Gendered ageism and the class politics of growing old

The coming month i.e. October carries two distinct awareness days inside its thirty-one days, and much of my career has been spent in the delicate seam between them. The month opens with a quiet reverence for time on the 1st, the International Day of Older Persons. Yet, like memory itself, the official UN's Commemoration drifts forward to October 8th, 2026. On that autumn morning, or frosty evening somewhere, global voices will gather to unveil this year's theme at the UN Headquarters. Yet neither day, alone, is where the work truly lives.

It is in the gap between them the quiet collision of gender and age, of mental health and ageism where most of my non-glamorous professional life has unfolded.

I saw where that gap ends recently, in the sterile quiet of a clinical setting. A woman in her sixties told me, devastated, that a man fifteen years younger, whom she had dated in her fifties, keeps calling her a pedophile "as a joke". He is not accusing her of anything real, and he knows it. That is precisely the cruelty of it: reaching past every ordinary insult to land on the one word that borrows the terrifying weight of an actual crime. She cannot report it, cannot object without seeming humorless, and cannot name the violence of what has been done to her because, after all, it was only a joke.

I have sat with clinicians describing this exact pattern, just as I have scrolled past its digital ghost in Instagram reels: a grandfather accused, a family closing ranks in frantic silence, no FIR ever filed, no headline following up. It is a grim, upside-down reality. A society that panics over a fifty-year-old's romance rarely raises its voice for the toddler assaulted by her own grandpa.

There is a word already sitting one step before that one: cougar. English built an entire insult around an older woman's desire - feline, predatory, faintly ridiculous - and never built a male equivalent. A man with a much younger partner gets called lucky, or nothing. The clinic-room joke is what happens when that word stops being cruel enough.

I discovered this unfairness a quarter of a century earlier. The opening line of Sinf aur Burhapa - Gender and Old Age – from my 2001 PTV series Gender Watch, was: are old people really human beings? Echoing Simone de Beauvoir, who opens La Vieillesse by arguing that modern societies treat the old as "walking corpses", I brought her into a state broadcaster not built for such ideas. When I proposed old age homes, the criticism was immediate. I was seen as an Amsterdam-returned, westernised woman. A man who comes home with the same foreign degree is called modern; the identical distance reads as promise in him and contamination in me.

Eastern values, apparently, only need guarding from women. In 2017, I returned to this in print, arguing that ageism functions as patriarchy's second act: a system that extracts value from women on youth and utility, then penalises them once that value expires. By then I had also started naming gendered ageism in the media the way our dramas, talk shows and jokes quietly agree on what an ageing woman is allowed to want.

Here is the part we do not say out loud enough. A wealthy widow who remarries is "moving on". A woman without money doing the identical thing is "shameless", a burden offloaded onto whoever will take her, or someone who has "lost her senses". Money buys an ageing woman the right to be read as a romantic lead rather than a cautionary tale, or a punchline. Its absence buys her a diagnosis, or a "joke" with a criminal word inside it. Grey divorce, where discussed in Pakistan at all, is treated as something the rich can survive and the poor cannot attempt not because courts distinguish between them, but because everyone around them does.

"Act your age", "cougar", and that clinic-room joke are the same instrument at three volumes. All three teach a woman to distrust her desire before anyone else has to. Say it enough times, in enough registers, and she starts pre-emptively editing herself, the way that television heroine does it for the young man before he can. That is not resilience. That is a woman doing the work of her own diminishment so thoroughly it no longer needs a second party.

The isolation this produces – the quiet loneliness of women told that wanting things is undignified past a certain age – never shows up in a hospital chart, because it was never allowed to announce itself as harm. It shows up, instead, as a woman in her sixties, sitting across from her doctor, devastated by a joke.

This year's UN theme asks us to rethink health systems, labour markets and social protection for longer lives. Our macro policy metrics measure economic data, remaining completely oblivious to the emotional starvation we enforce on ageing women. We are building systems to sustain the physical body while actively design-coding the death of its desires. We smile indulgently at an older man's late-life re-awakenings, treating his lingering vitality as a triumph of nature, yet we expect an older woman to smoothly transition into a genderless, desireless shadow, a maternal monument that feels nothing and asks for nothing.

The result of this is visible daily in clinical settings: women whose bodies are physically healthy but whose spirits have been systematically broken by casual social terrorism. We treat their anxiety and isolation as clinical pathologies rather than what they truly are the predictable, invisible bruises of a society that shames them for remaining alive.

Rethinking systems for longer lives will mean little if we have not first rethought whether an older woman's longer life may include romance, or desire, or the right to be teased, never accused, for wanting either the way it casually includes a longer career for everyone else.