Women Of a Certain Age.
Hot off the press: writing quickly about the cool treatment of women as they age.
Avignon, France; December 2024. In this Provençal village, provincial and outdated modes of thought are beginning to shown signs of faltering.
Trigger Warning: Mention of a rape case.
(Writer’s apology: I wrote this quickly and whilst incensed. I have not paid attention to language nor grammar. Normally I try to make my essays into seductive little harpies, long-form reads gently winning you over. This is shorter and more acerbic.)
Young women are rallying together in hoards in this charming quarter of the world, with its burnished medieval walls and cobbled streets, its windowsills strewn with flowers, its easy-going way of life and its fabled boulangeries.
But here, the anxious, urgent flames of a reinvigorated feminist movement are licking upwards towards the sky. A feminist movement, yes—perhaps one such movement that we thought we had outgrown the need of here in Western Europe, for the most part.
Why?
What has caught their attention?
One man, by the name of Dominique Pelicot, has been jailed for 20 years after being found guilty of the charges against him. Pelicot would drug his wife through her food and drink, thus rendering her unconscious, before then proceeding amass a group of similarly sick men through an online group-chat, urging them repeatedly come round and join him in to rape her collectively. This went on in a chilling serial spanning almost ten years, between 2011 and 2020.1
Now though, his wife—unthinkably courageous—appears in court, and gravely gives her testimony, indicting against the man who pledged to love her, but treated her so despicably. No wonder she captures the attention of French women, who give her encores of feminist song, a rapt chorus.
This woman’s name is Gisèle Pelicot. She is 72. This all happened to her between the ages of 59 and 68.
Was this the age you expected?
Post-menopausal. Not Mummy anymore, what with grown-up children having fled the nest—but maybe Grandma though, to a little pudgy-faced, puppy-eyed toddler.
Across the English channel, whilst not coalescing in a story of such horror as Pelicot’s sufferance, a grim story about the way we allow our older women to be treated is unfurling, side-stepping into the light.
On Radio 5 Live’s Your Call phone-in, a discussion forum whose premise is platforming ordinary people, a woman identified only as ‘Sue in Orpington’ calls in. She is ‘furious’ about the new Labour government’s decision not to offer reparations to the so-called Waspi Women—after they previously pledged to do so. Basically, in 1995, the Pension Act ruled that in 2020 the state pension age (SPA) for women would be brought in line with the state pension age for men: 66. This would be done incrementally, however the last stage was suddenly expedited, and the emended SPA reached 66 two years prematurely, in 2018.
Anyway, a government ombudsman’s advice conducted an inquest and ruled that the women affected by the change of the state pension age were eligible for financial compensation. The ombudsman hit upon a figure falling between £1,000 and £3,000 as being that which should be paid to each woman affected. To ease the burden on the state, this was supposed to have been paid out in instalments, rather than one lump-sum. But no, alas. A case of political cold feet; an unflattering game of takesies-backsies.
The Waspi Women felt that the change, impacting 3.6 million women, was not adequately communicated by the government—for example, Sue in Orpington only discovered it at ‘a Knit and Natter session’. Despite her meticulous budgeting and planning, Sue only realises too late that six years of her pension have evaporated—vanished into thin air—all of a sudden. The government claim this is not the case, that sufficient warning was given—but if there is a gap or chasm between what passes behind-the-scenes in government and what is properly communicated to the ordinary people who will be affected by a new law, something is amiss.
The Waspi Women maintain that they do not take issue with levelling and equalising the state pension age. What they object to is that they feel they were not properly informed of this change in advance of it, and thus could not make the requisite preparation for their retirement—puzzling out the logistics of when they would do and how they would support themselves in doing so, and for their financial future.
There is a Member of Parliament also on the radio show, who is there to answer the questions (or take the flack) of the people phoning in. He says, in short, that the government simply cannot afford to compensate the affected women. He claims shruggingly that this unfortunate conclusion was necessary. Or, in other words, the Labour Secretary of State for Work and Pensions Liz Kendall’s refusal to allocate the necessary ten billion pounds to carry out these reparations merely represented ‘a tough choice that has to be made in the circumstances.’ The economy is floundering; something has got to give. The MP elaborates that ‘there isn’t ten billion pounds there [in the budget] and if there was, perhaps it would probably to go to other things like more police and more hospital appointments.’
Sue is not pacified. ‘So, basically, you’re saying we’re not worth it.’ She pauses: ‘as older women, we’re not worth it.’ This is, of course, given that the women implicated have all been working for decades; they have all been tax-payers.
‘I would never ever vote Labour again,’ Sue declares, and suggests that to balance the books, the public opt to ‘cut their [the MPs’] allowances’. Currently MPs get paid stipends—or expenses—for their travel around their constituency, among other things. It is popularly felt, if not proven, that some MPs exploit this allowance. Another bated moment pulsates through the radio-waves as Sue strikes again: ‘Why have they got fuel allowances in second homes and what have you, while we can’t even heat the ones we’ve got?’
