When I went to university in 1988, feminism was wildly unfashionable; if students of both sexes happily queued around the block to hear Germaine Greer lecture on Aphra Behn, it was considered deeply uncool to own a copy of The Second Sex, let alone to go on about Andrea Dworkin or the Sun’s page three. I guess we thought – even those of us who did call ourselves feminists – that progress was inexorable, an optimism that strikes me as blackly comic now. Sometimes, as I sit at my desk in front of a machine that can, with a single click, provide access to every possible kind of sexual image, no matter how graphic, I suddenly see myself at 19, marching angrily into WH Smith to remove its porn mags (we used to dump them on the pavement outside). Such sweet innocence! How badly I miss it.
Given all this, I should be glad that in 2023, most young women – and many young men – throw the word feminism around like confetti. Thirty years ago, I longed for others to see the world as I did, and after all, there is still so much to be done. But, alas, this isn’t how I feel. Such talk sounds increasingly hollow; a question only of clever marketing. While the pressures on young women are greater than ever, many of their rights terrifyingly under threat, the bigger surprise is that I find myself on the receiving end of as much sexism and misogyny now as I did when my bum was pert and my breasts very bouncy – and nearly all of it comes from those far younger than me. Was the harassment I experienced when I was young better or worse than the dismissive contempt that’s aimed at me today? I’m not sure. All I know is that I’m far angrier now – and far more clear-sighted about the cause of that anger – than I ever was in the days when I campaigned for every female student to have a free rape alarm.
Victoria Smith, who is six years my junior, has written a book, Hags, that speaks directly to everything that I’ve just described. In its sights are those people who, even as they loudly proclaim their righteous politics, are apt to label older women as Karens and Terfs; who either roundly ignore or demonise the views of such women, however well-founded or based in experience; who write with open loathing of their bodies, their haircuts and their clothes; who struggle to acknowledge that they have benefited even the smallest bit from the legacy of those who went before them; who would, in effect, like women over the age of 45 either to shut up or to disappear altogether. It is, to be clear, a very good book, one that brilliantly and unrelentingly exposes all the weasel ways in which ageist misogyny enables regressive beliefs to be recast as progressive. In my eyes, it’s a future classic, up there with Joan Smith’s Misogynies and Susan Faludi’s Backlash. But it’s also, I’m afraid, very painful to read. Like many women of my age and background, I feel myself to be approaching my zenith. How agonising to be reminded that, in some senses, this counts for nothing at all.
But, deep breath… Like Alex, the character played by Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction – as Smith says, in spite of the best efforts of the film’s director, Adrian Lyne, Alex is a perfect metaphor for the feeling of having been fucked and then ghosted by life itself – middle-aged women Will Not Be Ignored. And part of not being ignored involves doggedly reminding people that ageism is the dumbest bigotry of all, as well as the most widespread – for you, too, dear reader, will be 40 one day (and then 50, and 60, and on and on, if you’re lucky).
To discount older women is, if you’re female, to write off your future self. Yes, we know why you do it. It is born of fear, and societal pressures, and a lot of deep, Freudian stuff to do with motherhood; if you are privileged, it may also have to do with guilt (shout about the Terfs and no one will notice you went to public school). However, our sympathy for you is limited. When you liken feminism to Covid-19 on the grounds that both had “problematic second waves”, you sound very ignorant to us. We wonder where you would be without the Abortion Act, the Equal Pay Act, and the women – your grandmothers among them, I expect – who struggled to make sure their daughters might have all the things they were denied themselves.
Smith’s book has a wide scope: chapters are devoted to beauty and to sexuality, to work and to motherhood, each one unwittingly the realm of the hag, if this is indeed what we’re going to call her (Smith’s use of the term is very different to that of those high-profile female columnists who, having first professed their new-found love for Sylvia Townsend Warner’s fictional witch Lolly Willowes, like to announce that they’re no longer going to shave their armpits). She is as good on the toxic culture of self-improvement as she is on plastic surgery, knowing that, in the end, they amount to the same thing; and she understands that great reckonings are less important in terms of the struggle for equality than the close tracking of the cumulative cost of being female across a lifetime (never mind the pay gap, we need to talk – again – about unpaid labour).
In short, Hags is a book over which older women will bond, adhesive as glue. A few days ago, I had dinner with a friend who’d just read it. I’d never heard her sound so droll or so furious, and it was infectious. But will it change anything, out in the world? It doesn’t seem very likely. Since I began writing this, I’ve received an email from a (young) man who writes to say that he considers my mere existence as beyond the pale. To pinch from Zadie Smith, doubtless this guy regards death, from his youthful vantage point, as appallingly anti-aspirational. But apparently, it will do very well for me: a bag, a bitch, a woman for whom he feels, with every fibre of his being, nothing but disgust.
• Hags: The Demonisation of Middle-Aged Women by Victoria Smith is published by Fleet (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
