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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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Natural(ly) men
— masculinity and gendered anti-ageing practices in Finland and the USA | | Author(s) | Hanna Ojala, Toni Calasanti, Neal King, Ilkka Pietila |
| Journal title | Ageing and Society, vol 36, no 2, February 2016 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press, February 2016 |
| Pages | pp 356-375 |
| Source | journals.cambridge.org/aso |
| Keywords | Older men ; Middle aged ; Attitude ; Ageing process ; Preventative medicine ; Qualitative Studies ; Finland ; United States of America. |
| Annotation | The neo-liberal ideologies that point to individual responsibility for risks increasingly influence countries of the global North. The anti-ageing industry reflects this dictate and encourages middle-aged people to use their products and services to manage their ageing. However, given the negative connotations attached to the term 'anti-ageing', which is usually seen to focus on aesthetics and thus be a woman's concern, men may be likely to disavow being involved in such activities. The article uses interview data collected from men aged 42-70 from Finland and the United States of America to explore whether and how men adhere to the call to manage their ageing when such anti-ageing activities are seen to be potentially feminising. The authors find that these men reflected neo-liberalism in the sense that they felt that, although ageing cannot be prevented, it can be controlled. Also while they generally rejected anti-ageing products and services that they judged to affect aesthetics, they reported that they use those that they define as promoting health and performance instead. For them, masculinity is the instrumental focus on performance to the exclusion of beauty or attractiveness. Masculine anti-ageing bodily strategies must also be 'natural', involving hard work rather than the use of products, which they regard as never having been scientifically proven to enhance performance. Thus, in talk of their anti-ageing, men distance themselves from women. (RH). |
| Accession Number | CPA-160205206 A |
| Classmark | BC: SE: DP: BG: LK2: 3DP: 76L: 7T |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
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| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
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