Aging in America. Lawrence R. Samuel

such as Clinique jumped on the antiaging bandwagon, forcing the FDA to take more aggressive action. In 1987, the agency issued twenty-three regulatory letters to firms including Revlon, Estée Lauder, and Avon, warning them that they better have hard evidence to make the claims they were making in advertising and on labeling.²⁴

      The fact was, however, that consumers were eager to purchase anything that offered even a remote possibility of antiaging. Simply accepting the physical signs of aging was commonly viewed in the competitive 1980s as a kind of defeat, especially among women of a certain age. “’Growing old gracefully’ is apparently out of fashion,” noted Ellen Goodman in her syndicated column in 1988 after surveying a stack of women’s magazines. A product called Retin-A with alleged wrinkle-smoothing properties was seen as something of a magical potion among women over forty, just one of various elixirs that those averse to aging naturally kept in their medicine cabinets. Unlike the FDA, women couldn’t care less whether Retin-A and similar products were considered to be a cosmetic or a drug; all they cared about was whether the stuff could make them look five or, even better, ten years younger.²⁵

       A Different Species

      One did not have to be a marketing genius to know that demographics were on the side of companies trying to sell antiaging products. In 1950 the average age of Americans was around twenty, while in 1980 it had risen to about thirty. In another fifty years, the average age in the United States would be around forty, demographers were predicting, a bubble that would undoubtedly impact not just the marketplace but also education, health care, and even the way homes and cities were built. Given that the very makeup of the United States would be fundamentally altered, many sensibly argued, it was time for our perception of older people to be modified in an equivalent manner. Americans had to “integrate the aging into the full life of society,” remarked Robert C. Benedict, the U.S. commissioner on aging, in 1980, calling for the end of the widespread stereotyping and discrimination of older citizens.²⁶ Carroll L. Estes, a professor of sociology and director of UC Berkeley’s Aging Policy Center, felt similarly. “Our perceptions and policies define old people as a major societal problem but, in fact, it is society’s treatment of old people that is the primary problem,” Estes wrote the following year; she saw Americans’ equation of aging with decline and dependence as the root of the issue. Research showed that chronological aging caused no major changes in personality or behavior, meaning there was little or no basis for our common practice of distancing ourselves from older people.²⁷

      Other experts chimed in on what they justifiably believed was a distorted view of aging in America. Rose Dobrof, a pioneer in social work and director of Hunter College’s Brookdale Center on Aging, argued that our muddled perspective had a ripple effect that compounded the problem. Young people naturally became fearful about getting older because of the way we characterized aging, she astutely held, thinking that our discomfort with the subject also served as an unhealthy divisive force. It “widens the sense of difference and distance between the generations,” she said in 1982, leaving older people in a kind of no-man’s-land within society. Aging was one of the most basic and obvious facts of life, yet it was clear that major misconceptions surrounded it. For example, it was safe to say that a good number of people considered aging to be a state when it was really a process, a basic misunderstanding that likely led to many others. No one woke up “old” one day, Dobrof explained, although this would come as news to young folks conditioned to regard aging as a peculiar condition limited to a particular segment of the population.²⁸

      Because children and teens often had little contact with older people (and due to the simple fact that becoming old was further into the future), aging was generally an alien concept for the former. In one’s youth, the elderly “seem like a different species,” Walter Goodman of the Chicago Tribune posited, a good way of describing not just how young people viewed seniors but also the loss of humanity that aging brought on.²⁹ Some authors of children’s books, such as Richard Worth, apparently agreed. His 1986 book You’ll Be Old Someday, Too introduced the subject of human aging to students between grades 6 through 9 in a valiant attempt to make older people seem not so foreign to them. In half a century or so, Worth explained, young readers would be old themselves, a nice way of personalizing the rather abstract idea of aging.³⁰