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Societal attitudes toward aging are generally highly stereotyped so that Jennifer McLerran, in apparent agreement with Kirkland, warns that, although those attitudes have been largely negative stereotypes, there is an equal danger in the trend toward positive stereotyping which may serve
as evidence of a form of ageism which threatens to propagate public policies and institutional practices which ignore the specific needs of the elderly(McLerran 82). McClaren in Annual Editions: Aging. Ed. Harold Cox. Dushkin: Guilford. 1995. John Bell argues that societal attitudes and stereotypes of old age are rampant on television and although most programming does not
encourage rational discourse on such important issues as health care for the elderly, they do participate in our society’s overall discourse on aging by providing compelling, often unexaminedly accepted images of aging and the elderly, thereby fueling stereotypes about elderly persons and their lives(Bell 92). Bell further states that many portrayals of the elderly on television are sexist and, as McLerran has cautioned, other images of the aged are in the categories of either highly negative or highly positive stereotypes which furnish to the viewers significantly unrealistic perspectives of older Americans (Bell 93). However, Bell does say that, due to a handful of programs featuring elderly individuals in leading roles,
[t]he picture of the elderly on television . . . appears to be far more positive than it was [in 1981]. . . the elderly are still an incomplete presence, and significant problems of role presentation, especially in terms of gender, persist (Bell 93), furthermore, society would be better served if all members of society, including the elderly, were depicted in realistic terms on television (Bell 98). Bell in Annual Editions: Aging. Ed. Harold Cox. Dushkin: Guilford. 1995.
Societal attitudes toward the elderly are often displayed as ageism, the term coined in the late 1960’s by Robert Butler (Kirkland 28) which is inherent in all stereotypes of the elderly and, as Patricia Moore found in her highly publicized and now-famous experiment, is ubiquitous in American society and includes: rudeness, assault, invisibility, patronizing behaviors, false assumptions about physical and/or social competence, victimization, and verbal abuse (Ryan 34-35). Among other ageist stereotypes are the myths of the asexual and uninterested elder (Mayo Clinic 45) which are addressed by Richard Cross who states the following facts:
all older people are sexual (Cross 101) . . . many older people have a need for a good sexual relationship (Cross 101) . . . sexual physiology changes with age (Cross 102) . . . social attitudes [toward sexuality between older adults] are often frustrating (Cross 102) . . . [sexuality must be]used or lost (Cross 103). . older folks do it better (Cross 103). Ageism, as with any negative attitudes toward any members of a minority group is detrimental to society creating obstacles to the development of competent public policy and general human understanding. Ryan, Cross, Butler, Kirkland, Mayo Clinic in Annual Editions: Aging. Ed. Harold Cox. Dushkin: Guilford. 1995.
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