Older Adults in Films: The Invisible Older Woman

According to the Nielsen Company’s market research, Americans increased their television viewing in 2010 to an astounding average of 34 hours per person per week. In addition, that same year, more than three out of four Americans went to the movies at least once. Latinos, followed by Blacks, went more often than Whites.

But how much does our fascination with media shape our views of reality?  The content of the tv shows and films we love provides a distorted representation of our society. The impression we receive is that older adults are the exception. Although prime time television portrays many young adults (20–34 years old), significantly fewer older adults appear on screen. Older adults make up about 3% of television characters, but comprise almost 15% of the total population. This finding is consistent throughout the short history of television.  The same pattern emerges when we examine television advertising, game shows and cartoons. Fewer than one in 20 of all characters is aged 55 years and older. Even in soap operas—typically replete with older-looking actors—older adults are still under-represented, although appearances go up to 8%. The same is true for magazine advertisements, where older adults comprise only about 6% of the images. It seems that the pictorial media is shunning older adults.

And women fair much worse than men. Older men appear as much as ten times as frequently as older women, with a similar pattern among characters in children’s television cartoons. Approximately 77% of older characters on those shows are male. As for ethnicity, a 2002 study that examined 835 television characters found only four African American characters over the age of 60, and other ethnic groups were almost totally absent from the 60+ age group. They are have become invisible in television and film.

In America, advertising that portrays older adults overwhelmingly associates them with health-related products. Interestingly, seniors appear even if these products are for ailments that are not particularly age-related (e.g., allergy medications). In advertisements related to Alzheimer’s disease, long-term institutionalization, and loss of bladder control, older adults are invariably shown as being happy, smiling and generally being amiable.

Television and film executives argue that older adults do not comprise their primary target audiences. They argue that older clients stick with the same products. But do not tell that to Lexus. By providing an excellent quality product and customer support, older people did switch brands. Perhaps older adults are waiting for the right quality product. Moreover, one look at television will tell you that perhaps that product is not out yet. Nevertheless, perhaps there is a possibility with film.

The Coming of Age film festival—which première’s its second year on January 12, 2012 at Balboa Park’s Museum of Photographic Arts (MOPA)—will highlight how some films can represent older adults realistically. The champion of older adults, Florida Senator Claude Pepper once lamented: “Are the elderly the lepers of television, ostracized from public view?” 

Not yet.  The Coming of Age festival is addressing that imbalance, one film at a time. To book free seats, call MOPA at  619-238-7559 or visit their website at www.mopa.org.

Mario Garrett, Ph.D., is a professor of gerontology at San Diego State University and is currently on sabbatical at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He can be reached at mariusgarrett@yahoo.com

Seeing through Ages

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One of our greatest fears is becoming dependent. Blindness and vision impairment—which increase with age—directly contribute to dependency, presenting challenges to families and caregivers.

National studies indicate that vision loss is associated with diabetes, heart disease, stroke, death, falls and injuries, depression, and social isolation. It also compromises our quality of life because it diminishes our ability to read, drive, walk, watch entertainment and participate actively in visual art. Eventually vision loss and blindness isolates us from others.

Vision impairment comprises an important public health issue for older adults, affecting one out of six older Americans.  Vision impairments double in persons aged 80 years compared with persons ten years younger. Although more than half of those with impaired vision could improve their eyesight by using prescription lexes, others experience underlying diseases that can result in blindness.

Because eyes are such refined organs in the body, they are prone to damage through increase in blood pressure. Anything that contributes to blood pressure can therefore directly cause blindness—smoking, high cholesterol, being overweight and diabetes. These serious diseases include diabetic retinopathy, cataract, glaucoma, and macular degeneration. Vision problems might start slowly, but they have serious consequences that can lead to blindness. In many cases, blindness can be prevented through early detection and treatment.

Cataracts, the most common eye disease, afflict nearly one in three older adults. A cataract is a clouding of the eye’s lens. More than 15 million Americans aged 65 years or older have a cataract in one or both eyes. By 2020, the estimated number of people aged 40 or older with cataracts is expected to rise to more than 30 million.

Afflicting one in ten older adults, glaucoma and age-related macular degeneration (AMD) are the second most common type of eye diseases among older adults.

