Entrepreneurs have delved into unexplored areas of the midlife market. Not Your Daughter’s Jeans was created in 2003 by Lisa Rudes Sandel, who, at 38, could no longer fit into her old pants. By 2010, it was the largest domestic manufacturer of jeans under $100. One ad pictured a nicely curved behind with the slogan “Bottoms Up!” PixelOptics, a lens technology company based in Roanoke, Virginia, has spent a decade developing electronic eyeglasses that can instantly autofocus, hoping to replace the bifocals and progressive lenses that the middle-aged are compelled to use for nearsightedness. Kellogg’s, Sketchers, 5-Hour Energy Drink, Jeep, and other companies and products that have ignored the middle-aged have indicated that they, too, plan to address these consumers.
The shift in narratives can be detected in some corners of the beauty industry. Dayle Haddon, a model who regularly appeared in cosmetics ads in the 1980s, said that when she hit 40, “the industry just said I would never work again.” At 57, she was hired by L’Oréal to represent Age Perfect creams, designed for women over 50. Lauren Hutton, fired by Revlon in 1983 when she turned 40, reappeared in cosmetics advertisements in the 1990s. She now has her own line of cosmetics and in 2005, at age 61, appeared in unretouched nude photographs in an issue of Big magazine. “I want them [women] not to be ashamed of who they are when they’re in bed,” Hutton said at the time. “Society has told us to be ashamed.” Models and actresses in their 50s and 60s, including Diane Keaton, Susan Sarandon, Catherine Deneuve, Ellen DeGeneres, and Andie MacDowell, are stalwarts of cosmetics advertisements. Marketers discovered that middle-aged women were turned off by products pitched by women half their age.
Dove, a Unilever company, has benefited from its “pro-age” approach for the 50-plus set. Over the face of a 95-year-old woman, one 2006 ad asked: “Wrinkled? Wonderful? Will society ever accept old can be beautiful?” Another showed a gray-haired 45-year-old: “Gray? Gorgeous? Why aren’t women glad to be gray?” We’ve come a long way from Clairol’s 1940s-era ads warning that gray hair caused you to be “UNPOPULAR” and “PITIED.”
Dove’s “Real Women Have Curves” campaign caused a sensation by featuring women of various shapes and sizes in their underwear, probably creating as much free exposure in news coverage and commentary as the company got from its paid ads. In 2006, Dove launched “Beauty Comes of Age” and hired Nancy Etcoff of Harvard Medical School and Susie Orbach, a psychoanalyst and the author of Fat Is a Feminist Issue, to survey women between 50 and 65. Nine out of ten of those polled commented that realistic images of women over 50 were rare in advertising and other media.
Dove launched the second phase of its “Pro Age” campaign in February 2007. Its ad agency, Ogilvy, hired Annie Leibovitz to photograph nude but modestly posed women over 50. In New York, forty-foot-high, black-and-white full-body shots of these models stared out from Times Square’s billboards. “We are not saying turn back the hands of time, or stop aging, or look ten years younger,” said Kathy O’Brien, a marketing director at Dove. “We are saying embrace the age that you are and make the best of it.”
Dove was not revealing anything new about young anorexic models. Activists, pundits, scholars, government officials, and parents have criticized the purveyors of this body image for decades. But the source of the message—marketers—was surprising. Questioning the skinny ideal “really hit a nerve,” Philippe Harousseau, a marketing executive at Dove, said. “Women were ready to hear this.”
The federal government was not. In 2007, when Dove tried to air television ads using these same images, the Federal Communications Commission banned them as obscene after receiving complaints from the American Family Association, a conservative Christian nonprofit based in Tupelo, Mississippi. The group charged that Dove was “focusing on outward beauty and using nudity to do so,” and said that showing fully clothed women was a better way to demonstrate respect for them. The FCC maintained that totally naked women were not permitted on television, even if the modest poses ensured that no intimate parts could be seen.
Dove said it was impossible to edit the commercials in a way that would satisfy the FCC. The campaign, Dove explained, is “celebrating women 50-plus and widening the definition of beauty to show that real beauty has no age limit. The advertising campaign is certainly not about nudity, but rather about honesty. We didn’t want to cover these women or enhance their appearances, because they are beautiful just as they are.”
Dove’s campaign for realism seemed to have impressed a few other brands. In 2008, Tylenol ads included elegantly shot black-and-white photographs of various body parts—a hand, foot, shoulder, or back—some smooth, others wrinkled. And Nike introduced an ad campaign for exercise gear that more realistically pictured body parts about which women are most sensitive. “I have thunder thighs,” one ad exclaimed next to a photograph of muscular thighs. Another was accompanied by the text:
MY BUTT IS BIG
And that is just fine
And those who might scorn it
Are invited to Kiss it.
The Economy
Before the recession cut deep into the economy in 2008, the conversation about middle age and work had a wonderfully liberating flavor. For many people in their middle years, the prospect of having a series of careers, each more meaningful or enjoyable than the last, seemed possible. People in their 50s considered using their financial cushion to downshift into a different sort of life. Newspapers and magazines ran stories on midlife reawakenings—the middle-aged broker who gave up Wall Street to design gardens or the management consultant who became a comic.
