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----------------------------------------------- Clothes do not make the woman ----------------------------------------------- Last Saturday as I was saying goodbye to my father at the nursing home, he watched me with unnerving attentiveness while I zipped up my running jacket. In a voice so weak that I could barely hear him, he said, "Do you know how this civilization will end?" I shook my head. His eyes still scanning me, he said, "Women will make themselves so unattractive that the male of the species will refuse to mate." Dad's obviously been hanging around too many women over 30. On the other hand, he's not the first person to link female attire to sexual activity. This behaviour likely goes back as far as human kind. I'll bet cave dwellers fluffed their fur and vocalized grunts in "that special way" to get those biological fires lit. Our Darwinian soul mates, gorillas, behave like that. Humans and gorillas are not equal, I know. Gorillas get off easier. Especially in the fashion department. For one, they don't have to pay to look good. They just pick a few bugs out of their fur and lick themselves. They never have to listen to some pasty-faced guy with a pony tail telling them what's "in" this year. And they never have to hear their off-spring say, "You can't wear that. It's so old-fashioned." Seventy-year-old Carolyn Heilbrun, in her 1997 book, "The Last Gift of Time: Life Beyond Sixty", talks about - among other things - sex and women's clothing. She says fashion has always set women up to appear "thin and helpless". In the world of women's fashion, however, she has recently seen a "straw in the wind". "Designers who refuse comfort of movement and simplicity of dressing to women", she says, "go either bankrupt or back to the drawing board." This feminist, author, literary critic, and scholar, at sixty-two years of age, decided to relinquish what she called "the last popular restraint" in her life. And that is, dresses. She writes, "When, in my young adulthood, newly awakened Freudians droned on about penis envy, I recognised that what I envied in men was not their sexual equipment but their clothes." A new sense of freedom, post-retirement, and a desire to be true to herself, propelled this former English professor to adopt the clothing that had been forbidden in her youth: trousers, shirts, and flat shoes. "Oh, the triumph", she says, "of saying in one's sixties that one will never wear pantyhose again... [I] learned to live with the knowledge that whatever I did and wherever I was going, I would be comfortable from my feet up." Clothing was not the inspiration for "The Last Gift of Time: Life Beyond Sixty". Suicide was. The bookjacket note explains, "When she was a young woman, distinguished author and critic Carolyn Heilbrun made a solemn resolution not to live past 'three score and ten'. Taking her own life at the age of seventy, she reasoned, would give closure to a life well lived." On turning seventy, her perspective changed. The years between sixty and seventy had surprised this wife, mother, and grandmother with "unexpected pleasures - newness and brightness." Today, Ms. Heilbrun says, "I daily chose life the more earnestly because it is a choice... I find it powerfully reassuring now to think of life as borrowed time." Ms. Heilbrun covers the gamut in her latest book. In the chapter entitled "Sex and Romance", she writes, "Us aging women will do well to learn to listen to the young often and earnestly. But we must never, never listen to them on the subject of sex." Married to her husband for over 50 years, she says of marriage, "If one is married to a man, there are certain things to be expected on the debit side, just as, if you have a cat for a pet, you expect the furniture to be clawed." And throughout the book, she reflects on growing older. "The greatest oddity of one's sixties is that if one dances for joy, one always supposes it is for the last time." Despite her earlier assumption that life would have nothing to offer after seventy and she would have nothing to offer it, Carolyn Heilbrun seems to have many reasons still to dance for joy. And, thankfully, she can continue to kick up her feet safe in the knowledge that she will never get blisters. "The Years Ahead" by Hilary Kemsley The Ottawa Citizen Saturday February 21 1998 ----------------------------------------------- janet paterson 50-9 / sinemet-selegiline-prozac almonte-ontario-canada / [log in to unmask]