Ageism Quotes

So, my unsolicited advice to women in the workplace is this. When faced with sexism, or ageism, or lookism, or even really aggressive Buddhism, ask yourself the following question: “Is this person in between me and what I want to do?” If the answer is no, ignore it and move on. Your energy is better used doing your work and outpacing people that way. Then, when you’re in charge, don’t hire the people who were jerky to you.

When we age we shed many skins: ego, arrognace, dominance, self-opionated, unreliable, pessimism, rudeness, selfish, uncaring ... Wow, it's good to be old!

I’m really happy when I’m with you. I get the feeling you feel the same way. And if that’s true, I don’t think you should give a fuck about what people may or may not think of our age difference. Furthermore, if our ages were reversed, no one would bat an eyelash. Am I right? So now it’s just some sexist, patriarchal crap, and you don’t strike me as the kind of woman who’s going to let that dictate her happiness. All right? Next issue…

It’s not loving a man that makes life harder for gay guys, it’s homophobia. It’s not the color of their skin that makes life harder for people of color; it’s racism. It’s not having vaginas that makes life harder for women, it’s sexism. And it’s ageism, far more than the passage of time, that makes growing older harder for all of us.

Ageism is the only self-correcting prejudice, isn’t it?

The good thing about being old is not being young.

We don’t ask when people age out of singing, or eating ice cream; why would we stop making love?

As she drove the familiar route to the school, she considered her magnificent new age. Forty. She could still feel "forty" the way it felt when she was fifteen. Such a colorless age. Marooned in the middle of your life. Nothing would matter all that much when you were forty. You wouldn't have real feelings when you were forty, because you'd be safely cushioned by your frumpy forty-ness. Forty-year-old woman found dead. Oh dear. Twenty-year-old woman found dead. Tragedy! Sadness! Find that murderer!

Racism, sexism, ableism, homo- and transphobia, ageism, fatphobia are algorithms created by humans’ struggle to make peace with the body. A radical self-love world is a world free from the systems of oppression that make it difficult and sometimes deadly to live in our bodies.

Do not dismiss the words of the old; they possess wisdom, which comes only with age, and often speak of things that the young are too immature to understand.

Some people say they have 20 years experience, when in reality, they have 1 year's experience repeated 20 times. (Stephen M R Covey to Richie Norton when Norton asked if he was too young to train older executives for Covey.)

The sooner growing older is stripped of reflexive dread, the better equipped we are to benefit from the countless ways in which it can enrich us.

Discrimination on the basis of age is as unacceptable as discrimination on the basis of any other aspect of ourselves that we cannot change.

The important part of growing older was the growing part. Resisting change meant forever standing still, which was a sad way to live.

My first interview was with eighty-eight-year-old folk artist Marcia Muth… ‘Your life does change as you get older,’ she told me. ‘You get into what’s important and what’s not’.

Never judge a woman by her age.

Being older deceives us into thinking that we are experts at being the ages we used to be.

Of course, ultimately ageism is a prejudice against one’s own future self.

Women not only bear the brunt of the equation of beauty with youth, we perpetuate it—every time we dye our hair to cover the gray or lie about our age, not to mention have plastic surgery to cover the signs of aging.

Fear of dying is human. Fear of aging is cultural.

Nowhere is ageism more sexist, and vicious, than in the domain of sexuality.

Some women I talk to are so frightened of growing old. I sense their desperation. They say things like I m not going to live to be old I m not going to live to be dependent. The message young women get from youth culture is that it s wonderful to be young and terrible to grow old. If you think about it it s an impossible dilemma how can you make a good start in life if you are being told at the same time how terrible the finish is Because of ageism many women don t fully commit themselves to living life until they can no longer pass as young. They live their lives with one foot in life and one foot outside it. With age you resolve that. I know the value of each day and I m living with both feet in life. I m living much more fully... The power of the old woman is that because she s outside the system she can attack. And I am determined to attack it. One of the ways in which I am particularly conscious of this stance is when I go down the street. People expect me to move over which means to step on the grass or off the curb. I just woke up one day to the fact that I was moving over. I have no idea how many years I ve been doing that. Now I never move over. I simply keep walking. And we hit full force because the other person is so sure that I am going to move over that he isn t even paying any attention and we simply ram each other. If it s a man with a woman he shows embarrassment because he s just knocked down a five foot seventy year old woman and so he quickly apologises. But he s startled he doesn t understand why I didn t move over he doesn t even know how I got there where I came from. I am invisible to him despite the fact that I am on my own side of the street simply refusing to give him that space he assumes is his

THE BEST people are the good old wrinkled people with a sparkle in their eye, a wink when you walk by or a toothless smile saying you are doing just fine ...

