The Senior Stigma: Does it Apply to You?

An article in the local newspaper, "Director hopes to fight senior stigma" documents the declining attendance at a local senior center because older people don't want to be labeled "seniors." Imagine that!

Here's the deal at the senior center: For just $25 a year you can partake of the following activities: poker, sewing, pool, ceramics, quilting, doll making, watercolor and bridge. All great stuff. I'd love to learn to play poker or shoot pool and even play bridge but here's the thing: Frankly, I don't want to learn how to do anything in an age-segregated situation. It's depressing. If I want to learn something I'll sign up for a class at the local community college where I'll be exposed to people of all ages and circumstances. When you associate with an age-diverse mix of people you open yourself to growth and it keeps you in touch with the larger world.

But back to the senior center dilemma. In a nutshell, the center's problem with declining membership is that eligibility starts at age fifty. Remember when you had to be sixty-five to be labeled a senior? And then it was sixty, then fifty-five? Now it's age fifty. How can management not understand that's a major problem? I don't know any fifty- year- old woman who thinks of herself as a senior. (Maybe you know fifty year old "seniors" but I don't.) The term "senior" has become a dirty word to many older women, and well it should. It is loaded with too much decline-oriented baggage.

The director of the center says the senior stigma is so serious that groups such as the American Society of Aging and the Gerontological Center of America have been trying for years to find a new word to replace "senior". Why can't we call older people "older people" and let it go at that?

Why do we insist on rounding up mature people, labeling them with restrictive designations and herding them into age-segregated situations?

I have a hot flash for the management of the senior center: The lifespan has increased by 30 years in the past century. Women today at age fifty are not seniors which means not too many women at age fifty are looking to socialize with women much older then themselves. They have little or nothing in common. They are not interested in learning to shoot pool with women their mother's age.

The traditional senior culture is a dinosaur. Why does it continue to exist? Money. Seniorism is very big business. Many people make their living providing useful services as well as services many seniors could provide for themselves. And because so many older women are rejecting the senior label, those who provide senior services try to widen their net by lowering the age of entry into seniorhood. Thankfully, it appears not to be working as well as it used to.

If the senior center cannot find enough people willing to call themselves seniors it needs to shut down and save taxpayer's money. For "card carrying seniors" (those who proudly call themselves seniors) looking for classes and companionship, if they can find their way to a senior center, they can find their way to a local community college where they will find rewarding classes and activities that will put them in touch with the real world and not just clones of themselves.