I was high-fiving the TV as Maye Musk, until now best known for being the mother of billionaire Elon Musk, announced her history-making news as the oldest woman to be a cover model for the swimsuit edition of Sports Illustrated.
As someone who has been pushing back against ageism – discrimination that sidelines and silences older people and makes growing older so much harder than it should be – I couldn’t help but think: “Yeah! One for our side”.
“When women go to the beach, we’re kind of shy about our bodies, but men will walk around, looking terrible, and they don’t care,” said Ms. Musk. “I think we have to not care that much! With this cover, I want women to be able to walk on the beach in a swimsuit and not be embarrassed about their bodies.”
I’m not sure what excited me more, that a 74-year-old woman was posing for the Sports Illustrated swimsuit cover or, that at age 74, she was still working and in demand more than ever.
Ms. Musk told People Magazine, “I’ll continue working as long as people want to hire me, I have no plans to retire. When I go to shoots the young models are excited to see me. It proves they can have long and successful careers, too.”
Just wait a second!
Why was I celebrating? I have a confession to make: I wouldn’t be caught dead in a bathing suit.
Fifteen years ago, I ceremoniously announced that women over a certain age shouldn’t be seen in one and tossed them in the garbage. Shorts also had to go – those saggy knees are embarrassing.
How could I, who considers myself a pro-aging radical, fall prey to stereotypes that say old is bad??? Shame on me.
“Breaking The Code”, a new book written by Dr. Becca Levy, recognized as one of the world’s most respected experts on aging, provides the answers.
The expectation that aging means decay, Dr. Levy shows, is actually a major reason it so often does – our negative view of aging is literally killing us. Her research found that older individuals with more positive self-perceptions of aging lived 7.5 years longer than those with less positive self-perceptions of aging.
While in college, Dr. Levy planned to spend a semester in Japan, investigating why its residents have the world’s longest life spans. “I noticed how differently older people were treated there,” she said. “They were celebrated. Centenarians were rock stars!”
Before leaving on her trip she visited her grandmother, a lively septuagenarian. They were shopping together when Grandma Horty fell over a crate with jagged metal corners that had been left in the aisle.
The resulting cut on her leg, though bloody, proved superficial. But when her grandmother suggested to the grocery owner that he not leave crates about, he responded that old people fall all the time, and maybe they shouldn’t be walking around.
Dr. Levy noticed the message stayed with her grandmother, and impacted her behavior. She began to question her competence, asking her granddaughter to take over chores she normally handled herself. The incident prompted Dr. Levy to contemplate how cultural values and people’s own ideas about age might affect them.
Over the years, her research showed many of the health conditions that are assumed to be entirely due to aging, such as hearing loss and dementia, are influenced by negative stereotypes.
The results from study after study found that older people with more positive perceptions of aging performed better physically and cognitively than those with more-negative perceptions; they were more likely to recover from severe disability, they remembered better and they even lived longer.
So what can we do? Dr. Levy has created the ABC Method to help us shift from an age-declining mindset to an age-thriving one.
AWARENESS: Success in changing our negative age beliefs hinges on our ability to identify them within ourselves.
BLAME – Place it where it belongs – those moments when we can’t remember where we put the car keys. If this happens to you and you’re 25, you shrug it off as a temporary lapse of memory. If you’re over 50, you likely label it as a ‘senior moment” and start to question your cognitive abilities.
Dr. Levy tells us these “moments of forgetfulness can happen at any age. Sometimes memory simply short circuits and it happens to everyone.”
CHALLENGE NEGATIVE AGE BELIEFS – Simply means calling it out when you see it. Madonna recently complained, “People have been always trying to silence me … and now it’s that I’m not young enough. I’m being punished for turning 60”.
Trying to change society can seem overwhelming. But in the words of the late South African Bishop Desmond Tutu, “Do your little bit of good where you are; it’s those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.”
Positive role models of aging, like Maye Musk, don’t just make us feel good, they actually help change behaviour. She’s inspired me to go out and buy a swimsuit and to find a beach so as to strut my stuff – my “little bit of good”. And along the way, I’ll pick up a copy of Sports Illustrated. Maye Musk has become my latest inspiration.
“AGE PRIDE” at 65 – It’s never too late”