The myth of self-sufficiency demands optimism without end, downplays life’s challenges, and shames us when, inevitably, we fall short.

Hiding or lying about your age is giving in to ageism. Don't do it! Be proud of who you are, what you know and what you've accomplished.

Success is not about age, it's about action.

Human beings fear what they don’t understand. The unknown scares us. When we meet people who look or act in unfamiliar or strange ways, our initial response is to keep them at arm’s length. At times we make ourselves feel superior, smarter or more competent by dehumanizing or degrading those who are different. The roots of so many of our species’s ugliest behaviors—racism, ageism, misogyny, anti-Semitism, to name just a few—are in this basic brain-mediated response to perceived threat. We tend to fear what we do not understand, and fear can so easily twist into hate or even violence because it can suppress the rational parts of our brain.

So my unsolicited advice to women in the workplace is this. When faced with sexism or ageism or lookism or even really aggressive Buddhism, ask yourself the following question: “Is this person in between me and what I want to do?” If the answer is no, ignore it and move on. Your energy is better used doing your work and outpacing people that way. Then, when you’re in charge, don’t hire the people who were jerky to you.

So where does that leave me? I like hosting the show....It’s become my identity. If that’s gone, where am I?

The job you seek isn't out there in some job description, it's already inside you, aching to get out.

Gaslighting can be subtle and unintentional, but as feminist writer Nora Samaran explains, it is particularly insidious because it undermines people's trust in their own capacities: "If you think of the power, the strength, the capacity to effect change that women who trust themselves are capable of, what we are losing when we doubt ourselves is an indomitable force for social change that is significant and therefore, to some, frightening. In other words, our capacity to know ourselves is immensely powerful." All forms of oppression seem to have this tendency: racism, heteropatriarchy, ableism, ageism, colonization, and other systems of oppression contort people's insights, experiences, and differences into weaknesses or deny them outright. For this reason, the emergence of trust can be a powerful weapon, which is being recovered all the time through struggle.

Only those who have been on the receiving end of poverty, unemployment, homelessess, mental illness, domestic violence, racism, sexism or ageism can fully identify with others' reactions to those distressing experiences. Only those who have been members of marginalised minority can fully appreciate how that feels. [p50]

Controlling your mindset is one of the most powerful badass things you can do.

I don’t care how old you are—fifty, sixty, or seventy. Your value doesn’t diminish with each birthday.

The story of humanity can be written as the struggle to acknowledge all human beings as human beings.

Use affirmations as statements of becoming, not statements of being.

How did I get to be this old and still have to put up with so much crap?

Ambition doesn’t end on a particular birthday. Own it and live it.

Don’t be stingy with your praise and support of other women. What goes around comes around. It’s great karma.

The older person is necessarily more experienced at life, but is not necessarily more wise, or even just wise.

In order to create your future, you have to reconcile your past.

You now have more experience and wisdom than ever before. Age enhances your value.

The crafting of the face is a billion-dollar industry because there’s actually only one truly acceptable face to create: that of “the girl.” The girl’s face is always dewy, unblemished, and unwrinkled, her eyes bright, her forehead uncreased. “Womanly” hips and ass might be theoretically fetishized, but they’re desirable only when the rest of the body remains that of the girl.

In 1978 Susan Sontag coined the term ‘the double standard of aging’ to describe the way in which ageist sexism/sexist ageism impacts the status of women, particularly with regard to physical appearance.

