GROWING OLD – DISABILITIES
Many of the physical and mental disabilities attributed to old age are due more to society’s perception of ageing and to our institutions, which classify people as old, than to the biology of ageing.
In our society, old age begins at 65 – the usual retirement age. You may not feel old at 65, but you are classified as old, and it takes a good deal of mental fortitude to escape the belief that you are old. This is not helped by the ambivalent attitudes that many people -young, middle aged, and old – have to old age. Because of ‘conditioning’ during their formative years many people think of old age as a shameful period of life. They treat old people as if they belong to a sub-human species.
Along with children, blacks, and women, old people are alternately patronized and mocked. If old people show the same sort of feelings, needs, and desires as younger people, society regards them with disgust. In our youth-oriented society, young people are expected to enjoy sex, but the idea of old people caressing, copulating, and enjoying their sexuality is considered obscene and repugnant. An older man is accused of being ‘lecherous’, an older woman of being ‘shameless’. Younger people may properly feel the pangs of jealousy, in older people such feelings are considered to be absurd. Young people fall in and out of love; sexual love in the old is considered revolting. Young people are expected to show passion and be violent, in old people such acts are seen as ludicrous.
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