The Demonisation of Middle-Aged Women With Victoria Smith and Hadley Freeman
2023
•
56m
Why are middle-aged women these days subject to so much rage and hatred? Why are they so often portrayed as entitled, selfish and morally inferior – frequently by people who see themselves as progressive and kind?
As writer Victoria Smith approached middle age, she made her peace with her sagging neckline and having to cope with ageing parents. But the disdain and vitriol she experienced as a woman in mid-life came as a shock. In her new book Hags: The Demonisation of Middle-Aged Women she traces the ageism and misogyny that have been directed towards older women throughout history and explores why these attitudes have become increasingly prevalent in recent years.
In conversation with The Sunday Times’s Hadley Freeman Smith will dissect the popularity of the Karen meme, which references a stereotypically privileged white woman; she will explore why women who have the temerity to exist beyond the age at which they are desirable to men are inseen as superfluous to society; and she will suggest potential solutions which can benefit all women – whether they are hags or hags-in-waiting.
Up Next in 2023
-
In Defence of the Unmodified Body wit...
Our bodies are never good enough. And the social pressures to change them are overwhelming. We strive to defy ageing, build our biceps and conceal our quirks. Surrounded by filtered photos and surgically-enhanced features, we feel we must contort our physical selves to accepted standards of beaut...
-
Can Russia Escape Its History? With A...
‘We rebuilt the same barracks, we rebuilt the new dictatorship, we rebuilt the same regime that we used to live in and now we have another regime, and the question is the same: How to preserve our human dignity, if everything is humiliating?’ – Mikhail Shishkin
Mikhail Shishkin is one of the mo...
-
Carlo Rovelli and Tom Holland on Anax...
‘In my opinion this idea of Anaximander’s [that the Earth is suspended in space] is one of the boldest, most revolutionary, and most portentous ideas in the whole history of human thinking.’ – Karl Popper
Carlo Rovelli is one of the world’s best known scientists. A theoretical physicist, his boo...