My unsolicited advice to women in the workplace is this. When faced with sexism or ageism or lookism or even really aggressive Buddhism, ask yourself the following question: “Is this person in between me and what I want to do? If the answer is no, ignore it and move on. Your energy is better used doing your work and outpacing people that way. Then, when you’re in charge, don’t hire the people who were jerky to you. If the answer is yes, you have a more difficult road ahead of you. I suggest you model your strategy after the old Sesame Street film piece, "Over! Under! Through!” (If you’re under forty, you might not remember this film. It taught the concepts of, “over,” and “under,” and “through” by filming toddlers crawling around an abandoned construction site. They don’t show it anymore because someone has since realized that’s nuts.) If your boss is a jerk, try to find someone above or around your boss who is not a jerk. If you’re lucky, your workplace will have a neutral proving ground- like the rifle range or a car sales total board of the SNL read-through. If so, focus on that. Again, don’t waste your energy trying to educate or change opinions. Go “Over! Under! Through!” and opinions will change organically when you’re the boss. Or they won’t. Who cares? Do your thing and don’t care if they like it.

Like ageism and sexism, lookism was everywhere, resulting in the good-looking getting the best jobs, winning all the plaudits, being let off the most parking tickets by soft-hearted traffic wardens; being generally favoured.

Racism, sexism, classism, heterosexism, ableism, ageism, and all other isms are all forms of gaslighting—to doubt and defame the reality of others, to leave them second-guessing themselves, and by so doing holding on to the power.

America isn't breaking apart at the seams. The American dream isn't dying. Our new racial and ethnic complexion hasn't triggered massive outbreaks of intolerance. Our generations aren't at each other's throats. They're living more interdependently than at any time in recent memory, because that turns out to be a good coping strategy in hard times. Our nation faces huge challenges, no doubt. So do the rest of the world's aging economic powers. If you had to pick a nation with the right stuff to ride out the coming demographic storm, you'd be crazy not to choose America, warts and all.

Many thanks for your good wishes. The fact is, however, that I have not been ill except a two days attack of indigestion and subsequent fatigue, from which I am quite recovered. It is less easy to recover from a serious attack of indignation.

So my unsolicited advice to women in the workplace is this. When faced with sexism or ageism or lookism or even really aggressive Buddhism, ask yourself the following question: “Is this person in between me and what I want to do?” If the answer is no, ignore it and move on. Your energy is better used doing your work and outpacing people that way. Then, when you’re in charge, don’t hire the people who were jerky to you. If the answer is yes, you have a more difficult road ahead of you. I suggest you model your strategy after the old Sesame Street film piece “Over! Under! Through!” (If you’re under forty you might not remember this film. It taught the concepts of “over,” “under,” and “through” by filming toddlers crawling around an abandoned construction site. They don’t show it anymore because someone has since realized that’s nuts.) If your boss is a jerk, try to find someone above or around your boss who is not a jerk.* If you’re lucky, your workplace will have a neutral proving ground—like the rifle range or the car sales total board or the SNL read-through. If so, focus on that. Again, don’t waste your energy trying to educate or change opinions. Go “Over! Under! Through!” and opinions will change organically when you’re the boss. Or they won’t. Who cares? Do your thing and don’t care if they like it.

If you can not call out bigotry, corruption, racism, sexism, xenophobia, islamophobia, ageism, agnosticism, imperialism, antiblackism, antisemitism, authoritarianism, terrorism, egoism, and totalitarianism; then you are encouraging it to grow. There is no retreat from all the "isms" conflicts with which we must cope. The most fecund killer of innocent in all of human history is not a disease or natural catastrophe. It is rooted in a sick way of thinking in which we have been programmed. Avoiding the quandary isn't helpful. A public discussion of these challenges could open up a new dialogue of approach. Without, this is the reality that the next generation would have to live with.

