新视野大学英语43读写教程单词表】unit8(2)

Offering a more scientific interpretation, Brian Newman, a British surgeon who has studied Imedeen, explains that the compound has a specific action as food is digested, preventing the destruction of essential proteins in the diet and allowing them to be absorbed in a state more easily utilized by the skin.

On the other hand, a different doctor who specializes in the study of the skin is unimpressed by the data and questions the methods used in the study. In addition, the medical journal in which the study of Imedeen is published is a "pay" journal — one in which any studies can be published for a fee. According to the doctor, any attempt to play by the medical world's rules of research has been a failure.

Such controversy is familiar ground to Brian Newman, who used a type of oil from flowers for years before it was generally accepted.
In no way discouraged, he insists the most important point to establish is that Imedeen actually works.

Ultimately, however, the real issue

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is why we are so afraid of wrinkles in the first place. Sadly, youth and beauty have become the currency of our society, buying popularity and opportunity. The value of age and experience is denied, and women in particular feel the threat that the visible changes of ageing bring. According to one psychological expert, when men gain a little gray hair, their appeal often increases because, for them, age implies power, success, wealth, and position. But as a woman's power is still strongly perceived to be tied up with the ability to bear children, ageing demonstrates to the world her decline, her uselessness for her primary function. Wrinkles are symbolic of the decline of her ability to reproduce.

Until we appreciate the true value of age, it is difficult to do anything but panic when the signs of it emerge. While the media continues to show men of all ages alongside young, smooth-skinned women as a vision of success, women will go on investing in pots of worthless rubbish. Let's see more mature, wrinkled women in attractive, successful, happy roles and let's see men fighting to be with them.

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What Does It Really Mean to Grow Old
In my late fifties, and then my sixties, I heard, "I can't believe you're that old. You don't look that old." At first that felt like praise. Then I became a bit uneasy. It reminded me of early pre-feminist days when I was complimented by some men for being "smarter", and "more independent" than those "other" women.

Slowly other experiences began to accumulate, reminding me of a real change in my life status.

First, I moved. And while I found easy acceptance among older people in the community, when younger people talked to me they invariably would say something like, "You remind me of my grandmother." Grandmother?! I felt like I had been given a label and my position lowered somehow.

Recently, I have, in fact, become a grandmother. I found most young friends expected me — automatically — to "be" a certain way. Many of those expectations were in accord with what I felt. Some were not. I did not instantly fall in love with my grandson. I was much more drawn to my daughter and what she was experiencing. I must admit that I am now a devoted grandmother, but being put in a particular category about that bothered me, as though all of my reactions could be known in advance and belonged to the general group "grandmother" rather than to me.

I lost some money recently through bad judgment and suddenly had the realization that I would never be able to replace it. I do not have enough time left to be able to earn that money again.

I looked in the mirror and saw lots of wrinkles. I had a hard time fitting that outward me with the me inside. I felt like the same person, but outside I looked different. I ch
ecked into a face lift, with much unease. What a piece of marketing took place in that doctor's office! He told me he would make me less strange

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to myself. I would look more like I felt! I became frightened by the whole process. Who was I then? This face? What I felt like inside? How come the two images were not connected? My own ageism told me that how I looked outside was ugly. But I felt the same inside, not ugly at all.

Finally, death entered my life as a direct reality. My oldest friend died of cancer three years ago. My father died two years ago after what turned out to be needless surgery. Another close friend died last month after a year of struggling with cancer. My mother is dying slowly and painfully after suffering a massive stroke. The realization hit me that I can expect this kind of personal contact with death to occur with greater and greater frequency.

Not just my age, but life itself was telling me that I was becoming an older/old woman!

Think of all the adjectives that are most disrespectful in our society. They are all part of the ageist description of old women: useless, powerless, complaining, sick, weak, conservative, rigid, helpless, unproductive, wrinkled, ugly, unattractive, and on and on.

How did this happen, this picture of old women? To understand this phenomenon we must look at our society's insistence that women are only valuable when they are attractive and useful to men. Women spend their lives accepting the idea that to be beautiful one must be young, and only beauty saves one from being discarded. Women's survival, both physical and psychological, has been linked to their ability to please men. It is small wonder that the prospect of growing old is frightening to women. By denying our ageing, we hope to escape the penalties placed upon growing old.

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