Sophie Radice
Body Language
About 10 years ago I remember my mother telling me that she and another very good-looking friend in her early fifties had decided that they had reached the state of invisibility. I didn’t understand because at the time I was more concerned with different kinds of female invisibility, the kind where you take your clothes off and the man you live with doesn’t lift his eyes from his book.
Now a decade on I am beginning to understand what my mother meant. My own visibility is becoming a bit blurry. I used to be able to turn it on and off at will but now I feel as though I’m going permanently out of focus. I’ve started to notice small things, like men in cars not stopping for me on zebra crossings, and not looking up as I enter a room.
I am obviously travelling fast towards the moment Germaine Greer described as “when the older woman suddenly realises that she can no longer trade on her appearance, something which she has done unconsciously all her life”.
My mother is a good example of an “unconscious trader” because there has never been anything about the way she dresses or behaves which seemed designed to attract the attention of men.
Nevertheless, watching a video recently that she’d made of our childhood holidays I saw playing with us on various beaches a woman of outstanding beauty and grace. There was no doubt about it: Mum was a babe. That’s why she noticed when male eyes stopped noticing her. And although she had never particularly sought their gaze she was not quite sure about how she felt now it was gone. It was a noticeable shift in her life, touched with a sense of regret, a sort of “oh well, alright, I’ve got to that stage then”.
The episode that really made me think about my own impending invisibility was a holiday with another family, including a girl of 15 and her friend. Acutely aware of the gaze of others, these young teenage girls were both excited and disturbed by the amount of male admiration they received. Although perfectly ordinary-looking, they were kind and innocent, yet sexually curious and miniskirt-wearing all of which had local men of all ages salivating with hope and desire.
The girls would listen politely to the chat-ups, and then when asked if they wanted to come home/go clubbing/have a snog they would run away or ask me to help them disengage from an awkward situation. I was happy to act as chaperone because I remember how confusing it all was. I was also rather bemused to realise that I had come this far from being, like them, the centre of testosterone-fuelled attention.
The novelist Esther Freud, whose novel Peerless Flats has a young teenage heroine unable to decide whether she wants to embrace the visibility her sister so obviously enjoys or hide away, says: “I felt awkward with that kind of attention when I was a teenager and in my early twenties. I wanted people to have to look beyond my appearance and make an effort to find something deeper and more interesting within. Later you can learn to be visible when you want to be and invisible when you need to be without having to wear camouflage.”
For similar reasons, perhaps, striking women are able (after the initial feelings of surprise and regret) to see some advantages in moving to this different stage of life. There is a freedom in not being watched and in being able to do some watching. As the writer Carolyn Heilbrun put it, “to relearn seeing and to forget being seen”.
Others who were less visible when they were young find the shift works in reverse. The actress Liz Smith, who was not taken on by an agent until she was 50, always “crept around and slipped into roles, never playing the romantic lead”. Now she has more work than she has ever had in her life.
But if you were once defined as “a beauty” it can be especially hard to fade from sight. Cora Whitely is 70. “I modelled when I was young and married two wealthy older men who were obsessed by the way I looked. I noticed that I had become invisible when I was about 50 and it took me about five years to get over it.”
Gina Duncan (54), who has two teenage daughters, says: “I might not have minded so much if my girls’ peak had not come at the same time that I was becoming menopausal. Sometimes when I walk down the street with them men seem to bang into me, to push me aside, in an effort to take another look at my daughters and that can be demoralising.”
Was that what it was all about? When my friends’ mothers used to scream about their “tarty clothes” and tell them that they couldn’t go out looking like that, was it simply a mixture of fear and jealousy?
Looking at my six-year-old daughter I feel pride at her beauty and yet don’t want too many people to comment on it in case she becomes self-conscious and self-regarding. I don’t want her to see herself through other people’s eyes, to become what John Berger described as a woman who watches herself being looked at “the surveyor of woman in herself is male; the surveyed female an object of vision; a sight”.
I hope also that when my daughter hits her visible teenage years I will not be one of those mothers who borrows her clothes or flirts with her boyfriend. Please let me be a gracious mother like my own, ready to pass on the baton of visibility while helping her by my own example to see that just because you stop being visible you do not have to disappear.
As my 85-year-old grandmother, who demands attention by the sheer force of her personality, said: “Invisible? Me? I don’t know what you mean, darling.”