Crabby Old Lady Gets Grumpy

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The BBC produces a television comedy series after Crabby Old Lady’s heart. It is titled Grumpy Old Men in which such luminaries as Geoffrey Palmer, Elliot Gould and Michael Grave among others, sound off and hold forth, with seriously-intended humor, on what’s wrong with the world. A statement from Sir Bob Geldof in one of the earliest shows is still a favorite of Crabby Old Lady’s: “If you’re not grumpy about what’s going on in the world, you’re not paying attention.”

Feeling ignored by the male-only show, some women (undoubtedly crabby ones) complained and before long, there was another program, Grumpy Old Women, in which Michele Hanson was asked to participate:

“There was one gap left in the programme,” [wrote Ms. Hanson in the Guardian UK last week]. “Would I like to fill it? Yes please. All I had to do was bang on about everything that annoyed me. Who would pass up such an opportunity to air one's grievances?”

The show producers had a list of suggestions on which to bang on about, but Ms. Hanson took exception to them:

“…when one's gripes are wide-ranging, one tends to ignore lists and digress, especially when the list had, to my mind, a fluffy bias: shopping, supermarkets, cooking, children, housework, clothes, men and sex. I didn't notice the chaps being asked about buying and cooking the Christmas dinner.”

This is a mild surprise to Crabby Old Lady. That there are too few women pundits and commentators may still be so, but it had slipped her notice that women are expected to leave the serious stuff to men. She thought we had been beyond such stereotypes for a long time, especially among older women.

Obviously, Crabby is mistaken. One case in point: in her first week as speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi was reported in the press to be a grandmother about 250 times – although Dennis Hastert’s condition as a grandfather was mentioned no more than half a dozen times during his entire tenure as speaker.

Ms. Hanson ignored the TV program producers’ list:

“…I banged on about any old thing. How the TV people laughed. How encouraging they were. Marvelous, they said. Very funny.”

But when the program was broadcast, Ms. Hanson got only a few seconds of air time.

“Only a tiny fraction of my complaints appeared,” she writes. “What humiliation. The details have faded, but it seems to me that the women moaned about girls' stuff and the men moaned about everything they fancied: the state of the world, art, politics, life and death.”

It appears that not even age grants women an equal say in state of the world, not even when its purpose is comedy. Crabby Old Lady feels a kinship with Ms. Hanson and is grumpy about this, indeed.

[Hat tip to Marian Van Eyk McCain of The Elderwoman Website.]

* Contributing Editor Ronni Bennett also blogs at Time Goes By - What it’s really like to get older.