When Ashton Applewhite hit 55 years old, she dyed her hair. So what? That’s what women the world over do, you might think: dye grey hair to hide their age. But what Applewhite did was different: she dyed her hair grey. Not Kim Kardashian-platinum grey, but defiantly uncool, bog-standard grey.
“I went to a matinee, so it was all old people,” she says, grinning widely as she absentmindedly tousles her hair, the brown roots showing. “When it finished, everyone left via an escalator. I looked down and there was not a grey head to be spotted. I suddenly thought: ‘This is one way we collude, en masse, in making ourselves invisible as older women – and that’s a real problem, because when people are invisible, so are the issues that affect them’.”
When Applewhite, author of This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism, gave a TED talk titled Let’s End Ageism in 2017, it was an unexpected hit, with 1.5m views to date. In the video, the audience gives Applewhite repeated standing ovations as she talks about how it is not the passage of time that makes it so hard to get older, it’s ageism: a totally illogical prejudice that pits us against our future selves. “Ageing is not a problem to be fixed or a disease to be cured,” she exhorts from the TED stage, to shouts of support. “It is a natural, powerful, lifelong process that unites us all.”
But back to the matinee: “I stood at the top of that escalator,” Applewhite, now 66, says, “and I thought, wouldn’t it be amazing to have the year of letting our hair go grey, so the world can see how many of us there are and how beautiful we are and how diverse we are?”
Applewhite, who is based in New York, inherited her mother’s no-grey-hair gene. But she decided that if she was going to talk the talk, she needed to walk the walk: “The big, if shallow, surprise is how much I liked having grey hair, because I didn’t expect to,” she says. “But other people’s reactions varied. My manager at work said: ‘You don’t look older’; my friend Mer said: ‘You look older’; and her husband Josh said: ‘You look hot!’”
“But what was most interesting was a contributor to my blog, who said: ‘Fine for some, but my hair doesn’t look good grey.’ OK, no judgment, but I wonder how much of her opinion is coloured by what the grey signifies to her – because that’s what we need to work on, in ourselves and in the culture: decoupling ‘older’ from ‘undesirable’ and ‘old’ from ‘ugly’.”
This is the elevator pitch for Applewhite’s exuberant, thoughtful and surprisingly entertaining book. “My call to action skews towards the first and foundational step of confronting internalised ageism,” she says. “But that is only the first step. It is clear that upending discrimination on the basis of age will require fundamental changes in the way society is structured.”
“We have to come up with fairer and broader ways to access productivity, devise more ways for older people to continue to contribute, support them in their endeavours and decouple the value of a human being from success along any of these metrics,” she says.
It is not news that the population is ageing. Life expectancy in Britain is growing by a dramatic five hours a day. Furthermore, in 2014, the average age of the UK population exceeded 40 for the first time – up from 33.9 in 1974. This is no mere blip; the trend will continue as life expectancy increases. In fact, this year marked a demographic turning point: for the first time since the early 1980s there were more people either too old or too young to work than there were of working age. The number of people in the UK aged 85 or more is expected to more than double in the next 25 years and by 2040, nearly one in seven Britons will be over 75. By 2066, 26% of the total population will be aged 65 years and over. Some 10 million of us alive in the UK are likely to live past the age of 100.
But despite the overwhelming message from media and society that wrinkles are unattractive, old people are incompetent and ageing is something to be feared, research also shows that people are happiest at the beginning and the end of their lives. And despite the fear that most of us have of care homes, the vast majority of people over 65 live independently: “How come so many of us unthinkingly assume that depression, diapers, and dementia lie ahead?” asks Applewhite. “That the 20th century’s astonishing leap in life expectancy is a disaster in the making? Underlying all the hand-wringing is ageism: discrimination that sidelines and silences older people.”
Applewhite’s journey from her personal experience of ageing to the political stage seems to have hit the crest of a wave: the reception of her book has been more than enthusiastic. Anne Lamott, a New York Times bestselling author, said: “I never use the word empower, but this book has empowered me.”
Despite the acclaim, however, the prevailing message about age and ageing is, Applewhite says, uniformly negative: “There are giant, legitimate challenges individually and structurally to scaling up the support an older population will require, and to the personal fears about running out of money and ending up alone. But what never occurs to most of us is that hugely amplifying those fears and contextualising them is the culture in which we age. The story of the 80-year-old supergeezer jumping out of an aeroplane or the 50-year-old woman waylaid by early Alzheimer’s is going to get a lot more readers than the true story, which is that most of us muddle along fine and continue to do everything we always did, or at least, versions of it, right to the end.”
Ageism, she believes, is the “last socially sanctioned prejudice”. “Racist and sexist comments no longer get a pass, but who even blinks when old people are described as worthless, incompetent, or ‘out of it’?”
Suppose, she suggests, we could step off “the treadmill of age denial and begin to see how ageism segregates and diminishes our prospects”? “Until then,” she says, “ageism will pit us against each other: it will rob society of an immense accrual of knowledge and experience; and it will poison our futures by framing longer, healthier lives as problems instead of the remarkable achievements and opportunities they represent.”
So how to counter ageism? Applewhite is clear about where we all need to start: “The first and most essential step is to look at our own attitudes towards age and ageing because most bias is unconscious and we can’t challenge bias without thinking about it. All change starts within.”
Don’t compliment an older person by telling her she is different – fitter, stronger, more stylish – than other people her age, she says. Watch out for sanitised or romanticised views of ageing: sexless, placid depictions of older people on a cruise or playing the token wise elder: “Idealised depictions of later life distract from the real challenges of ageing and the need to confront them.” Don’t use adjectives for older people that you wouldn’t use for younger ones, like feisty and kindly. Try active, opinionated and kind instead: “Children are little – their grandparents are not,” she says.
Above all, “we must be proud of our age,” she says. “Age pride is for everyone who refuses to regret waking up a day older, who acknowledges long life as the privilege it is, and who is prepared to challenge the power structures that underlie all discrimination.”
This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism by Ashton Applewhite is published by Melville House UK for (£12.99). To order a copy for £11.34 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
