Sleep was a prototype, enduring “months and years of patient Taylorized effort” to ward off “the natural human fate”—aging.

  Since mass marketing took off after World War I, youthful images have paraded across screens, billboards, publications, and imaginations. Two things have changed in the twenty-first century, however. Cosmetic medicine has advanced so much that less invasive treatments are able to effect startling alterations in appearance. At the same time, our digital world incessantly assails us with artificially maintained images of youth. The combination has ratcheted up disdain for signs of aging to an unmatched degree. “We have become so used to seeing perfect, unwrinkled faces,” a 45-year-old woman from New Jersey commented to the New York Times, that “now when you see someone who looks like a raisin or a prune, it seems so unusual that you are almost repulsed.” In the 2008 film The Women, Candace Bergen’s character explains why she got a face-lift: “There are no 60-year-old women. I was the only one left.” In some affluent circles, there is an antiaging arms race among women, described in Orange County by one competitor as involving “big boobs, blond hair, and Botox.”

  The combination of America’s youth obsession and revised expectations about the new and improved middle-aged face have strengthened the link between employability and a youthful appearance. In Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and on Madison Avenue, employees feel added pressure to appear younger—just like the boilermakers and bricklayers who purchased hair dye a century ago. A 2005 Harris survey found that most men and women think it is important to try to look younger. Half of those polled agreed that a youthful appearance is necessary for professional success and for personal happiness.

  The deep recession that gathered force in 2008 intensified fears of the “age deadline,” bolstering the belief that middle age is a detriment. One Virginia clinic located near the Pentagon “donated” free Botox injections to unemployed workers in June 2009, an investment in publicity and future customers for when the economy picked up. Colleen Delsack, 47, was one of dozens who stood on line for the free facial freeze. The single mother had been out of work for eighteen months and her home was in foreclosure. “Age is a handicap,” she said plainly.

  As early as 1929, the German sociologist Siegfried Kracauer argued that cosmetics and other products created to improve one’s appearance were a necessity for middle-class job seekers. Decades later, self-help authors make the same argument. “Looking hip is not just about vanity anymore,” Charla Krupp advised in her 2008 book, How Not to Look Old. “It’s critical to every woman’s personal and financial survival.” The women who make up half of the labor market are repeatedly informed that their economic worth as well as their sexual desirability are tied to a youthful appearance. “I have to look young,” a Botoxed 50-year-old woman who works at an investment bank confided. “I work on Wall Street.”<
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  During the health-care debate in 2009, the National Organization for Women spoke out against a proposal to help finance universal health care with a five percent tax on elective cosmetic surgery—nicknamed the Bo-Tax. “They have to find work,” Terry O’Neill, the NOW president, said of middle-aged women. “And they are going for Botox or going for eye work, because the fact is we live in a society that punishes women for getting older. . . . Now they are going to put a tax on middle-aged women in a society that devalues them for being middle-aged?”

  When confronted by critics, O’Neill insisted, “The women’s movement is not overly concerned with the more superficial aspect of clothing or beauty or fashion trends. I know a lot of women whose earning power stalled out or kicked down as they entered into their 50s, unlike their male counterparts’, whose really went up.” The numbers told a different story. The first year of the recession came down hardest on men, who accounted for three out of every four job losses. But O’Neill’s argument reveals a troubling assumption that affects both men and women: that the middle-aged must employ artifice to deceive potential employers about their age. They must pass.

  Assuming an identity that is not your own—passing—was once considered a desperate act that entailed profound sacrifice for society’s most oppressed members. Blacks who passed as white sometimes cut off ties to their family, their heritage, and their true identity to gain opportunities that were otherwise not available. They were frequently seen as quietly complicit in a system that discriminated against them. Men and women who pass themselves off as young, however, are praised for their success rather than pitied for a lack of authenticity or moral resolve.

  Passing can also be seen as offering moral redress. It undermines a system of prejudice by circumventing its dictates. It opens up opportunities that should rightly be available but are not. Still, whether as moral compromise or moral justification, passing involves a loss—the inability to openly embrace one’s singular identity and originality. Gays may have been justified in passing for straight in order not to be dismissed from the military during the days of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and educated blacks may make a rational calculation to hide ethnic names or “whiten” their résumés in order to get a job interview, but the question of why they should have to don a mask in the first place persists.

  In an era of unwonted diversity and pluralism, the standardized conception of beauty has narrowed. Recent studies have found that more people preferred “a ‘generic’ face, a computer-composed average beauty rather than an exceptional one.” William Ewing, the director of the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland, sees this as evidence that “a new form of homogenized beauty seems to be emerging as the norm.” “A hundred years ago people demanded that photographs reflect what they saw with their own eyes: the standard was physical reality,” he said. Now that retouching of photographs has become routine, “they demand that the material face and body conform to the standard of the image.” Television series that offer plastic surgery makeovers or ridicule abashed participants’ clothing while redesigning their wardrobes contribute to a contracted aesthetic and style. No one wants to look middle-aged.

  The Power of Persuasion

  The strength of the Midlife Industrial Complex derives primarily from the ability of the media and advertisers to set standards and manipulate tastes. In 1873, the Bazar Book of Decorum declared: “No devices to give a deceitful appearance of youth can be justified by the sense of fitness and good taste.” But by the 1920s, women were embracing makeup to look youthful. Persistent marketing combined with glamorous images of penciled eyebrow arches and bee-stung lips that flickered from movie screens ultimately reversed the perception that middle-aged women should not use cosmetics to roll back the years. Recall that Gertrude Atherton, the author of Black Oxen, chastised the “fools” who refused to take advantage of science’s marvels, saying they “deserve the worst that malignant Nature can inflict upon them.”

