The Double Standard of Aging

The double standard of sexual morality, according to which unchastity is more acceptable in men than in women, is a familiar aspect of Victorian culture and society. The rhetorically derived concept of the double standard of aging, described by Susan Sontag in an essay of that name in 1972 and extensively debated within sociology and psychology, has been much less discussed by literary scholars and social historians. ¹ Sontag’s essay first appeared in the Saturday Review of the Society supplement to the New York Evening Post, and was reprinted seven years later as part of a collection of essays on The Psychology of Women. ² Sontag was forty (or about to turn forty) when she wrote the piece, and it is difficult at this distance not to see it as overdetermined by that biographical moment or, for the few in the know, making reference to it.