With the financial downturn, those sunny futurescapes were replaced by dark anxieties about losing one’s home, job, and emotional moorings. A severe economic recession makes it difficult for anyone to be positive—young, middle-aged, or old. Heartbreaking tales and ominous trends are in abundant supply across the generations. Nonetheless, there are reasons for optimism among the middle-aged even in this unfavorable climate.
Discrimination has been a common theme in every economic downturn since Taylorized factory production gave young men new opportunities and encouraged managers to push out those over 40. In the early decades of the twentieth century, laborers felt the bias most keenly because of the physical demands of many industrial jobs. As youth progressively became more associated with innovation, vitality, and modernity during the twenties, age discrimination further infiltrated the white-collar world, particularly in certain industries like entertainment, advertising, and the media. In 1939, during the Depression’s grim years, President Roosevelt reminded employers that a blue-ribbon panel of business, labor, and experts found “no good reasons” to support the continuing prejudice, as he issued a national appeal to hire middle-aged workers.
In 1967, Congress passed the first antidiscrimination legislation making it illegal to discriminate against anyone over 40 because of age. The following year, the psychiatrist Robert Butler coined the term “ageism,” explaining that it “allows the younger generations to see older people as different than themselves; thus they subtly cease to identify with their elders as human beings.”
Middle-aged workers benefited from cradle-to-grave employment policies in the fifties, sixties, and seventies that rewarded staff who stayed with a company through the decades. The clear ladder of increasing pay and benefits encouraged young people to work their way up, and the rules governing seniority, promotions, and salaries discouraged discrimination. In the 1980s, though, as the economy’s foundation shifted from manufacturing to service and technology, many of these employment practices altered. The Reagan administration’s sustained battles with organized labor, beginning with the firing of air-traffic controllers who went on strike in 1981, further eroded protections for more senior employees. As globalization took root, white-collar workers in their 40s and 50s were jolted by blanket layoffs and a drop in wages already familiar to blue-collar workers. The aftershocks of the 1982 recession reverberated through the decade. In 1988, the Los Angeles Times noted, “Tho
usands of Americans with years of service at their companies are experiencing the vicissitudes of MAAD—Middle Aged and Downward.” The familiar career track for middle-aged workers had derailed. “We are finding that the standard pattern for educated labor, where wages rise with age, is not so true anymore,” Frank Levy, an economist at MIT, said in 1994.
The dot-com revolution brought a generation of young technologically savvy college graduates into the labor market, with knowledge and abilities their older colleagues simply did not possess. In the last two decades, economists have observed that jobs at the highest and lowest end of the skills range increased. Positions in the middle—stock clerks, inspectors, telemarketers, payroll workers, sales agents, and software programmers—were more likely to be automated or exported to countries with cheap labor, forcing an unaccustomed number of people over 45 into low-skilled jobs.
The recession has accelerated this “hollowing out” of the job market. Workers over 50 tend to hold on to their jobs longer than younger workers, but when they are displaced they spend much more time unemployed. Chances are their next job will have lower pay, fewer benefits, and less responsibility. Those in midlife who were laid off in 2009, the heart of the recession, saw their wages fall by more than a fifth; a quarter lost their health insurance. At the same time, the financial crisis left a wreckage of their assets; twenty to forty percent of the wealth they worked to build over the years was gone in an instant.
Although the American labor force is for the first time fairly evenly split between men and women, male-dominated industries like manufacturing and construction suffered some of the worst job losses in 2008 and 2009. The education and health-care fields, which are dominated by women and tend to have lower pay and benefits, were initially more insulated. The severe slashes that city, state, and federal officials pushed through in 2011, however, reverberated through those ranks as well.
As the second decade of the twenty-first century began, age discrimination against workers over 40 seemed pervasive despite federal age-discrimination legislation.
Clearly, few can feel secure until the economy recovers more broadly. Yet despite the havoc the economic slump is wreaking, the long-term outlook for workers in their middle decades is brighter because the total size of the American labor force is shrinking dramatically. As life span theory reminds us, the historical moment matters. Generation X has nearly 30 million fewer members than the 78 million strong baby boom generation. Even though many from this group will work past age 65, there will still be fewer employees overall. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that within the next ten years the number of workers between 45 and 54 will fall by five percent, while those between 35 and 44 will increase by just one percent. That imbalance will cause other economic stresses as the burdens of a large aging society fall on a smaller number of workers and Social Security is stressed beyond its ability to pay.
But as David DeLong, a research fellow at the MIT AgeLab, argues, the bulk of technical and organizational knowledge that has exploded in the past thirty to forty years primarily resides in these middle-aged brains. The combination of skills and midlife expertise is going to be a particularly desirable commodity because of difficult-to-replace technical knowledge that these employees—whether a utility lineman, a manager, or an engineer—have accumulated over the years.
