I don’t make resolutions as such, but one of my areas of focus in this coming year is to keep on top of this site, among other things. The short version is, stuff happened, I got busy, and things like blogging slid.

But I wanted to talk about something else today.

2016 was a hard year in a number of ways, not the least of which was the number of high profile deaths.  And no, it isn’t because we’re all getting old, clickbait article that’s trying too hard to be snarky.  If everyone who’d died had been in their 80s and 90s I might agree with that, but many of these icons were in their 60s, 50s—some younger.

But the one who hit me the hardest was the December 27th loss of Carrie Fisher.

I am of the Star Wars generation, having been born only a year after the first movie hit theaters.  I grew up with the playsets and the actions figures and the plastic retail Halloween costumes.  I grew up watching the movies on Betamax tapes on small TVs where we had to sit 5 inches from the screen to read the crawl.  (And we had to read the crawl, even though we’d read it numerous times before.)  As with most girls my age, Princess Leia was one of my idols.  And what an idol!  This was no demure, hand-wringing princess who passively waited to be rescued.  Oh no—Leia talked back to her captors, sassed and snarked at her would-be rescuers, and had an active hand in her own rescue.  And she helped lead a rebellion!  Entire squadrons of x-wing pilots listen to her orders without question!Of course the fact that she’s the only woman on screen here is a huge issue but a feminist analysis of the Star Wars movies isn’t what I’m here for right now.  I’m actually here to talk about a particular kind of sexism in the fans.

When promotional material for Star Wars: Episode VII The Force Awakens started being released, I started seeing comments about how Carrie Fisher “hadn’t aged well.”  These struck me as particularly sexist because I wasn’t seeing similar remarks about Mark Hamill or Harrison Ford.

Harrison Ford, of course, aged in the public eye.  We aren’t startled to see him in his early 70s because we saw him at 65, at 60, at 50, at 40.  But Mark Hamill has done mostly voice work for the last several decades.  The most prominent image of him the public has is of the 20-something Luke Skywalker.  Why no remarks about how well he had aged?

It’s simple, really:  men are allowed to get old.  Women aren’t.

As a woman who is approaching 40 this has been on my mind lately.  Partly spurred by my recent high school reunion and seeing people I hadn’t seen in 20 years looking—well—almost 40.  Partly by how my internet niches not only seem to get younger and younger every year but now seem to come with the assumption that certain interests and activities have an expiration date (one that I have long since passed).  I found myself mentally shying away from my actual age, because I’ve absorbed the same youth-obsessed notions as the rest of society.

And that needs to stop.

Women need to be allowed to get old.  We need to stop using “she’s aged well” as code for “She still looks young.”  And we need to be allowed to age on our own terms, not to some artificial standard set 50 or 100 years ago.

There’s a lot tied up with getting older, especially for women, especially for one (like me) whose life hasn’t followed the “typical” path ordained by society.  But we—I—need to sever it from this notion that women must stay forever young, that a woman’s youth and beauty are tied key components to her value.

Carrie Fisher—wonderful, acerbic Carrie—had a response to the age shaming:

To go on a bit of a tangent for a moment, I love The Force Awakens. Sure, it’s predictable, and much of it is a rehash of A New Hope, but it’s a well-told and fun rehash.

But I love it for the characters.  I love it for Finn and Rey, for the little kids who will grow up with action-adventure heroes who don’t fit the White male model.

And I love it for General Organa.  Our fierce, feisty Leia, who has dropped the title of “princess” because it no longer serves her.  A woman past her prime who is still fighting because there is a fight that needs to be fought.  A woman who has lost so much over the years but still holds her head up and pushes forward, because there is shit to do and she’s not going to sit back and wait for someone else to do it.
Carrie Fisher did age well.  She was lively and witty.  She had fought her demons and taken control of her life.  She was beautiful at 60, just as she’d been beautiful at 20.  If you’re judging a woman for not looking at 60 the way she did at 20, maybe you should take a good hard look at yourself at figure out why.