“Even though hearing starts to deteriorate in our 20s, many people think of hearing damage as a sign of old age, and the fear of being seen as old leads people to delay treatment,” Charley Locke writes in The Secret to Getting Men to Wear Hearing Aids. (Note: Atlantic gift links are only good for two weeks.)
Her conclusion: Of course being seen as old is understandably something people recoil at and want to avoid at all possible costs.
Caution: Ageism rant.
“That anyone is straining this much when a fix exists is a testament to how powerful ageism and the pressure to project youth can be,” Locke writes - an encouraging start. But instead of examining this issue a bit more, the rest of the article falls right into the ageism mindset.
“Apple’s bid last week to turn AirPods into starter hearing aids . . . may be the key to softening the stigma around hearing aids,” Locke explains. It could help convince people “that treatment need not be a rite of passage associated with old age.”
In other words: In a society steeped in discrimination against older people, here’s how to make sure as a younger person you’re personally not caught in all that (until you’re old).
Can you imagine saying something like that about other marginalized groups? How of course we need to make a health treatment look, oh, less ethnic? Without further examining that perhaps part of the problem is how everyone views that group?
If younger people start using hearing assistance, Locke concludes, “that could make the shift in identity less stark, easing the way to normalizing hearing aids and changing the idea that they’re for geezers only.”
“Geezers.” “Normalizing.” I guess because those ancient geezers with hearing issues aren’t “normal”, but . . . abnormal? To be avoided? Grotesque?
Does she think no older people who need hearing assistance read the magazine?
Here’s another idea. How about we confront a culture that stigmatizes the most natural part of living: aging?
“It’s time for us to grow up, let go of our desperate need to stay young, and embrace that we age and get old,” writes Tracey Gendron in Ageism Unmaked: Exploring Age Bias and How to End It (I’ve used that quote before. “Once you begin to recognize ageism in all its forms, you will be able to make conscious choices on how you want to experience aging.”
Or as Professor Becca Levy in Breaking the Age Code observes: Once you start looking for ageism, you realize it’s everywhere.
Gendron explained to Liz Seegert at the Association of Health Care Journalists: “Everybody thinks ageism is about older people. We are all aging. Not just in our later years but throughout our lifespan. We fail to see that we are not only setting ourselves up for discriminating against our future selves, but we’re impacting our health in a negative way. The powerful connection people need to make is, we’re all elders in training. When you discriminate against someone based on their older age, you’re setting yourself up for that same level of discrimination.”
We are all elders in training. Too bad we live in a society that signals in countless ways that we should pretend otherwise.
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