In Our Prime (33 page)

Self-improvement is a wonderful tool, helping people to stay sober, finish an education, or feel happier. But there is a flip side: blame. Success may be yours for the taking, but so is failure; the fault does not lie with society, the system, nature, or history—only with you. And because failure is personal, personal effort is expected to fix the problem. If you were unhappy in a job, early advertisements admonished, individual flaws were the cause. Those who fail to take advantage of the commercial aids, as Helena Rubenstein suggested, have no one to blame but themselves.
In the 1920s, Williams Shaving Cream
told men: “It's the ‘look' of you by which you are judged most often.” Listerine advised readers to “suspect themselves first.” Today, the self-help guru Dr. Phil (Philip McGraw) reminds his fans that “there are no victims, only volunteers.”

Refusal to partake in consumerist
self-improvement promoted by the
Midlife Industrial Complex is perceived as a moral failure rather than as a sign of independent thinking. The motivational entrepreneur Tony Robbins captures the essence of the self-help imperative in his directive: “Commit to CANI—Constant And Neverending Improvement.” The relentless burden to improve becomes more curse than counsel.

Attributing success and failure solely to individual effort can distract people from working on social and political issues, or from pursuing other aspects of well-being. A relentless focus on self-help reinforces the notion that society has no responsibility for any negative treatment of middle-aged people, and no obligation to take any remedial action on a broader scale. Economic restructuring, income inequality, institutionalized layoffs that hit workers in their middle years (not to mention others) are the result of national policies and global forces, but effort is put into individual self-improvement like Botox rather than social change.

There is a built-in contradiction to the logic of self-help. The solutions bought in the marketplace are not the individual's but those of a copywriter or product manager. In the freewheeling capitalist bazaar, individual power can be turned on itself, allowing others to decide what the model for
your
self should be.
As George Carlin joked
: “The part I really don't understand is if you're looking for self-help, why would you read a book by someone else? That's not self-help, that's help.”

The contradiction is particularly sharp for middle-aged women. As engineers of the feminist movement, they personified self-empowerment, crashing through age-old barriers to positions of power. Their success in the workplace and on college campuses has even sparked debate about affirmative action for men. Yet once they hit middle age, women are under more pressure than ever to conform to narrowing definitions of attractiveness and beauty.
Anorexia, bulimia, and other
eating disorders have increased enormously among middle-aged women over the past decade. “
In our culture, remaining cute
throughout midlife is a problem,” Debra Benfield, a clinical nutritionist from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, said. “Our mothers didn't stay cute. It was okay to look like a mother when you reached fifty.” No more. Even though the extra ten to fifteen pounds that women tend to put on in middle age increases bone density and protects them against fractures, women don't want them.
Jean
Kilbourne, the creator of the 1995 documentary
Slim Hopes: Advertising and the Obsession of Thinness,
observed: “The hope was that as the baby boomers grew old, aging would finally be in, that it would be sexy to have wrinkles and gray hair. But that did not happen.”

Self-help has created a conundrum: at the very moment consumers exercised their power, they also surrendered it.

Jack Nicholson and Shirley MacLaine in
Terms of Endearment,
1983

There are only three ages for women in Hollywood: babe, district
attorney, and Driving Miss Daisy.

—
First Wives Club
(1996)

S
ince
Harper's Bazar
and other middle-class periodicals began accepting national advertising from cosmetics companies in the 1920s, magazines have been an integral part of the Midlife Industrial Complex.
Publications that had virtually ignored
the subject of beauty, like
Ladies' Home Journal,
redirected their editorial content as they partnered with cosmetics manufacturers. Pages were
dedicated to discussing the benefits of soothing balms and eyecatching lip colors, while the staff assisted advertising agencies with market research. Some columnists and editors sold their endorsements to particular brands.

Expert in the language of empowerment, magazines today have perfected the promotional art and dispense advice on how to fend off the indignities of middle age, counseling that the threat of old-style dowdiness is averted by well-timed purchases.
Vogue, Bazaar, Glamour,
and others produce special aging issues every year.
A
Vogue
cover promises advice
to those “19 to 91,” from “conquering your first wrinkle at 29 to the perfect Yoga body at 52.” One writer offers a “lesson in age-appropriate makeup,” confessing that in her mid-40s “the ravages of age” have finally caught up with her. On the “cruel cusp” of 50, she can get help for her “droopy” eyes and “withered” lips by attending a “Fabulous at 40 and Beyond” makeup class. What has this new midlife experience taught her? Makeup is about “confidence and knowing who you are.” Buying into the stereotypical attitude toward an aging face is spun here to represent personal insight and strength. And the story ends happily: “Ever the consumer, I have gleefully purchased a whole new arsenal of products.”

O, The Oprah Magazine
seemed to
offer a refreshingly frank appraisal in its May 2011 issue, devoted to the theme “Love the Age You Are.” Oprah wrote a rousing editor's note. “For sure we live in a youth-obsessed culture that is constantly trying to tell us that if we're not young and glowing and ‘hot,' we don't matter,” she declared. “I refuse to let a system, a culture, a distorted view of reality tell me I don't matter. . . . People who lie about their age are denying the truth and contributing to a sickness pervading our society—the sickness of wanting to be what you're not.” The message, however, was strangely at odds with some of the inside copy. In “How Do You Feel About Your Face?,” an attractive middle-aged woman with the normal complement of lines, creases, and brown spots was pictured in retouched before-and-after-style photographs to illustrate how five progressively more intensive antiage treatments turned her from young to younger. Choose makeup or Botox or go all the way with a full-scale face-lift.

