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Gen X Women Feel Excluded From Body Positive Movement | Time
Gen X Women Feel Excluded From Body Positive Movement | Time
But for the women of Generation X — those of us born between millennials and baby boomers, now in our late 30s to early 50s — the loud roar of body positivity is more like a whisper. It’s like we don’t exist.
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Ladies’ Night: Carolita Johnson
Who: Carolita Johnson
Age: 53
Location: Kingston, NYWhere you may know her from: Cartoons in The New Yorker, illustrations and writing in The Hairpin, including a great tale “The Evolution of Ape-Face Johnson,” and a new series of illustrated essays for Longreads.
Carolita was kind enough to do an email interview way back in April, right before I moved, and I’m finally getting settled in enough to focus on “The Middle Ages” again. You’ve been warned!
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Parker Posey Still Loves Generation X
Parker Posey Still Loves Generation X
You don’t find that there are many movies made with women like you in mind? There’s so many women out there that are like, “I’m like that!” They like the Christopher Guest movies. Or they’re living in Portland or Seattle or Austin or New Orleans or New York City or Silver Lake and Eagle Rock. I’d love to see the story of those people. Or people that are more like us. Because I love my generation. I love Generation X.
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Is this a gray-haired woman being featured in an Instagram ad? I actually use Betterment so I feel even better about this.
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Paydirt
When: Saturday, 6pm
Age appropriate? I didn’t even take notes after I saw a couple with mylar balloons spelling out 4 and 0 across the street. I knew where they were going.
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Skyline Tavern
When: Wednesday, 5:30pm
Skyline Tavern is a faux roadhouse that used to be a real roadhouse and has a similar vibe to the Lighthouse in that it doesn’t attract a super young crowd, seems blue collar on the surface but is adjacent to very expensive properties in the woods.
Age appropriate? Yes.
On this visit, a blonde, tattooed woman who appeared to be in her 30s was wearing a t-shirt that said “grandma” in the cooper font and actually said aloud, “I’m 42” in a discussion with friends about New Portland and Old Portland. She also said, “Once you turn 40…” and did a raspberry (why do people call that a raspberry?) but I didn’t catch the end of the sentence.
On a subsequent visit, the band setting up had two members who were women around 50.
Also, the bartender said she had my tattoo that’s been on my upper right arm for 24 years. I’ve never encountered anyone with this tattoo of a stylized ‘60s (?) cat face that I saw in a book of logos in the early ‘90s and is now dated, faded and is probably mistaken for that “Glitter Kitty” that was ubiquitous on stickers around that same time even though no one has ever said that to me. I kind of didn’t believe it, but sure enough she had a smaller version of mine on her shoulder. She said it was a logo from a cafe in Bellevue, Washington and she got it around 1994 when she was a senior in high school. I graduated college that year, so that’s practically a different generation, but upon further reflection that would make her around 42.
As much as I want to resist it, I’m very much a product of Old Portland.
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Sandy Hut
When: Thursday, 4:47pm
Sandy Hut is one of those dive bars that kept the name but in the last decade was revitalized into a “dive.” It does not make any sense that it lacks a website.
Even though I used to live one block from it, I never went because it was 1990 and I wasn’t drinking age yet. My mom and her 27-year-old boyfriend frequented it, however. In fact, the eventual drunk-driving step-dude totaled my high school VW that my mom seized under eminent domain right near the Sandy Hut. When she answered the phone after the accident, it was the first time I had ever heard her say “fuck.” The second and last time was when I managed to get her car towed in the middle of the night.
Age appropriate? Yes. Young creative types now frequent it but there are also plenty of older folks. In fact, I was meeting a co-worker who is probably somewhere in her late 50s and lives in San Francisco but has a house in Portland. At this early hour, at least half of the patrons were over 40 and one woman was easily 60s, super skinny in a black summer dress and fedora, giving off beach goth vibes.
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Exclusive: June 2018 cover star Zadie Smith weighs in on the great age debate
Exclusive: June 2018 cover star Zadie Smith weighs in on the great age debate
I grew up in a culture suspiciously eager to convince me that an 80-year-old woman with a 20-year-old man was at the best comically grotesque, at the worst, some form of perversity, while Chaplin and his youthful loves, by contrast, were an example of the ‘agelessness’ of men. But the truth is — as I think those teenage boys suspected — age exists for us all. It comes to you whether you believe in it or not. And I am now very grateful to be in a body that reminds me every day of this simple human truth. Which is not to say age does not bring me sadness, that I don’t sometimes mourn for my 27-year-old self, nor miss a certain version of my face, breasts, legs or teeth. I feel all of that natural, human sadness. And I do all the usual things — exercise, eat decently, dress optimistically — in the hope of slowing the inevitable process. But there are limits to that hope: limits like the menopause, limits like the end of my fertility. And thank God for them, because hope without limit is another word for delusion.
I can’t imagine discussing Charlie Chaplin with boys as a teen, but I’m no Zadie Smith.
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Old Slightly Suburban Semi-Pro
I was recently called a “yuppie” online by a vitriolic stranger because I have enough money for a downpayment to buy a house in Portland, my hometown. Which first off, lol to using yuppie in 2018, but also I’m flattered that anyone would mistake me for young, as I am only a month away from 46. (Professional is also debatable.)
The last time I was called a yuppie was around 1999 on Chowhound when I said there weren’t any good restaurants in Ridgewood, Queens. It’s hard to imagine Ridgewood in 1999, but take my word for it.
Oh, I shouldn’t have to even say this, but people buying homes in non-hip, non-gentrified, far-flung neighborhoods in Portland isn’t the cause of rampant homelessness.