Glaucoma is caused by fluid pressure which damages the eye’s optic nerve. Both slow- and fast-developing (painful) glaucoma characterize this disease which is more prevalent among Blacks and Latinos. The number of glaucoma cases specifically among Latinos aged 65 years or older who have diabetes is expected to increase 12-fold by 2050.

On the other hand, AMD affects the central part of the retina (macula), occurring in both wet and dry forms. Wet AMD occurs when blood vessels start leaking under the macula, impairing the senses. While dry AMD—the most common in about 90% of cases—is where the macula thins over time.  AMD is more likely to affect Whites and accounts for half of all blindness among White Americans.  AMD cases are expected to double by 2050, increasing to 17.8 million.

Among older adults who reported moderate or extreme vision loss, one out of four reported that cost prevented them from seeking eye care. In some cases a balanced nutritional supplement can save your eyesight. Older adults should know that Medicare pays for glaucoma screening, cataract removal, and treatment of macular degeneration in some cases. Although Medicare does not pay for routine eye examinations or glasses, numerous agencies offer free or reduced-rate examinations. Your local adult enrichment center should have more details. Eye Care America (http://www.eyecareamerica.org/), run by volunteer ophthalmologists, offers no cost screenings to those who qualify.

Aristotle and Cool Old Age

Science does not have to look to ancient Greece for ideas. Even so, some of the assumptions that we have about aging are ancient. Ask anyone what they think about getting older and you will notice that we have not progressed very much recently—the central theme that emerges about aging involves attrition and running out of juice.

The idea of attrition started with Aristotle (384-322 BC) and was later adopted by the Romans, Muslim and Western European medical establishments.  It became the basis for our early understanding of how the human body works.  Essentially, Aristotle held that the human body was filled with four humors: black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood. Any imbalance in these four humors resulted in diseases and disabilities. Aging is caused by the drying out and cooling of these humors. This idea had a wide following, and involved numerous hot baths and saunas in order to maintian our wetness and innate heat. 

Surprisingly, older adults do have slightly lower temperatures. The 98.6° F benchmark for body temperature comes from Carl Wunderlich—a 19th-century German physician.  In 2005,  Irving Gomolin from Winthrop University Hospital in New York, found that older people have lower temperatures than this average. In a study of 150 older people with an average age of 80-plus, they found the average temperature to be 97.7°. What is fascinating is that the older you are, the lower your body temperature.

This finding does not by itself dispute Aristotle’s. Since older people are more likely to die, then a decline in temperature would seem to indicate that their “innate heat” is ebbing.  But recent 2006 research, led by Italian researcher Bruno Conti at the Scripps Research Institute, has shown that a decline in body temperature is beneficial. The study found that mice who had lower core body temperatures lived 12% (male) to 20% (female) longer than mice with higher core body temperatures. The difference in temperatures between "cold" and "normal" mice was 0.5-0.9 F (0.3-0.5 C), which is the same difference between the average person and older adults.

The science behind this anomaly is just now becoming clear to us. One of the known ways to increase longevity is to restrict our calories. Caloric restriction increases life- and healthspan in all sorts of animals.  Several studies have reported that animals on reduced calorie diets also had a lowering of core body temperature.

It could be that lowering of the body core temperature is one way of slowing the aging process. Thus the reason older adults may have lower body temperature is not because they are dying, but because it is nature’s strategy for keeping them alive longer. In the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging, men with a core body temperature below the average (median) lived significantly longer than men with body temperature above the average. Being cool is, well, cool.

Cicero and the Attitude of Aging

With all the scientific interest in anti-aging products, and all the money spent on procedures to make us look younger, healthier and more vibrant, a single reality still stands at the end of the day:  Aging is inevitable.  Being conscious of this will save you a lot of heartache (and money.)

Researchers and authors continue to discuss how best to describe ideal aging.  From Successful Aging, to Healthy Aging, to what we now call Conscious Aging, the central theme is to accept our limitations but to not let them determine who we are.

In contrast to philosophers who came before him, Cicero (106-40BC) was the first person to acknowledge aging as a period of diminished abilities but concluded that this—by itself—was not negative. Cicero had in fact articulated our current concept of psychological aging—of being conscious of the aging process and adapting accordingly.

