How I Became Invisible (and why I like it)

Everybody knows that, over a “certain age,” women become invisible. Many voices decry the fact, lamenting our culture’s blended misogyny and youth worship with its consequent ageism. When I was in my twenties and thirties, and even into my forties, I saw the invisibility cloak thrown over women over fifty (forty?) as an insult — a slight to be fought — and I fought it by intentionally smiling at and greeting the grey and the slightly stooped women I would pass on the street.

I occasionally noticed that one of these women did something I can only describe as twinkling at me as I said my ostentatious hello, but I didn’t give the reaction much thought. After all, I was fighting whatever good fight I had set up in my own mind.

Now that I have reached my own cronehood, at 65, I think I know what that twinkle realły meant. Rather than some spark of gratitude for being acknowledged in a youth-obsessed world, it was a silent giggle at my ignorance.

These old women, a class in which I now happiły include myself, had learned the freedom and delight of being invisible. Far from feeling ignored or slighted, we go our ways unfettered by the expectations of youth and the general tribe of men. Maybe we have a partner who is a man, and maybe we don’t. If we do, he’s likely to be a man whose delight in us grows naturally out of our own delight, our own choices.

For example, it is fashionable just now to have grey hair. Young women have the color stripped from theirs and grey…