Grace's Musings: Shirley Manson won’t be put in her place

Shirley Manson isn’t just one of the greatest rock stars of all time – the Garbage singles Stupid Girl and Only Happy When It Rains were my soundtrack to the mid-1990s – she’s also a fierce advocate for midlife women. So I wasn’t surprised to hear her clapping back at the press when they declared her “unrecognisable” in a recent story.

It’s all so much clickbait: “unrecognisable” is not-so-subtle code for the idea that she has aged, and disappointingly it’s one of those words that pulls in thousands of readers hoping for a bit of disaster porn. But Manson was having none of it.

“Look, I’m nearly 60 years old,” she declared. “Of course I’m not going to look anything like my late-twenties self. Quite honestly, I think it would be a bit creepy if I did, but hey, that’s just me. Either way, this kind of language is weaponised to put a woman like me in my place. So I have decided to reject this gift. This gift is a fail.”

The weaponisation of language is a big part of ageist rhetoric: as midlifers we are “unrecognisable”; we are “emotional”; our appearance is “shocking”. But here’s what’s really going on: the patriarchy wants to belittle older women because it’s scared of our power, and of what we can achieve when that power is unleashed. So it tries to put us in our place – but that’s impossible with a force like Manson. She’s both frank and fearless in her responses.

“I shall continue to age as I am. I will continue to wrinkle and flub, lose an inch of my height here and gain a new inch or two there, but I will still look cute in my pyjamas with bedhead and no make-up on, and I will always, no matter what I look like, no matter what they say about me, I will always and forever rock harder than most.”

Manson spoke to The Guardian recently about how brutal the 1990s were for women in the music industry, loaded with micro-misogynies, and it reminded me of how tough it was to be a young woman making her way at that time.

“I think it goes back to the 1990s offering a different kind of woman, for the first time, arguably ever, in culture,” Manson told Zoe Williams. “Liberated, mouthy, opinionated, political, also often beautiful and powerful. At first, I think they thought it was a marvellous distraction, a joyous kink. And then, all of a sudden, they were, like, ‘Wait a minute, these women are getting a lot of attention and taking up a lot of column space, and we’re going to crush it.’”

In many ways, the patriarchy has long been trying to crush us. But our desire here at Studio10 – and at many female-founded companies like ours – is to fight back against that attitude. And refuting the toxic rhetoric around ageing is just one way to do it. The idea that we all want to stay young is just so much rubbish. What we want is to enjoy our power. We’ve earned it.