Sun, Jan 27, 2008 page9

• A younger look reflects insecurity, gives job security

  • By Natasha Singer / NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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  In a new self-help book called How Not to Look Old, chapter headings in screaming capital letters warn readers of the dreaded signs of aging that are to be avoided at all costs.

  "NOTHING AGES YOU LIKE FOREHEAD LINES" admonishes one chapter introduction. Another chapter cautions: "NOTHING AGES YOU LIKE YELLOW TEETH."

  Nothing, apparently, also carbon-dates you like GRAY BROW HAIRS or SAGGING SKIN or RECEDING GUMS, according to the book written by Charla Krupp, a former beauty director at Glamour and who writes a column for More, a magazine for women over 40.

  The book is the latest makeover title to treat the aging of one's exterior as a disease whose symptoms are to be fought to the death or, at least, mightily camouflaged. But the book offers a serious rationale for such vigilant attempts at age control, arguing that trying to pass for younger is not so much a matter of sexual allure as of job security.

  "Looking hip is not just about vanity anymore, it's critical to every woman's personal and financial survival," the book jacket says.

  Promoted recently on Oprah Winfrey's show and Today, the book clearly speaks to the fears of professional obsolescence and economic vulnerability among women over 40, at whom it is aimed. How Not to Look Old made its debut on the New York Times bestseller list last week at No. 8 in the advice and how-to category.

  "Whether we want to admit it or not, in male corporate America we would rather have a cute, sexy 30-year-old working for us than a 50-year-old with gray hair who has let herself go and looks out of it, not in the swing of it, like a nun," said Krupp, a blonde who blurs her age by personifying her advice about donning highlights, bangs, heels and sheer lip gloss.

  After all, nothing ages you like dark lipstick.

  "My book is hitting a nerve because I am giving not looking old a spin as if your life depended on it," Krupp said in an interview last week.

  Many people would shun a book if it were titled "How Not to Look Jewish" or "How Not to Look Gay" because to cater to discrimination is to capitulate to it. But the success of How Not to Look Old indicates that popular culture is willing to buy into ageism as an acceptable form of prejudice, even against oneself.

  "Ageism is one of the last frontiers of discrimination where people think that a way around it is not to be seen to age, but we would never say that women should try to look or act more male in order to avoid sexism," said Molly Andrews, a psychologist who is a director of the Center for Narrative Research at the University of East London.

  Andrews is the author of a 1999 paper entitled "The Seductiveness of Agelessness," published in Ageing & Society, in which she argued that encouraging people to mask their age constitutes a form of ageism in itself.

  "People who are held up as models of aging well are those who are not seen to age," she said.

  The success of How Not to Look Old comes on the heels of disparaging comments about Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton by radio provocateur Rush Limbaugh, who last month said: "Will Americans want to watch a woman get older before their eyes on a daily basis? And that woman, by the way, is not going to want to look like she's getting older, because it will impact poll numbers."

  Although Limbaugh's comments drew widespread criticism, they underscored the idea that older women in the workforce are vulnerable to age prejudice.

  In one study on hiring practices, for example, a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology applied for entry-level jobs in Boston and St. Petersburg, Florida, by sending out 4,000 resumes as a female job applicant; the resumes varied the year of high school graduation, which dated the job seeker as being from 35 to 62.

  The study, published in 2005 by the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, found that younger women were 40 percent more likely to receive an offer of a job interview than women over 50; a woman over 50 in Boston would have to send in 27 resumes just to get one job interview, where a younger woman would have to send in only 19, the study said.

  "Seeming young can definitely help your economic status, and that pays the rent," said Joanna Lahey, the author of the study, who is now an assistant professor of public policy at Texas A&M.

  A half-dozen women who were interviewed for this article said that they had chosen to use age-control techniques either because their jobs demanded it or because they simply disliked the physical changes attendant with age.

  "The only way to age gracefully in my business is to die young like Natalie Wood or James Dean, but Shelley Winters or Marlon Brando could not get a job on the Food Network right now," said Joy Behar, a talk-show host on The View on ABC.

  Behar suggested that working women today are held to beauty norms that are more stringent than in previous generations because of trends in longevity, fitness and cosmetic medicine.

  "I'll do Botox and Restylane injections, but my motto is, `I won't go under.' I won't do anything that involves anesthesia," she said.

  Indeed, the real trend behind How Not to Look Old is the rebranding of aging from biological inevitability to outmoded lifestyle option.

  And even for women who said their jobs had not dictated the choices they made about their looks, techniques to mask their age may improve their currency.

  "In 1985, I saw a tape of myself where my eyes were puffy," said Faye Wattleton, the president of the Center for the Advancement of Women, a nonprofit group in Manhattan. "I looked very tired and bedraggled and not as youthful as I would like to have been."

  Wattleton said she had an eye lift at that time, followed about five years ago by a lower face-lift.

  "I didn't do it because I was worried I would lose my job," she said. "I did it to make a better appearance, a fresher appearance, a more youthful appearance."

  Wattleton, 64, described people's outward aging and their decisions to ameliorate it as personal choices that others should not judge.

  "Being a person who has had plastic surgery and goes to the gym five days a week to work my muscles up so they don't look atrophied as a 60-year-old, I don't disparage people who want to maintain their appearance," said Wattleton, a former director of Planned Parenthood. "But what I don't want is a society that tells me I have to."

  Krupp argues that economic pressures require most women to adopt age-management techniques. As her book puts it: We cannot afford to let ourselves go.

  "What are we going to do if we have to enter the workforce at a ripe old age?" Krupp asked last week. "Out of necessity, you can disguise the age you are by looking younger, hipper and fresher."

  She added that Americans of one class, religion or ethnicity have often tried on other identities if they appeared to confer some professional or economic advantage.

  "There was a book on how not to look Jewish," Krupp said. "It was called The Preppy Handbook and it was a bestseller."
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