In June 2010, the FDA recommended against approval of flibanserin. Its assessment was that the benefits did not outweigh the side effects, which included dizziness, nausea, and fatigue, and that the company had not proved that the drug increased women’s desire (though panel members urged Boehringer Ingelheim to keep trying).
Social, commercial, and political forces can have as much to do with decisions about treatments as they do with scientific advances and health concerns. From miraculous hormone therapies to drugs that instill sexual vigor, many of the pitches and promises of middle age medicine echo those of the previous century. What is different today is the existence of better and safer treatments, an established scientific methodology to test them, and the means to communicate the results. What has not changed is the will to believe.
The Flip Side of Self-Improvement
Attempts to remodel middle age have exposed the tension between authenticity and social acceptance, between the democratizing and coercive aspects of the market, between self-help and social responsibility, and between biological determinism and environmental influence.
Distorted information from advertisers and the media promote unrealistic expectations, whether about pills that ignite sybaritic sexual pleasure or sprays that promise to instantly and imperceptibly cover bald spots. Skeptics are chastised for failing to do everything they can to help themselves before it is too late.
Self-improvement is a wonderful tool, helping people to stay sober, finish an education, or feel happier. But there is a flip side: blame. Success may be yours for the taking, but so is failure; the fault does not lie with society, the system, nature, or history—only with you. And because failure is personal, personal effort is expected to fix the problem. If you were unhappy in a job, early advertisements admonished, individual flaws were the cause. Those who fail to take advantage of the commercial aids, as Helena Rubenstein suggested, have no one to blame but themselves. In the 1920s, Williams Shaving Cream told men: “It’s the ‘look’ of you by which you are judged most often.” Listerine advised readers to “suspect themselves first.” Today, the self-help guru Dr. Phil (Philip McGraw) reminds his fans that “there are no victims, only volunteers.”
Refusal to partake in consumerist self-improvement promoted by the Midlife Industrial Complex is perceived as a moral failure rather than as a sign of independent thinking. The motivational entrepreneur Tony Robbins captures the essence of the self-help imperative in his directive: “Commit to CANI—Constant And Neverending Improvement.” The relentless burden to improve becomes more curse than counsel.
Attributing success and failure solely to individual effort can distract people from working on social and political issues, or from pursuing other aspects of well-being. A relentless focus on self-help reinforces the notion that society has no responsibility for any negative treatment of middle-aged people, and no obligation to take any remedial action on a broader scale. Economic restructuring, income inequality, institutionalized layoffs that hit workers in their middle years (not to mention others) are the result of national policies and global forces, but effort is put into individual self-improvement like Botox rather than social change.
There is a built-in contradiction to the logic of self-help. The solutions bought in the marketplace are not the individual’s but those of a copywriter or product manager. In the freewheeling capitalist bazaar, individual power can be turned on itself, allowing others to decide what the model for your self should be. As George Carlin joked: “The part I really don’t understand is if you’re looking for self-help, why would you read a book by someone else? That’s not self-help, that’s help.”
The contradiction is particularly sharp for middle-aged women. As engineers of the feminist movement, they personified self-empowerment, crashing through age-old barriers to positions of power. Their success in the workplace and on college campuses has even sparked debate about affirmative action for men. Yet once they hit middle age, women are under more pressure than ever to conform to narrowing definitions of attractiveness and beauty. Anorexia, bulimia, and other eating disorders have increased enormously among middle-aged women over the past decade. “In our culture, remaining cute throughout midlife is a problem,” Debra Benfield, a clinical nutritionist from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, said. “Our mothers didn’t stay cute. It was okay to look like a mother when you reached fifty.” No more. Even though the extra ten to fifteen pounds that women tend to put on in middle age increases bone density and protects them against fractures, women don’t want them. Jean Kilbourne, the creator of the 1995 documentary Slim Hopes: Advertising and the Obsession of Thinness, observed: “The hope was that as the baby boomers grew old, aging would finally be in, that it would be sexy to have wrinkles and gray hair. But that did not happen.”
Self-help has created a conundrum: at the very moment consumers exercised their power, they also surrendered it.
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Complex Accomplices
Jack Nicholson and Shirley MacLaine in Terms of Endearment, 1983
There are only three ages for women in Hollywood: babe, district
attorney, and Driving Miss Daisy.
—First Wives Club (1996)
Since Harper’s Bazar and other middle-class periodicals began accepting national advertising from cosmetics companies in the 1920s, magazines have been an integral part of the Midlife Industrial Complex. Publications that had virtually ignored the subject of beauty, like Ladies’ Home Journal, redirected their editorial content as they partnered with cosmetics manufacturers. Pages were dedicated to discussing the benefits of soothing balms and eyecatching lip colors, while the staff assisted advertising agencies with market research. Some columnists and editors sold their endorsements to particular brands.