The fact is, women aren’t having cosmetic surgery to stay beautiful. As Naomi Wolf wrote in The Beauty Myth more than twenty years ago, many women who undergo surgery are fighting to stay loved, relevant, employed, admired; they’re fighting against time running out. If they simply age naturally, don’t diet or dye their hair, we feel they’ve “let themselves go.” But if they continue to dress youthfully we feel they’re “trying too hard” or brand them as “slappers.” Poor Madonna, who has dared to be in her fifties. In order not to look like a woman in her sixth decade of life she exercises furiously, and is sniggered at by trashy magazines for having overly muscular arms and boytoy lovers. When Demi Moore’s marriage to Ashton Kutcher, fifteen years her junior, recently broke down, the media reaction was almost gleeful. Of course, it was what they had been waiting for all along: how long could a forty-eight-year-old woman expect to keep a thirty-three-year-old man? As allegations of his infidelity emerged, the Internet was flooded with images of Demi looking gaunt and unhappy—and extremely thin. Sometimes you want to say: just leave them alone. Then again, it’s mostly women who buy these magazines, and women who write the editorials and online comments and gossip columns, so you could say we’re our own worst enemies. There is already plenty of ageism and sexism out there—why do we add to the body hatred?

We believe that we don’t have what it takes to compete, therefore we don’t compete.

Make it your mission to finish your career on your terms with a bang, not a whimper.

When did wrinkles become shameful and when did we start buying into all this bullshit?

Be proud of how you show up every day, feeling comfortable in your own skin, being your magnificent you.

Chase career relationships, not job postings.

Getting fired is not shameful. It just means you need to find a better fit.

You hear a lot about "digital natives." Well, baby boomers are the "digital founders.

What a waste of time it is to be anxious and worried about aging instead of living.

it is for the elder man to rule and for the younger to submit

The reproductive abilities of women and other female animals are controlled and exploited by those in power (usually men) and both are devalued as they age and wear out—when they no longer reproduce. Cows, hens, and women are routinely treated as if they were objects to be manipulated in order to satisfy the desires of powerful men, without regard to female's wishes or feelings.

-[...] comme vous me paraissez amateur; car lorsque je suis entré vous regardiez mes tableaux, je vous demande la permission de vous faire voir ma galerie : tous tableaux anciens, tous tableaux de maîtres garantis comme tels ; je n'aime pas les modernes. -Vous avez raison, monsieur, car ils ont en général un grand défaut : c'est celui de n'avoir pas encore eu le temps de devenir des anciens.

Greeting the ageing self In trying to depathologize age, we need to make an important distinction, between resisting ageism (stereotyping or discriminating on the basis of age) and resisting age itself. The first opens the door to a path of rich potential, freeing us to keep on developing and changing, while the second closes it, condemning us to an endless attempt to recover the irretrievable.

I recognised just how different Alexander was from children raised in Britain. The most obvious distinctions were his maturity and broadness of view. He hadn't lost his innocence or childish ability to play, but he enjoyed conversations with adults, and he saw no problem in playing with any child of any age. He was wonderfully gentle with the little ones. He was never fazed by differences, and cultural diversity was of interest rather than a reason for prejudice, though, - like our Nepali friends - he liked to classify people.

I think there’s something about certain people’s chosen ‘lifestyle’ which ages them. I can’t explain it any other way. Leaving school, building a career, getting old before their time as they take on more and more stress lacks that one essential element that we had oodles of as youngsters, and that’s fun. We had lively, buoyant and animated fun. We were carefree at an age when you’re supposed to be carefree. We were breezy, jaunty and happy-go-lucky. The flip side of this is that at times it may make some of us feel as if we’re outsiders. People occasionally talk about us in hushed tones, whispering that we’re a bit of a lone wolf, or at times a loose cannon. They don’t want to say it to our faces because every now and again we can be a little bit unpredictable. But they look at us with a strange curiosity, because in comparison – although they’re often very successful at ‘fitting in’ – they lead lives that are drab, dreary and monotonous. They’re not unruly like the Carefree Scamps. We have a divine spark of unruliness within us. And it’s that unruliness which has kept us young.

It seems to me you’re turning into a regular old fussbudget,” said Miss Marple unkindly. “And don’t call me names!” said Dr. Haydock. “You’re a very healthy woman for your age; you were pulled down a bit by bronchitis which isn’t good for the elderly. But to stay alone in a house at your age is a risk. Supposing you fall down the stairs one evening or fall out of bed or slip in the bath. There you’d lie and nobody’d know about it.” “One can imagine anything,” said Miss Marple. “Miss Knight might fall down the stairs and i’d fall over her rushing out to see what had happened.