While everyone around him searched for the holy grail of anti-aging, Cicero advocated acceptance. Reflecting his training as a diplomat, he argued that old age was a time of transition, not despair. Even though we might withdraw from active pursuits, he argued, older adults can still fulfill advisory functions. Cicero championed the belief that old age was not a disease—that we should accept our limitations and actively engage in those activities which we can still perform. It’s all about attitude. Make sure that your cup is half full.

In 2002, in a now classic study by two Yale professors, Becca Levy and Martin Slade, supported Cicero’s ideas. The researchers surveyed 660 individuals aged 50 and older on their perceptions about aging. Twenty three years later, they found that older individuals with more positive self-perceptions of aging—recorded 23 years earlier—lived 7.5 years longer than those with less positive self-perceptions of aging. This advantage remained after age, gender, income, loneliness, and functional health were included as possible factors. The findings suggest that self-perceptions influence longevity.

This year a new test is set to hit the market in Britain that measures a person’s telomeres. Telomeres are structures found on the tips of chromosomes that correlate with how fast a person is aging biologically. Predicted by Leonard Hayflick—before their discovery—telomeres tell us how many times our cells have already divided (and because the number of times is finite, we can tell how many times they can continue to replicate until they die).  Will such a test change how you behave?

It is likley that it will in a posive way. In 2005 Chris O’Brien surveyed over 3500 individuals in Britain, on how long they expected to live. On average—compared to local statistics—they under-estimated. Males estimated that thy will die 4.62 years earlier and women 5.95 years earlier than they are likely to die.  In this case, undertaking the blood test would improve our expectation of living longer. Attitude determines not just our longevity but it makes living more than just an expresssion of our telomeres.

Taoist Orgasms and Older Adults

Sometimes we joke about how other civilization, or other ages, looked upon old age. Since we have “medical-ized” aging and death, we have shielded ourselves from experiencing other ways of understanding aging. For many of us, aging refers just to the physical and mental breakdown of the body. But before modern science, the only way to learn about aging was through philosophy and religion.

Chinese philosophers probably thought about longevity and aging before anyone else. Early Taoist thinking—some 2000 BC—contended that there is an energy substance contained in the human body known as Jing—and that once your Jing has been expended, you will die. This comprised a simple but compelling explanation. Jing could be lost from the body in a variety of ways—most notably through bodily fluids.

Taoists embraced extensive practices to stimulate/increase and conserve their bodily fluids. The fluid that contained the most Jing was male semen.  Taoist men attempted to decrease the frequency of, or totally avoided ejaculation—in some cases redirecting the ejaculation—in order to conserve their life essence.  Others reportedly recycled and composted their own fecal matter as fertilizer for their crops—human manure. The Jing was the most precious of all substances because it was life personified.

With women surviving longer than men, later Taoist teachings needed to completely ignore females in order to make assertions about longevity hold. In addition to this major omission, recent studies also debunk the myth of a Jing. Studies published in the last few years show that sex, ejaculation and orgasms have the opposite effect of Taoist predictions.

In 2011 Howard Friedman correlated the “orgasm adequacy of wives” with longevity. Using data gathered from a group of 1,500 California students in the 1920’s—and following them throughout their lives—Friedman was able to correlate their sexual activities with longevity. The results were exciting. Women who had more orgasms during intercourse tended to live longer than their less responsive peers. 

For men, a 2009 British study interviewed nearly 918 men aged 45 to 59 about their sexual frequency. Ten years later, when all death records were forwarded to the researchers, they measured the subjects’ life spans. The findings were conclusive. Men who had two or more orgasms a week had died at a rate half that of the men who had orgasms less than once a month. Ejaculating more than 100 times a year increases life expectancy by 5-8 years.

The causes of longevity might include more than sexual climax. Although the climax by itself has positive neural and chemical effcts on the body, it may be that the pre-existing conditions for sex are equally or more important.  Conditions which allow for sex—and its fulfillment—to take place might be more important than the climax itself. These factors may include being healthy, gregarious, active, a certain level of hygiene and cognitive functioning, physical capacity, as well as certain level of social adaptness. All, by themselves, may comprise strong correlates of longevity, without the climax. However, these studies do debunk myths that conserving the Jing will promote living longer.