In Our Prime (37 page)

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.

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, “Thousands 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.”

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)

T
he 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.