We cannot end just one form of oppression, so we need to be on board with other activists. If we are not, we doom social justice activists to perpetually pulling up the innumerable shoots that spring from the very deep roots of oppression. Furthermore, inability to see one’s own privilege and ignorance of the struggles that others face (in a homophobic, racist, ageist, ableist, sexist society) are major impediments to social justice activism. Those who are privileged must give way so that others can take the lead, bringing new social justice concerns and methods to the activist’s table.

One example of systematic oppression is structural violence. This concept was introduced in the 1970s by Johan Galtung, a pioneering Norwegian researcher in peace and conflict, and founder of the International Peace Research Institute. He describes structural violence as “a form of violence which corresponds with the systematic ways in which a given social structure or social institution kills people slowly by preventing them from meeting their basic needs. Institutionalized elitism, ethnocentricism, classism, racism, sexism, adultism, nationalism, heterosexism and ageism are just some examples of structural violence. Life spans are reduced when people are socially dominated, politically oppressed, or economically exploited. Structural violence and direct violence are highly interdependent. Structural violence inevitably produces conflict and often direct violence including family violence, racial violence, hate crimes, terrorism, genocide, and war.

It is extremely disturbing to live in a society that sees older people as a burden rather than rich experiences to benefit from and build upon. Older people can act as the memory that can help us make sense of what was, what is, and what could and should be. I see that in the U.S. older people are not only made invisible in a culture obsessed with youth and superficial physical appearances, but often their insights, experiences, and perspectives are dismissed as ‘nostalgic’ or as outright ‘ignorant’ using the ‘generational gap’ as a pretext.

While for some of us it may take an event - a serious illness or a trauma - to remember that we are bodies, many people do not have to wait for a specific event to remember the centrality of their body. That's because their body is placed outside the cultural hierarchy of the "ideal body", and so they learn early on that their body makes them "other". Most forms of oppression are directed against the body as "isms": racism, sexism, ableism, heterosexism, ageism, sizeism, and so on. The message underneath isms is this: You are less valuable in this society because of your body. This exemplifies the body-as-object narrative mentioned above: people are reduced to body-as-objects, not empowered as body-subjects. Because of their inability to leave or transcend or conquer their unruly body, the social context suggests to some that they are nothing more than a body, less-than in a world that does not value the inherent goodness of bodies. This creates a trap: their body becomes central to their identity while also being something they are unable to conquer in a social context that privileges the conquered body.

is this. When faced with sexism or ageism or lookism or even really aggressive Buddhism, ask yourself the following question: “Is this person in between me and what I want to do?” If the answer is no, ignore it and move on. Your energy is better used doing your work and outpacing people that way. Then, when you’re in charge, don’t hire the people who were jerky to you. If the answer is yes, you have a more difficult road ahead of you. I suggest you model your strategy after the old Sesame Street film piece “Over! Under! Through!” (If you’re under forty you might not remember this film. It taught the concepts of “over,” “under,” and “through” by filming toddlers crawling around an abandoned construction site. They don’t show it anymore because someone has since realized that’s nuts.) If your boss is a jerk, try to find someone above or around your boss who is not a jerk.* If you’re lucky, your workplace will have a neutral proving ground—like the rifle range or the car sales total board or the SNL read-through. If so, focus on that. Again, don’t waste your energy trying to educate or change opinions. Go “Over! Under! Through!” and opinions will change organically when you’re the boss. Or they

My unsolicited advice to women in the workplace is this. When faced with sexism or ageism or lookism or even really aggressive Buddhism, ask yourself the following question: “Is this person in between me and what I want to do? If the answer is no, ignore it and move on. Your energy is better used doing your work and outpacing people that way. Then, when you’re in charge, don’t hire the people who were jerky to you. If the answer is yes, you have a more difficult road ahead of you. I suggest you model your strategy after the old Sesame Street film piece, "Over! Under! Through!” (If you’re under forty, you might not remember this film. It taught the concepts of, “over,” and “under,” and “through” by filming toddlers crawling around an abandoned construction site. They don’t show it anymore because someone has since realized that’s nuts.) If your boss is a jerk, try to find someone above or around your boss who is not a jerk. If you’re lucky, your workplace will have a neutral proving ground- like the rifle range or a car sales total board or the SNL read-through. If so, focus on that. Again, don’t waste your energy trying to educate or change opinions. Go “Over! Under! Through!” and opinions will change organically when you’re the boss. Or they won’t. Who cares? Do your thing and don’t care if they like it.

