Of all kinds of shame, the shame of aging is the most stupid, the most pointless.
We should never be ashamed of aging.
The other day a woman ten years younger than me wrote on Instagram that she was past it. Everyone passed over it without blinking an eye.
Yet it’s astounding.
Not everything aged is decrepit, far from it. For example, a portrait from Fayum, painted 17 centuries ago. For example, the little paleolithic horses in the Chauvet Cave.
The idea of decrepitude is a lie; maybe a crime.
The idea of decrepitude is a crime, completely and utterly.
If a woman writes, “I’m past my best before date” it’s because she thinks that probably no one will want
to consume her any more.
Consume - horrible word.
We are not consumer products.
If consumer products could think, they would also of course be ashamed.
Ashamed of being so poorly displayed. Ashamed of being left on the shelf.
We are not products, even if we like to believe, that we know how to behave as if we are.
Maybe we are objects.
Then objects, while we’re at it, often age well. For example, a Magdalenian-era needle found in the
Elephant Cave at Gourdan-Polignan. Intact.
So the most delicate object of the era has survived centuries. Intact.
We too are fragile and delicate and sublime, and we too can survive the centuries.
Our shame of aging is unfounded.
We are absurdly ashamed of our common lot.
What humans are most ashamed of are their natural functions and their aging.
We are ashamed of what we have in common.
We’re crazy.
When we say, “men age better than women”, this is nonsense.
Women who repeat this nonsense confer upon it a reality, almost the status of truth.
Whereas men and women, we are equal in the face of this shame. Yes, equal.
Men and women, we would have so much to say to each other about this shame if one side (men) accepted
that they need to accept that they are dying of shame, as well.
Men are so ashamed of no longer having hair, that they shave their heads completely in order not to see
it disappearing. To not see themselves disappearing.
Men are so ashamed of aging they continue to chase after youth or its illusion.
Men are terrorized by the idea of not being able to desire an aging body.
Men are even more terrorized by the idea of discovering that they can desire what is no longer young. Men are more subject than women to the shame of aging, because it happens in the silence of their
lucidity, in the silence of their flight.
Men are raised to believe that nothing should diminish. Not their hair, nor their cock,
nor their honor - nothing.
Men believe, sometimes sincerely, that only women diminish.
All this discourse around the decrepitude of women is masking the decrepitude of men.
Letting men experience the shame of aging, seeing their own diminution, letting them drown in shame,
would destroy them.
Destroy them to the same extent women are destroyed by the idiotic discourse about their expiry date. One day, on the radio, there was a man who was saying that men can procreate when they are 95, when
they are 100 years old!
As if, at least, that was one less thing for men to be ashamed of.
In reality, shame then attached to all the men who speak to their cock and say to it,
“I’m only 50 and you’re already asleep! There are 95 year olds who can still get it up! Shame on you!”
Even cocks are ashamed sometimes.
Women are ashamed through osmosis, absorbing the shame of men.
If women really loved men, they wouldn’t relent; they’d hammer home to them that time passes and it
is a blessing.
Too often women rely on cosmetic surgery; it’s an abdication, and a way of saying, “I am ashamed”. It’s a way of saying, “I am so ashamed that I prefer the shame of artificial puffiness to the shame of
natural alterations”.
A woman was telling me one day, “I am trying not to get too old, out of respect for others”. This sentence is inexplicable and worrying.
Women would age better if they didn’t care.
Not caring seems impossible and isn’t.
Not caring doesn’t mean “giving up on everything”, as is said.
Not caring is heaven.
The first person to dare de-shaming will bring everyone along with them.
We have to admit, first of all, that shame is a sham: basically a media fabrication.
For example, I have just read an interview with an eminent gerontologist who says that in reality, there
are few people who end their lives in a state of helplessness.
Most elderly people die suddenly, poof. Without having known the terrible senescence that we hear about. If the emphasis on helplessness is ubiquitous, it’s because we are terrorized by it. And by the shame of aging. That gerontology is almost the ontology of shame.
We say to ourselves, “I’ll be old, I’ll be dependent, people will find it hard to care for me, and therefore
to love me, because I’ll be old it will be awful”.
It’s not true. It’s not true, it’s not true, it’s a lie.
In reality, of course I am going to age.
In reality, I am going to age in beauty.
For example, my skin will become even softer.
We would know that the skin of the elderly is not shame but softness if we reached out to touch
them more often.
A friend asked if me if I was sick or a pervert or a gerontophile, one day when I said all that to him,
the stuff about touching.
People are so ashamed of old age that they think you’re crazy if you don’t share their shame.
I am 55 years old and less and less ashamed.
In the past, if you put me on a beach, I needed a cabin to get changed. Yet I had a powerful, splendid,
young body.
Today I can be naked in front of anyone.
The mere fact of having a body is such a miraculous thing. Sensational!
When I am photographed (sometimes I dare to model, since I am now free from shame), the photographer,
the digital assistant and I look at extreme close ups of the folds of my aging skin and I hear them say, “It’s beautiful”. They are 20 years old and unprejudiced. We can only be free from shame collectively.
Freeing one’s self from shame requires courage.
It serves no purpose to write “image retouched” on a fashion photo, as art in its entirety is the
retouching of reality.
What we have to do precisely, is to ALSO show faces with their wrinkles, their points of collapse. De-shaming is not when we replace one regime (the smooth) with another (the wrinkled); it’s when we
show that both have their own beauty.
De-shaming also has a sartorial dimension.
It’s terrible to tell people how to dress appropriately for their age.
Little Manny from Modern Family, wearing grown up attire when he’s just a kid, is also an example
of de-shaming.
It’s sad that shame makes people who are no longer young exclusively wear dull clothes that make them
invisible to compensate for the insult of daring to exist.
The 89-year-old lady on the Catalans beach in Marseille, at 9 o’clock in the morning, is doing something
worthwhile for humanity.
Once in Greece, on Hydra, I saw three women arrive on the big flat rocks. They had long white hair,
they were svelte, they were not young. They took off their kaftans and they dived in. A friend next to me, paralyzed with the shame of aging and Viagra said to me, “Jesus, I’m jealous, they’re so beautiful.”
And I know a man who is 72; one of his friends said to him, “At our age we shouldn’t be showing our old bodies to anyone.”
Shame shortens our lives.
Shame makes us believe that we are ugly, when we could be joyful.
Being joyful is the real challenge in life. The only challenge.
On YouTube, if people in their millions are watching the video of the elderly Catalan gentleman, knee
high to a grasshopper, dancing uninhibitedly, the life and soul of a local party, it’s because
he is the master of de-shaming.
Instead of fiddling with a penis pump, why not just jump into the water, radiant, at dawn.
Because if we embrace the last part of our lives, as a second adolescence without shame, flaccidness is
no longer an issue.
The days when I am ashamed of no longer being young are becoming more and more rare.
If I am embarrassed to show my hands where the veins are more salient than before, there is always
someone who will say that they are beautiful.
We need to learn to listen not to complaints but to compliments. We need urgently to invent the discipline of de-shame-ology. We’re inventing it today.
Sara & Emma Bielecki
Sara & Emma Bielecki
