"Men Can Age Without Penalty"

In her landmark essay titled 'The Double Standard of Aging' (1972), American writer and critic Susan Sontag analysed how aging affects men and women in deeply different ways. Society is much more permissive about aging in men than in women. Men feel regret about growing older, while women are made to feel panic and disgust. The double standard about aging denounces women with special severity and measures their worth on the basis of age and looks. Excerpts from the essay

- Susan Sontag

AGING is a movable doom. It is a crisis that never exhausts itself, because the anxiety is never really used up. Being a crisis of the imagination rather than of "real life," it has the habit of repeating itself again and again.

Most men experience getting older with regret, apprehension. But most women experience it even more painfully: with shame. Aging is a man's destiny, something that must happen because he is a human being. For a woman, aging is not only her destiny. Because she is that more narrowly defined kind of human being, a woman, it is also her vulnerability.

To be a woman is to be an actress. Being feminine is a kind of theater, with its appropriate costumes, decor, lighting, and stylized gestures. From early childhood on, girls are trained to care in a pathologically exaggerated way about their appearance and are profoundly mutilated (to the extent of being unfitted for first-class adulthood) by the extent of the stress put on presenting themselves as physically attractive objects. Women look in the mirror more frequently than men do. It is, virtually, their duty to look at themselves-to look often. Indeed, a woman who is not narcissistic is considered unfeminine.