Activists who expressed genuine and reasonable concern for the struggles of trans-identified people would simultaneously dismiss women’s desire for safety, privacy, dignity and fair competition. Unlike those activists, I feel compassion both for people who feel at odds with their sexed bodies, and for the people, mainly women and children, who are harmed when sexual dimorphism is denied. At first I was puzzled that well-educated young women were the most ardent supporters of this new policy of gender self-identification, even though it is very much against their interests. A man may be embarrassed if a female person uses a male changing room; a male in a communal female facility can inspire fear. I came to see it as the rising generation’s ‘luxury belief’ – a creed espoused by members of an elite to enhance their status in each other’s eyes, with the harms experienced by the less fortunate. If you have social and financial capital, you can buy your way out of problems – if a facility you use jeopardises your safety or privacy, you will simply switch. It is poorer and older women who are stuck with the consequences of self-ID in women’s prisons, shelters and refuges, hospital wards and care homes. And some women’s apparent support for self-ID is deceptive, expressed for fear of what open opposition would bring. The few male academics and journalists who write critically on this topic tell me that they get only a fraction of the hate directed at their female peers (and are spared the sexualised insults and rape threats). This dynamic is reinforced by ageism, which is inextricably intertwined with misogyny – including internalised misogyny. I was astonished by the young female reviewer who described my book’s tone as ‘harsh’ and ‘unfortunate’. I wondered if she knew that sexists often say they would have listened to women if only they had stated their demands more nicely and politely, and whether she realised that once she is no longer young and beautiful, the same sorts of things will be said about her, too.

have a problem with ageism, overt and especially covert. My feeling about a person’s age is that it’s a serving suggestion. It’s up to you what you do with it: take it as offered, modify it, or ignore it altogether.

We'd incorporated Asia into our bones - its colours and laughter, its smells, its rhythms, its tolerance and patience, its compassion, its lack of ageism.

The main prize is access to patriarchal wealth—not revolutionary social change: feminism is framed as a symbolic ‘cock block’ that reduces girls’ chances of upward social mobility. Ageism is mobilised in an opportunistic contempt for feminism in the hope that conforming to the new girly normative femininity will be rewarded by greater access to the patriarchal pie.

Suffering from a rare syndrome, my grandmother always stated, that - 'she could not rest'.

The goal of all the GOP voter ID laws is to reduce significantly the demographic and political impact of a growing share of the American electorate. To diminish the ability of black, Latinos, and Asians, as well as the poor and students to choose government representatives and the types of policies they support. Unfortunately, it's working.

It’s time for women fifty and beyond to claim their workplace power.

Being a badass means owning who you are, owning your experience, your wisdom, your talent, your age.

Say it out loud: “I’m not done yet!” Own it. Live it.

The bottom line is that gendered ageism is a factor in our careers. There’s no denying it.

When you're fearful of aging, you don't step into your full power and potential.

Our entire purpose is to solve the ultimate problems of existence. The task of the meditators and the mindfulness advocates is to flee from every problem, solve no problems, and become animals, devoid of consciousness, untroubled by judgment. They dream of living non-judgmentally in the moment. That’s what cows do. The message of Eastern mysticism and New Ageism is Become a Cow!

The longer we keep using these outdated demographic labels, the longer we perpetuate the demographic stereotypes fueling racism, sexism, ageism, homophobia, and the like.

But before we, too, abdicate, let us speculate on the following scenario: if every magazine that denounces ageism made a point of using models with graying hair and crow's feet; if every personnel who complains of the prejudice against older men hired one; if every middle-aged man who ran a personals ad requested a woman his own age, rather than one a minimum of five years younger; if every woman took her cosmetic budget for the year and sent it to Emily's List, that alien entity called "society" might start to look more malleable.