“Things look bleak for a lot of people today,” DeLong said, “but I truly believe that, given the demographics, things are going to get better for older workers in the next decade. The demographics are immutable.”
15
In Our Prime
The New York Times headline that greeted the first MacArthur report on midlife, 1999
Youth is the period in which a man can be hopeless. The end of every episode is the end of the world. But the power of hoping through everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration comes to the middle-aged.
—G. K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens (1906)
The standardized sequence of life stages that Frederick Taylor helped inaugurate and that encouraged previous generations to move out, marry, and start families on schedule has lost much of its force. The loud tick of the social clock has been drowned out by a raucous concert of individual timepieces. In the early sixties, forgoing marriage was rare, having a baby out of wedlock was scandalous, and remaining childless in middle age was tragic. Today, all of these are commonplace.
The statistics tell the story. In 1960, sixty-eight percent of adults in their 20s were married and five percent of births were to unwed mothers. Now, only one in four 20-somethings has exchanged vows and single moms give birth to forty-one percent of infants. It is no longer shocking for middle-aged women to skip parenthood (twenty percent of those in their 40s were childless in 2010) or, thanks to fertility treatments, to become pregnant (more than fourteen percent of births were to women over 35).
Women match men’s numbers in the workplace and exceed them on college campuses. At the same time, economic shifts have eroded the high-paying industrial jobs that once enabled men in their late teens or early twenties, particularly those without a college degree, to earn enough money to support themselves, let alone a family. Careers are less permanent and more varied. Willingly or not, young men are increasingly postponing the leap to independence. To look at just one segment, 25-year-old white men: a quarter of them lived at home in 2007—before the recession—compared with less than one-eighth in 1970.
Despite the disdain of contemporary life span researchers for stage theories, these changes have prompted some social scientists to argue that the period between 20 and 34 should be reclassified as “emerging adulthood.” If you do not marry until your late 20s, do not have children until your 30s, and do not settle into a career until nearly 40, middle age feels less like a midpoint than a starting point. Thomas Cole’s portrait of “Youth” stretching through the mid-30s and “Manhood” encompassing the late 30s, 40s, and 50s suddenly seems modern.
On the far side of midlife, another group of academics and consultants have singled out the years between 55 and 75 as a distinct category since with longer life spans so many people are healthy and capable of working past the traditional 65-year-old retirement deadline. Calling this group the “encore generation,” “the third age,” “midcourse,” or “the new old age,” advocates have revived the concept of the “young-old” category Bernice Neugarten suggested four decades ago.
Neugarten would, no doubt, be dismayed by the continuing obsession with age-based stages, but the scientific instinct to categorize and classify continues to impel men and women to more precisely situate themselves on that line between birth and death. Invariably, the first question everyone asked me upon learning I was writing about middle age was “When is it?”
Even now, long after I began thinking about this book on that sandy beach several summers ago, I am at a loss to give a simple answer. I take comfort in the fact that after $35 million and twenty years of intensive research, MIDUS has not produced a clear definition either. Survey responses from men and women, office and blue-collar workers, East Coasters and Midwesterners don’t result in a typical American; they produce an imaginary one. The particular combination of physical, psychological, social, and spiritual elements that contribute to one’s entry into midlife varies from person to person. Not even Justice Potter Stewart’s remarkably adaptable definition of obscenity—“you know it when you see it”—seems to apply. Many people who ask me when midlife begins don’t seem to know if they’ve reached it or left it.
The answers MIDUS III will elicit over the coming decade are bound to look different from those gathered during the first phase of research in the mid-nineties. Already we know that middle-aged boomers are more willing to divorce than their parents were. A 2011 report found that the risk of divorce among 50- to 64-year-olds has doubled during the past two decades. “Every fresh generation is a new people,” Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America. In his work on the Great Depre
ssion, Glen Elder discovered just how much a different historical context could affect two contiguous generations. Future visitors to the tableland of middle age are likely to diverge in both their views and experience from today’s inhabitants. Members of the baby boom were uniquely shaped by their times. They came of age during an unusual period of extended affluence, social upheaval, civil rights breakthroughs, and an unpopular war. Born before the 1965 immigration law ushered in millions of Africans, Asians, Indians, and Latinos, they are the last band of middle-aged Americans who are so ethnically homogenous. Eighty percent of them are white. As a group, they grew up watching the same television programs and listening to the same records and radio stations. They share an unusually strong generational identity. Their unprecedented numbers have exerted an irresistible gravitational pull on the culture, whether they were watching Bozo the Clown, buying their first home, or helping their own children fill out college applications.
They moved into middle age during an extraordinary transformation of the global economic system, a digital revolution, and a political realignment that shuffled foreign alliances and sharpened domestic partisan politics. They made scads of money, more than any of their predecessors, and spent it with wanton abandon. Girls who saw their mothers burdened by the feminine mystique grabbed at the thrilling surfeit of opportunities when their turn came and delayed marriage and motherhood, sometimes discovering belatedly that they had permanently deferred them. Boys whose fathers hid behind a newspaper have become expert diaper changers and class parents.
In Our Prime Page 27