  This was the same strategy Clairol and other companies used a couple of decades later to alter the disreputable taint associated with hair coloring. For most of history, as P. G. Wodehouse once observed, the only cure for gray hair was the guillotine. Clairol offered an alternative and employed a two-pronged campaign to convince women of its benefits. One aim was to send the message that coloring hair was socially acceptable. “Nice women do color their hair,” a 1943 Clairol ad declared. “Remember when rouge spelled ‘hussy,’ when lipstick meant ‘brazen,’ when nail polish branded you ‘common’?” An ad for Eternol Tint Oil Shampoo said, “Lipstick was once considered daring . . . so was tinting your hair.” Early Clairol advertisements offered Hollywood beauty secrets and endorsements by glamorous stars such as Joan Crawford.

  The second prong was aimed at denigrating gray. “Because of her prematurely gray hair, Miss H was fast becoming known as ‘the old maid aunt’ . . . at the age of 32!” Clairol grimly related in a 1943 ad. Then Miss H “Chases Gray Hair! . . . Joins Younger Crowd!” Advertisements did whatever they could to promote the notion that aging was regrettable and gray hair its stigmata. In the 1940s, Clairol ran a series of ads suggesting gray hair was the cause of a wide range of exclamation-pointed social failures: “UNPOPULAR!” “WALLFLOWER!” “LOSING FRIENDS!” “PITIED!” all followed by the parenthetical question “(because your hair is gray?).”

  In 1956, when Clairol came out with a new twenty-minute color treatment without peroxide, its memorable slogans—“Does she or doesn’t she?”; “Is it true blondes have more fun?”; and “The closer he gets, the better you look”—did much to dilute the disgrace and artificiality associated with hair dye. Instead of glamorous movie stars, advertisements featured unknown models who were supposed to resemble the slightly more attractive woman next door—someone like you. Without color photographs to remind us, we have forgotten that gray was the color of middle age before the mid-1950s. Previously, roughly seven percent of adult women over 40 dyed their hair. Now nearly seventy-five percent do.

  Fifty years ago, Clairol aimed to alter the views of women. Today, advertisers are working to revise the perception of hair dye for men. Commercials seek to build positive associations by using athletes and sex symbols such as the actor Patrick Dempsey. In one Grecian Formula spot, a man gets a job after ridding his hair of gray.

  Edward L. Bernays, who is credited with founding the public relations industry in the 1920s, brought extraordinary perceptiveness and creativity to the job of molding tastes. A nephew of Sigmund Freud, Bernays had an intimate connection with psychological theories about subliminal desire and persuasion. He worked on the Committee on Public Education during World War I, stoking popular support for military action, and at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, where the Treaty of Versailles was signed. He was impressed by the French people’s responsiveness to pro-democracy slogans and recognized how susceptible the public was to manipulation. Like the adman Bruce Barton, Bernays was as much of a philosopher as a marketer. “This is an age of mass production,” Bernays wrote in a 1928 article, “Manipulating Public Opinion.” “In the mass production of materials a broad technique has been developed and applied to their distribution. In this age, too, there must be a technique for the mass distribution of ideas.” But while Barton saw marketing as an engine of democracy, Bernays was an unapologetic elitist with a dim view of the general public. He believed a small group of elites, the “intelligent few,” were necessary to oversee opinion-making in a democratic society. The new class of public relations professionals would use the principles of psychology, economics, and sociology to oversee “the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses” for the overall good. It was the only way to get “vast numbers of human beings” to cooperate in a “smoothly functioning society” and enjoy continued economic prosperity. In his book Propaganda, Bernays explained that it was impossible for each person to individually investigate every political, economic, and ethical issue or test every product in t
he market. Instead, we have agreed to let an “invisible government” do it for us. From our leaders—be they essayists, teachers, ministers, or “prevailing opinion”—“we accept a standardized code of social conduct, to which we conform most of the time,” just as factory workers were expected to conform to Taylorized standards. Bernays’s views were widely adopted by the industry. As one trade press put it: “Those in control can improve the taste of the mob.”

  When George Washington Hill, the president of the American Tobacco Company, discovered that women weren’t buying Lucky Strikes in the early 1930s, he called Bernays. Women told surveyors that the cigarette’s dark green packaging clashed with their outfits, but having spent millions branding Lucky’s green design, Hill was not about to switch to a different one. Bernays’s response? “If you won’t change the color of the package, change the color of fashion—to green.” And so he did, organizing a Green Ball in 1934 with a society figure who commissioned Paris fashion designers to create emerald-colored gowns. He put together a Color Fashion Bureau that fed stories to the press about the new green trend, and sponsored a Green Fashions luncheon for fashion editors, with art and psychology experts to expound on the significance of the color.

  Bernays understood how effectively marketing could guide opinions about what is normal, rude, desirable, or deviant. Ads can exploit longstanding urges (the quest for youth), establish new ones (being hip), and fan free-floating worries, impressions, and biases (do I look too old to get this job?). They can make a commonplace item seem outdated and turn disdain into desire. Objects, even trivial ones, are animated with meaning. Marketers provide the narratives. They create fairy tales, in which a flask of hair tonic or a bowl of oat bran functions as a handful of magic beans; and cautionary fables, in which the failure to use a stick of deodorant or a teeth whitener loses you the girl, the job of your dreams, and the approval of your friends. Science makes magical transformation possible. The modern marketplace expanded from quantifiable materials and services to intangibles like beauty, confidence, and social conscience until desire and imagination supplanted necessity as the mother of invention.