Remember, this new Labour government’s victory was hardly triumphant. It was a sallow spectre of Tony Blair’s landslide win of 1997, which was accompanied by a real and fervid feeling of optimism and change. Only five months in to Sir Keir Starmer’s government—the vestigial phase, messy toddlerhood, ‘a fresh poll found that he was more unpopular after five months in No10 than any other PM since the late 1970s.’2 My source for this however, was the pundit Ian Dale writing for LBC, which is a particularly right-of-centre news platform. But I choose to flirt and waltz with bias and incendiary politics (perhaps at the sleazy Parliament bar, the one Boris might’ve held his famous and famously naughty forbidden parties of the Covid lockdowns in).
Aggrieved at the government’s apathy towards the women who worked and paid taxes for decades to later find themselves losing out on money which they believed they were entitled to. Sue claims: ‘I just feel like [the government] just would like us all to die. Not enough of us died in Covid, obviously, because that’s how it feels.’ [All audio transcriptions mine. Radio 5 Live episode dated from 18 December 2024; around the 9:15am mark.]
I’m not saying that the Waspi Women should be remunerated, nor that it is the best use of the government’s budget—which, of course, comes from other British tax-payers, also working hard at the grindstone, the daily slog. But I am suggesting that they are being dispensed with, treated carelessly. They are, it might seem, quite justified in feeling as swept aside and disregarded as they do.
When allegations of sexual misconduct were launched against British television personality Gregg Wallace earlier this month, the celebrity waxed a bit populist and took to the democratic medium of his Instagram Stories to address the public—seizing the opportunity to give his side of the story, so to speak.
Wallace has been accused of inappropriate sexual contact with various women—some of them being contestants on television shows he has been a judge on, and also making crass, vulgar, uncomfortable jokes.3
Filming himself, awkward portrait-mode, dressed down and casual, Wallace claimed in tones midway between straight-talking and swaggering, that the allegations were nothing more than the pipsqueaks of a few ‘middle-class women of a certain age’. Nothing to take any notice of. Yes, the enthymeme was precisely that: a few prudish elder women couldn’t take a joke. He was just Gregg Wallace, harmless local funny-man! Just ‘aving a laugh! Everyone move on, now, please, and talk about something else. Orchestrate the demise of some other household name. (Huw Edwards, anyone?—the disgraced BBC reporter, beloved after having brought the British public coverage of Queen Elizabeth II’s death in 2022, and her son King Charles III’s coronation thereafter. He was later convicted of possessing hundreds of sexual and inappropriate images of children.)
See, Wallace has always postured as the plain-speaking, Cockney London greengrocer he was before being launched into fame through appearing as a judge on cooking programme MasterChef. Born in a two-up two-down. An everyman. Just like you, or maybe just like your dad. Someone eminently trustworthy. Someone who’d never short-change you on your paper bag of seasonal asparagus tips or cherries; someone who’d advise you on what herbs to pair with your unusual purchase of a whole, craterous celeriac—and what you could rustle up with the leftovers, besides.
His rhetoric seems to suggest he wants everyone to just brush off his comments, to treat it all as a bit of fun—just prodding at the women he worked with. Naturally, though, the dynamics of Wallace’s jests was complicated. There was power imbalance—very similar to the dangerous arena of erotics between bosses and employees. As aforementioned, he was the judge on the TV programme MasterChef, and the women accusing him of misconduct were contestants on the programme—all looking for their big break in the culinary world, all looking for recognition, success—bravely hoping to make their way in the world.
It doesn’t matter who these women were by demographic—whether they were indeed older, middle-class women, as Wallace scoffingly claimed. It shouldn’t lessen the gravity of their distress.
These are three separate incidences which are, perhaps, only flimsily or distantly related to one another. But it takes only a few considered tugs to entangle them together and thatch together a depressing picture which suggests that we as a society have virtually no esteem of older women, women past the age wherein they typically have their fertility or their youth or their marriageability to recommend them. These are women who have passed working age, who have put their days of child-bearing behind them, who are seeking other existences in that strange, limboed world which young girls are never taught how to approach, when they spend all their lives preparing to be wives and mothers.
These cases are obviously not equally dramatic, either—running a gamut from horrific, life-threatening and utterly traumatic events like Pelicot’s rapes of his own wife to issues of pay-checks. But, held together—cheek by jowl—jowl that a little white-coated man in L.A. reckons he can vanquish in his latest miracle over-sixties facelift protocol (to the tune of $500,0000)—the scene is disconcerting.
Our girls need better, I warrant you. So too do our elders. We mustn’t ignore them.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c89xde5qzvgo - also the Channel 4 News Broadcast from 19 December 2024.
https://www.lbc.co.uk/news/keir-starmer-not-worried-decline-popularity-pm-government-must-go-further/#:~:text=It%20comes%20after%20a%20fresh%20poll%20found%20that,were%20satisfied%2C%20making%20his%20net%20satisfaction%20score%20-34.
https://news.sky.com/story/gregg-wallace-what-are-the-allegations-and-what-has-he-said-13262845
Timely and stated with strength - of mind, of heart, of word. I will always find the most frightening about the Pelicot case that there were so many men out there who wanted that. Who would not say anything. Who would *do* that. Truly horrifying.
you write rage very well