Expert in the language of empowerment, magazines today have perfected the promotional art and dispense advice on how to fend off the indignities of middle age, counseling that the threat of old-style dowdiness is averted by well-timed purchases. Vogue, Bazaar, Glamour, and others produce special aging issues every year. A Vogue cover promises advice to those “19 to 91,” from “conquering your first wrinkle at 29 to the perfect Yoga body at 52.” One writer offers a “lesson in age-appropriate makeup,” confessing that in her mid-40s “the ravages of age” have finally caught up with her. On the “cruel cusp” of 50, she can get help for her “droopy” eyes and “withered” lips by attending a “Fabulous at 40 and Beyond” makeup class. What has this new midlife experience taught her? Makeup is about “confidence and knowing who you are.” Buying into the stereotypical attitude toward an aging face is spun here to represent personal insight and strength. And the story ends happily: “Ever the consumer, I have gleefully purchased a whole new arsenal of products.”
O, The Oprah Magazine seemed to offer a refreshingly frank appraisal in its May 2011 issue, devoted to the theme “Love the Age You Are.” Oprah wrote a rousing editor’s note. “For sure we live in a youth-obsessed culture that is constantly trying to tell us that if we’re not young and glowing and ‘hot,’ we don’t matter,” she declared. “I refuse to let a system, a culture, a distorted view of reality tell me I don’t matter. . . . People who lie about their age are denying the truth and contributing to a sickness pervading our society—the sickness of wanting to be what you’re not.” The message, however, was strangely at odds with some of the inside copy. In “How Do You Feel About Your Face?,” an attractive middle-aged woman with the normal complement of lines, creases, and brown spots was pictured in retouched before-and-after-style photographs to illustrate how five progressively more intensive antiage treatments turned her from young to younger. Choose makeup or Botox or go all the way with a full-scale face-lift.
Men’s magazines offer a similar if toned-down message. The June 2010 issue of Esquire included a year-by-year guide to aging that told readers their forty-second birthday was the time to stop “worrying that you’re starting to look old” and start “doing something about it.” The magazine
suggested Un-Wrinkle Night Cream and Men Age Fighter face moisturizer, and for those with brown spots and wrinkles, chemical peels or Fraxel laser technology.
Advertisers have been extolling “the younger crowd,” as Fatima cigarettes put it, as the standard-bearers of beauty and taste since the twenties. What has changed is a vastly enlarged media that has extended the impact of youth-centered appeals much further, faster, and more powerfully than ever before.
Television Advertising and Market Segmentation
“Change Your Life Television” programming, like the series 10 Years Younger and daytime talk show episodes that promise “New Ways to Look Younger,” directly encourages viewers to purchase self-improving products and treatments. In general, though, television’s partnership with the Midlife Industrial Complex operates more subtly.
The notion of young viewers as a kind of commercial grail has been based on two beliefs long taken as gospel: that buying habits are formed early, and that middle-aged and older consumers have buying patterns as rigid and immovable as the faces on Mount Rushmore. The reasoning holds that capturing an audience when it is young guarantees a lifetime of brand loyalty. That is why a television program with younger viewers can charge more than twice as much for commercials as one with older viewers, and why the phrase “coveted 18- to 49-year-olds” or “18- to 34-year-olds” is practically an amen to every conversation or story written about television viewers. That preoccupation has driven programming toward youthful themes and characters.
Abbe Raven, the president and CEO of A&E Networks, remembers how some in the industry wrote A&E’s obituary in 2002 after the median age of its viewers hit 61. One trade paper “called us ‘a sinking ship.’ Another said we were ‘rearranging chairs on the Titanic.’” Raven was then 48 and the general manager of AETV, a joint venture of the Hearst Corporation, Disney-ABC Television Group, and NBC Universal. Created in 1984, it featured BBC network productions and highbrow arts programming that included telecasts of plays, concerts, operas, and documentaries. Raven, who joined A&E in the mid-eighties answering phones and Xeroxing scripts, quickly concluded that an extreme makeover was needed. “We wanted to be a network that had a mission of welcoming younger viewers, and that’s what we did,” she said shortly after the network embarked on an overhaul.
Attracting younger viewers became the prime directive and reality television seemed a quick way to accomplish the goal at a low cost, Raven told me. In 2004, A&E introduced Growing Up Gotti, starring Victoria, the daughter of the deceased boss of the Gambino crime organization, and Dog, the Bounty Hunter, about a convicted murderer in Honolulu who tracked down bail jumpers.
“Almost overnight, the median age dropped twenty years,” said Raven. In the first two years of the makeover, A&E TV introduced seventeen real-life shows.
Raven has wrought a marketing miracle. But she is not completely convinced that the assumptions on which her success is built are meaningful. Neither the 18-to-34 nor the 18-to-49 grouping has any intrinsic meaning. They sprang nearly five decades ago from the minds of marketers who created these age segments to show off a particular network’s strengths and downplay its weaknesses. The obsession with these younger age groups “is a little outdated,” Raven confessed. “I spend more today than I did at 25. I didn’t own a car at 25.” But Toyota, which advertises on A&E, doesn’t think that way, she continued.
Now in her mid-50s, she has aged out of the demographic group that she so successfully brought to her network.
