Markets 
Even for successful, professional older women, decades of being exposed to messages about how they should look, what they should weigh and diet culture add up, says Clare Loewenthal.
She knows women like this who have had full and prosperous lives, yet are “still at war with their bodies”, now perhaps even more so as the multibillion-dollar longevity, menopause and anti-ageing supplements industries boom.
For women now in their 60s, like Loewenthal, theirs is the first generation to have lived through long-term mass advertising and media content about the ideal woman’s form, the evolution of commercial weight loss, and the birth of social media – all of which has left its mark.
The number of older women calling the helpline of national body image and eating disorder support organisation Butterfly Foundation has increased steadily, its data shows. A study it commissioned and published on Tuesday also suggests older women are now more dissatisfied with their bodies than younger women.
“How are we feeling? Not good,” says Loewenthal, who spent much of her career as a business writer.
“Part of it is decades of these messages we’ve been getting that are at odds with a woman’s body as she matures; our bodies are built for change – we grow up, have children and go through menopause, things change but beauty ideas are static.
“They are unachievable. Women reach their 40s, 50s and 60s and are trying to achieve the impossible, and it’s overlaid at a point in our lives where there are many different influences.”
These can include still being actively engaged in parenting young adults, caring for elder relatives, maintaining careers and attempting to manage personal health and appearance concerns.
“I know women spending an enormous amount of time, energy and money trying to stave off ageing, and actually, you can’t,” Loewenthal says. “There’s the wellness movement, the longevity movement and then there’s what’s happening to our bodies – and that can be a troublesome mix.”
The small-sample research commissioned by Butterfly Foundation, using a survey of 1005 Australians, suggested body confidence declined with age and that while 20 per cent of Gen Z (aged 17 to 30) and Gen Y (aged 31 to 45) respondents felt very confident about their bodies, just 9 per cent of those aged 61 to 80 (Baby Boomers) did.
While men were twice as likely to say they feel very confident, women were twice as likely to say they felt “very under-confident”, the research found.
Professor Jayashri Kulkarni, director of Monash University’s HER Centre and a women’s mental health expert, says that as the protective psychological effect of female sex hormones recedes in midlife, women who have had previous issues with eating disorders or other mental health problems might experience recurrence.
That proportionally more women are separating or divorcing in midlife and beyond than in the past, known as “grey divorce”, is also contributing to heightened concerns about body image in mature women, she says.
“In the past, it [the lack of understanding of how older women feel] was a case of if you don’t look, you don’t find,” she says. “There are a number of things midlife women experience that have gone unnoticed until recent times.”
While it has been a big positive to see more models in their 60s on runways, and impressive that older fitness influencers are gaining large online followings, comparison is an issue across age groups and increased visibility of age-defying role models puts extra pressure on older women, Kulkarni says.
“We need to be realistic that body shapes do change over the years and that is to be celebrated, not surgically altered or somehow discarded.”
Senior lecturer and clinical psychologist at the University of Canberra Dr Vivienne Lewis has studied body image issues for midlife women. She says it is difficult to know if body dissatisfaction in that age group had increased because older women are traditionally not included in research.
“For decades, researchers simply weren’t asking women in midlife and later life about these experiences, so we have limited historical data for comparison. I do think there are several reasons why body image concerns may be becoming more prominent.”
These include contemporary midlife women having spent decades in an appearance-focused culture and in continual exposure to thinness promotion, and these messages accumulate. Women in their 40s to 60s are also now active social media users and are exposed daily to filtered images, cosmetic procedures, weight transformations and anti-ageing messages.
That ageing is portrayed as a problem to be fixed “creates the impression that ageing itself is somehow a personal failure rather than a biological process”, Lewis says.
Increasing visibility and access to GLP-1 weight-loss medications such as Ozempic and Mounjaro are also contributing to comparison and self-criticism.
Butterfly Foundation’s Melissa Wilton says the organisation is preparing a targeted support campaign for older women, and on Tuesday launched content promoting intergenerational conversations about body image and health.
“The latest weasel word is ‘longevity’, and that we all need to be spending under the guise of it, but that is just another way to make money from older people,” she says.
Wilton says widespread visibility of other people’s fast weight loss produced by use of GLP-1 medications has also influenced some older women’s ideas of body standards, and the “looksmaxxing” trend – which began with young men but is spreading to women – is filtering up to older demographics.
Loewenthal, 66, lived through an eating disorder in her late adolescence and says it was only recently that she realised having a harsh and self-critical attitude to her body would reduce the quality of the rest of her life, and took steps to change her attitude to herself.
She has become an advocate for starting conversations about body image among an age group that feels they can’t be open about it because after she realised that “while I was giving any energy to this internal struggle, I couldn’t be out living the life I wanted”.
“It means changing the internal messages we have, the way we talk to ourselves,” she says. “It’s hard to find self-compassion when you’re looking at things and only seeing what’s wrong with them.”
Start the day with a summary of the day’s most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign up for our Morning Edition newsletter.
Wendy Tuohy is a senior writer focusing on social issues and those impacting women and girls.Connect via X or email.From our partners
Read the full article here
