ABSTRACT
Aging represents the future-not only for each of us as individuals, but for many facets of our collective experience within culture. As it happens, each of us is getting older, but also we are currently in a situation in which the world’s population is shifting toward an older average age. Like so many other things, the experience of aging is shaped by gender roles and expectations. Some analysts have written about a “double standard of aging,” by which older women in North America are judged as unattractive, less feminine and frail, whereas older men are judged distinguished, still masculine, and wise (Deutsch, Zalenski and Clark 1986; Sontag 1979). On the other hand, some researchers have identifi ed a mellowing of gender stereotypes with older age, so that women become more comfortable with agency, power, and authority as they age (e.g. Stewart, Ostrove and Helson 2001), whereas men become more nurturing and less concerned with dominance and competition (Sinnott and Shifren 2001; Villereal and Cavazos 2005). All this is of particular interest to gender scholars because women live longer than men-so there is an increasing majority of women as we consider older age groups.