Men's magazines offer a similar if toned-down message.
The June 2010 issue of
Esquire
included a year-by-year guide to aging that told readers their forty-second birthday was the time to stop “worrying that you're starting to look old” and start “doing something about it.” The magazine suggested Un-Wrinkle Night Cream and Men Age Fighter face moisturizer, and for those with brown spots and wrinkles, chemical peels or Fraxel laser technology.

Advertisers have been extolling “the younger crowd,” as Fatima cigarettes put it, as the standard-bearers of beauty and taste since the twenties. What has changed is a vastly enlarged media that has extended the impact of youth-centered appeals much further, faster, and more powerfully than ever before.

“
Change Your Life Television” programming
, like the series
10 Years Younger
and daytime talk show episodes that promise “New Ways to Look Younger,” directly encourages viewers to purchase self-improving products and treatments. In general, though, television's partnership with the Midlife Industrial Complex operates more subtly.

The notion of young viewers as a kind of commercial grail has been based on two beliefs long taken as gospel: that buying habits are formed early, and that middle-aged and older consumers have buying patterns as rigid and immovable as the faces on Mount Rushmore. The reasoning holds that capturing an audience when it is young guarantees a lifetime of brand loyalty. That is why a television program with younger viewers can charge more than twice as much for commercials as one with older viewers, and why the phrase “coveted 18- to 49-year-olds” or “18- to 34-year-olds” is practically an amen to every conversation or story written about television viewers. That preoccupation has driven programming toward youthful themes and characters.

Abbe Raven, the president and CEO of A&E Networks, remembers how some in the industry wrote A&E's obituary in 2002 after the median age of its viewers hit 61.
One trade paper
“called us ‘a sinking ship.' Another said we were ‘rearranging chairs on the Titanic.'” Raven was then 48 and the general manager of AETV, a joint venture of the Hearst Corporation,
Disney-ABC Television Group, and NBC Universal. Created in 1984, it featured BBC network productions and highbrow arts programming that included telecasts of plays, concerts, operas, and documentaries. Raven, who joined A&E in the mid-eighties answering phones and Xeroxing scripts, quickly concluded that an extreme makeover was needed. “We wanted to be a network that had a mission of welcoming younger viewers, and that's what we did,” she said shortly after the network embarked on an overhaul.

Attracting younger viewers became the
prime directive and reality television seemed a quick way to accomplish the goal at a low cost, Raven told me. In 2004, A&E introduced
Growing Up Gotti,
starring Victoria, the daughter of the deceased boss of the Gambino crime organization, and
Dog, the Bounty Hunter,
about a convicted murderer in Honolulu who tracked down bail jumpers.

“Almost overnight, the median age dropped twenty years,” said Raven. In the first two years of the makeover, A&E TV introduced seventeen real-life shows.

Raven has wrought a marketing miracle. But she is not completely convinced that the assumptions on which her success is built are meaningful. Neither the 18-to-34 nor the 18-to-49 grouping has any intrinsic meaning. They sprang nearly five decades ago from the minds of marketers who created these age segments to show off a particular network's strengths and downplay its weaknesses. The obsession with these younger age groups “is a little outdated,” Raven confessed. “I spend more today than I did at 25. I didn't own a car at 25.” But Toyota, which advertises on A&E, doesn't think that way, she continued.

Now in her mid-50s, she has aged out of the demographic group that she so successfully brought to her network.

The hallelujahs to youth grew out of the quest for a competitive advantage. With the advent of television in the 1950s, advertisers could reach directly into people's living rooms and bedrooms at the same time that postwar affluence was converting them into eager consumers.
The fledgling networks wanted to
capture as many viewers as possible across generations. No one considered a 25-year-old more valuable than someone 45 or 65. Competition among individual
programs intensified when the business model shifted from having a single sponsor (Texaco presents Milton Berle on NBC) to several sponsors. The more viewers a show had, the more a network could charge for each minute of ad time. CBS, the largest and most successful of the networks, adopted a something-for-everyone strategy.
The Ed Sullivan Show
was the model. Other variety shows were set up to offer a smorgasbord of entertainment for children, parents, and grandparents. Even if you didn't care for the Beatles, you might stick around for Frank Sinatra. The network stocked its comedies and dramas with characters that spanned different generations. The formula was easily adaptable to a family of monsters (
The Munsters
) or a family of astronauts (
Lost in Space
).

The multigenerational strategy made sense for CBS, which was solidly in first place. But what about last place? That was where ABC, the youngest and smallest network, was in the late 1950s and early 1960s. ABC was built on a series of affiliates in large cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, with a somewhat younger audience. Its string of failed and canceled shows gave rise to the joke that the quickest way to end the Vietnam War was to put it on ABC. Burdened by these handicaps, the struggling network was looking for a way to distinguish itself at the same time the trend of sorting consumers into categories was spreading through the industry.

The idea of dividing the population of buyers into separate segments in the 1950s, the art of demographics, was the work of marketing consultant Wendell R. Smith.
Born in 1911, Smith grew
up in Shenandoah, Iowa, where he worked in his parents' shoe store after graduating from college. He completed Florsheim Shoes' trainee program in Chicago and decided to get a PhD at the College of Commerce at the State University of Iowa. During World War II, he joined the Office of Price Administration, later returning to Iowa to teach at the university and, eventually, chair the school's marketing department. He left the academic world in 1954 after meeting Wroe Alderson, one of the most innovative marketing theorists of the postwar era. At Alderson's management-consulting firm, Smith became director of research.