The hallelujahs to youth grew out of the quest for a competitive advantage. With the advent of television in the 1950s, advertisers could reach directly into people’s living rooms and bedrooms at the same time that postwar affluence was converting them into eager consumers. The fledgling networks wanted to capture as many viewers as possible across generations. No one considered a 25-year-old more valuable than someone 45 or 65. Competition among individual programs intensified when the business model shifted from having a single sponsor (Texaco presents Milton Berle on NBC) to several sponsors. The more viewers a show had, the more a network could charge for each minute of ad time. CBS, the largest and most successful of the networks, adopted a something-for-everyone strategy. The Ed Sullivan Show was the model. Other variety shows were set up to offer a smorgasbord of entertainment for children, parents, and grandparents. Even if you didn’t care for the Beatles, you might stick around for Frank Sinatra. The network stocked its comedies and dramas with characters that spanned different generations. The formula was easily adaptable to a family of monsters (The Munsters) or a family of astronauts (Lost in Space).
The multigenerational strategy made sense for CBS, which was solidly in first place. But what about last place? That was where ABC, the youngest and smallest network, was in the late 1950s and early 1960s. ABC was built on a series of affiliates in large cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, with a somewhat younger audience. Its string of failed and canceled shows gave rise to the joke that the quickest way to end the Vietnam War was to put it on ABC. Burdened by these handicaps, the struggling network was looking for a way to distinguish itself at the same time the trend of sorting consumers into categories was spreading through the industry.
The idea of dividing the population of buyers into separate segments in the 1950s, the art of demographics, was the work of marketing consultant Wendell R. Smith. Born in 1911, Smith grew up in Shenandoah, Iowa, where he worked in his parents’ shoe store after graduating from college. He completed Florsheim Shoes’ trainee program in Chicago and decided to get a PhD at the College of Commerce at the State University of Iowa. During World War II, he joined the Office of Price Administration, later returning to Iowa to teach at the university and, eventually, chair the school’s marketing department. He left the academic world in 1954 after meeting Wroe Alderson, one of the most innovative marketing theorists of the postwar era. At Alderson’s management-consulting firm, Smith became director of research.
It was from this perch that he published a jargon-studded article titled “Product Differentiation and Market Segmentation and Marketing as Alternative Marketing Strategies” in the 1956 Journal of Marketing. Businesses and consultants had practiced segmentation before. In the twenties, the marketing consultant and Ladies’ Home Journal writer Christine Frederick had advised her clients to tailor appeals to different age groups. In the thirties, department stores and clothing manufacturers created the toddler stage by segregating children’s clothing in separate sections, and in the forties the word “teenager” was popularized by marketers who recognized the buying power of these nascent consumers. But Smith put this tactic into a larger conceptual framework. He argued that the strategy of selling the same item to as many people as possible had reached its limit. Consumers had different needs and desires, which businesses had ignored. A better approach was to break down the single mass of consumers into assorted segments and then adapt merchandise accordingly. For the first time, industrial processes had the efficiency and technical ability to diversify a company’s products, which made segmentation profitable in a way that it previously was not.
In Smith’s view, “The emergence of market segmentation as a strategy once again provides evidence of the consumer’s preeminence in the contemporary American economy and the richness of the rewards that can result from the application of science to marketing problems.” Advertisers had adopted a scientific approach when they employed strategic polling. As early as 1940, Elmo Roper modified his job description from “Poll-Taker” to “Marketing Consultant,” telling businesses that survey data could open up the “mass mind” to them. Like the PR mandarin Edward Bernays, who wanted to apply scientific management to marketing, Smith wanted to marry advertising and science. Taylorites would have been proud.
Smith’s ideas rippled through the industry. The Alpha Psi Kappa Foundation, a nonprofit group devoted to educating business leaders, named his piece the most important marketing article of the year. Companies immediately took notice and earn
estly began to cut up the mass of consumers based on income, gender, geography, ethnicity, and age to more precisely target their message to potential buyers. Instead of putting resources into publicizing the benefits of a product, Smith argued that advertisers should create a community of like-minded consumers, and then heavily advertise to that group. As the business historian Richard Tedlow explained: “Segmentation based not on logistics or on some genuine product characteristics, but on demographic and psychographic groupings carved out of the general population is an invention of late 20th century American marketing.”
When ABC decided to pursue a younger market, it had demographics on its side. By 1966, nearly half of the American population was under age 25 and their influence surged through the culture. Soon it became clear that some viewers were more equal than others. Advertisers drilled deeper into the youth market, further elevating viewers in the 18-to-34 bracket.
The spirit of youthful nonconformity and rebellion that the Beats embodied was already infusing advertisements by the late 1950s and early 1960s. There was a qualitative shift in the mid-sixties, however. Rather than target an isolated age group, advertisements proffered a characteristic sought by everyone—youthfulness. Or perhaps it would be better to call it “youthiness,” a cousin of the word “truthiness” coined by the television-show host Stephen Colbert to satirize the political discourse on the Iraq war. Colbert was referring to rhetorical devices that were used to appeal to people’s emotions rather than intellect—“something that seems like truth, the truth we want to exist.” Marketers were not going after an existing youth demographic but manufacturing a segment of consumers who wanted to feel youthful. Pepsi’s slogan was not “the drink for those who are young” but the “drink for those who think young.”
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