To fight against aging, we should first fight ageism. So many thousand more years and we still don't get along.. We just dam! One day we will value the soul and its essence more than its appearance. Until that day arrives, we still suffer from so much violence.

My call to action goes well beyond asking you to pressure your recruiting team to hire a couple of token employees. That's easy and you've been doing that for years. My call to action is that you dig deeper and place focus on making the work environment sustainable for the minorities you introduce to your team. I'm challenging you to refrain from the habitual practice of listening only to the jaded opinions of people that you are more familiar with. Consider that, although you may be under the impression that your employees have strong ethics, morals and values, there is a possibility that they mat not be telling you the entire truth when speaking about the performance or demeanor of minorities. Furthermore, I challenge you to accept that racism, ageism, ableism, classism, sizeism, homophobia, etc., are real and shaping the semblance of your organization. Accepting that fact does not mean that people you work with and trust are bad people. It simply means that many of them are naïve, fearful, and more comfortable with pointing fingers at the innocent than they are with facing and addressing their own unconscious and damaging biases.

Human beings fear what they don’t understand. The unknown scares us. When we meet people who look or act in unfamiliar or strange ways, our initial response is to keep them at arm’s length. At times we make ourselves feel superior, smarter, or more competent by dehumanizing or degrading those who are different. The roots of so many of our species’s ugliest behaviors—racism, ageism, misogyny, anti-Semitism, to name just a few—are in this basic brain-mediated response to perceived threat. We tend to fear what we do not understand, and fear can so easily twist into hate or even violence because it can suppress the rational parts of our brain.

First, their sheer prevalence; according to the World Health Organization, ageism is the most widespread and socially accepted prejudice today.

Ideals of attractiveness also often obscure racism, misogyny, ageism, and ableism.

Ageism is not attractive,

Ageism is the intimate colonisation of embodied time by the vampiric forces of patriarchal capitalism that instils an ideological timebomb in the female mind that ticks with the incessant and cruel warning that the passing of time is something for which women must be punished. Women, far more than men, are judged by how old they are and how old they look. The threatening ticking of male domination reduces women’s social and economic worth to how “fresh” we appear.

I played pinochle with my grandmothers. I thought I was the only person under the age of sixty who knew how to play. He also used the Oxford comma. That has to mean something, doesn't it?

The Dark Cloud Is the dismissive manner of ageism and how it punishes wrinkles but wants you to be caring Is the army of truth that always seeks those who are daring Is the cynicism that ties you up to a chair and leaves you there Is mourning people who were as good as gold, sweet like sugar, and who had deep emotions that were rare

You guys let people with physical beauty attributes distract you from the bad things they do. Someone might kill another person , be corrupt or commit fraud and tomorrow when they leak their own nudes. They will be your favorite people. That is why slay queens are used to commit crime.

Do you have any idea how many people, when given the choice between pursuing their strengths or their weaknesses, choose the latter? Selfishness is a weakness. So are pride, ignorance, narcissism, racism, sexism, ageism, ableism. And yet countless people follow those impulses at the expense of the real strengths—honesty, generosity, curiosity, selflessness—they’ve been conditioned to repress.

The behavior of his classmates was predictable. What was happening was a small version of what happens all across the planet in various forms every day. Human beings fear what they don’t understand. The unknown scares us. When we meet people who look or act in unfamiliar or strange ways, our initial response is to keep them at arm’s length. At times we make ourselves feel superior, smarter or more competent by dehumanizing or degrading those who are different. The roots of so many of our species’s ugliest behaviors—racism, ageism, misogyny, anti-Semitism, to name just a few—are in this basic brain-mediated response to perceived threat. We tend to fear what we do not understand, and fear can so easily twist into hate or even violence because it can suppress the rational parts of our brain.

The next step in imaginative emasculation is obvious: only elderly actors can play King Lear, only hunchbacks can sing Rigoletto or play King Richard III, only fat people can play or sing Falstaff, since using stage makeup and body suits to transform non-old, non-handicapped, and non-fat actors into those roles represents ageism, fat-shaming, and ableism.