I of support older women who want to wear whatever they want, and in some ways, I get it: in what is an extension of our own cultural pathology, fashion idolizes youth. I won’t get into how sick I think the connections are between teenage, hairless models and the patriarchal obsession with creating child-women…I am glad there are older men and women out there who enjoy using their bodies and the clothing/accessories to express themselves, be creative, and basically give a middle finger to a society that believes them to be extraneous, both reproductively and in capitalist modes of productive.

And yet, as I age, I just don’t wanna do it. I don’t want to be invisible, but I really just am not terribly interested in clothing. I try to look decent when I go places–I do not like sloppy dress, but I do admit that I have a good deal of absent-minded professor in me who is quite wrinkly and mudgy and just generally mussy.

I don’t have much more than that in terms of ideas; I was just confronted again this morning with a “look at how great and fierce this older lady is because she is stick-thin and wearing fabulous things.” And of course, good on ya, that’s your body and enjoy it, thin or otherwise, but I just don’t want to be invisible, I don’t want to have society decide I am baggage, and I don’t want to have to devote myself to an interest I don’t have in order to protest these.