The Power of Crones

Why older women vanish from cultural sightlines and why the invisibility cloak is actually liberation

The Carry-On Incident

The row ahead of me began to deplane. A man in a business suit yanked his carry-on from the overhead bin and smacked the woman in front of me across the face with it, knocking her head sideways. A full swing. No hesitation. No awareness.

“Holy cow. Watch it, mister. You just hit me with your bag.”
She held her cheek, startled but steady.

He walked on toward the jetway.
Not a glance. Not a pause. Not a single data point registering that he had struck a human being.

At baggage claim, she tried again.
“Sir, did you even notice you plowed your bag into my face?”
Nothing.

She turned to me, another over-forty woman, and said quietly, “They stop seeing us when we’re no longer cute and tiny. Suddenly, we disappear. We don’t matter. We’re not even in their galaxy of awareness. What. The. Actual. Fuck!”

The last word finally caught his ear.

He turned. “Huh? You talking to me?”
“Yeah you selfish, arrogant prick. You hit me in the face.”
He blinked. “Uh. Yeah. Sorry.”

She wasn’t dramatic. She was reporting a systems problem in real time.

I didn’t tell her she was wrong about her perceived invisibility. She wasn't.

I just knew she hadn’t yet felt the other side of the cliff she was stepping onto. The side where the male gaze disappears and life gets honest again. Where you’re no longer undressed by hungry eyes, and people reveal who they are without theater.

The delight and joy of taking your place as a real person in the real world, free to be.

I walked behind her, thinking. This deletion wasn’t personal.
It was structural.

When I Lived on the Other Side of the Line

Most of my life, I was unmistakably visible: cheerleader visible, homecoming court visible, the kind of visible where the dads sat in my section at games. The other cheerleaders said it like praise. It creeped me out.

Later, while raising investment for my SaaS startup in my thirties, the man I hired as CEO told me the funding came easily because “everyone we pitch with wants to sleep with you. That is our best asset.”

My whole body recoiled, “Ewwww.”
He said it like he was stating a business fact. Strategy. Not a violation.

I was flirted with, proposed to, evaluated, scanned, assessed, consumed.
Relentless male attention, void of recognition of me as a person, of anything which made me, me.

Women fear invisibility because they mistake attention for worth.
But visibility under the male gaze is performance, not presence.

So when that visibility faded, I did not mourn.
I exhaled in relief.
And returned to myself.

The Three Reactor Archetypes

Why our culture erases older women from its perceptual field

Every demographic responds differently to older women.
Each reaction is patterned, predictable, and rooted in systems.

1. Young Men

Maternal Task-Master Circuitry → Automatic Suppression Response

Young men don’t consciously ignore older women.
Their nervous systems do it for them.

Most grew up with female caregivers managing the emotional labor of household management.
Make your bed.
Turn off the Xbox.
Fold the laundry.
Soccer practice in ten minutes. Get in the car.

To their brains:
older woman = task = interruption = obligation = ignore.

So when a young man encounters a woman over 45, his adolescent circuitry fires.
Stimulus suppression.
Protect autonomy.
Ignore.

He doesn’t assess the woman.
He reacts to a neural pathway built at 13.

This is why he can hit a woman in the face with his carry-on and keep walking.
He isn’t thinking at all.
That is the system failure.

2. Older Men

Mortality Reflex → Youth Illusion Maintenance

Older men erase older women for a different reason.
A deeper one.

By mid-life, men collide with evidence of decline.
Strength. Speed. Desire. Power.
All softening around the edges.

Younger women offer a psychological loophole.
Their attention allows men to suspend reality.
To feel young by proximity.

Older women interrupt the illusion.
They mirror back the truth: time is moving.

So older men avert their gaze.
Not because older women lack value.
But because older men fear the reflection.

Avoiding older women becomes a self-medication strategy.
Do not look at what reveals my age.
Look at what erases it.

3. Young Women

Avoidance of Future Self → Inherited Cultural Programming

Young women do not ignore older women out of malice.
They do it out of fear.

From childhood, they’re conditioned to believe:
youth = beauty = value = safety.

A woman in her fifties is not a rival.
She is a prophecy.
The future self the young woman has been taught to dread.

So she looks away.
Not because the older woman is irrelevant. Because she is too relevant.

Too nearby.

This is the most culturally manufactured erasure of the three.
Not instinct.
Programming.

Grief of Loss, Followed by Freedom

The woman at baggage claim felt only the grief. The loss of attention and being seen.
Understandable.
Being struck in the face without acknowledgment strips anyone bare.

But the other side of the cliff carries something unexpected.

The invisibility cloak is also liberation.

When the gaze disappears, the scrutiny disappears with it.
When objectification ends, your mind returns to its full shape.
When men stop performing around you, you hear the unedited version of the world.

Life gets honest.
You get honest.
And the static stops.

I do not miss the old way.
I do not miss being scanned, ranked, undressed.
Visibility felt like power.
But it was a cage.

What Crones Gain

Something rare.
Something young women never receive.
Something men never notice.

Unfiltered access to how the world actually behaves.

A young woman at a bar changes the contour of the conversation around her.
Men posture, flex, curate.

Place a crone at the next table and the conversation continues unchanged.
Not because she is dismissed.
Because she is no longer part of the mating algorithm. She is invisible in the best possible way.

She gets the raw feed.
The patterns.
The unmasked behavior.
The truth without theater.

This is why crones become dangerous in the best possible way.
They become strategists.
Observers.
Unmanipulable.
Clear-sighted.

They see how the machine works.

How to Help Women Stop Fearing This Transition

Let's tell them the truth.

1. What you think you’re losing was never yours.
It was projection.
You were the screen and the scene. Not the reality of you.

2. Invisibility is not erasure. It is autonomy.
Your energy returns to you.

3. You gain mobility inside male systems.
Nothing is curated for your consumption anymore.

4. Your value migrates from surface to substance.
You become multidimensional.
You become sovereign.

5. You become unmanipulable.
No longer steered by approval, flattery, attention scarcity, or youth-performance culture.

Closing the Loop

The woman at baggage claim saw only insult.
She didn’t yet see her evolution.

She had stepped into the stage where a woman becomes her clearest self.
The strategist, not the symbol.
The observer, not the object.
The architect of her worth, not the projection of someone else’s desire.

That is the power of the crone.
The power of finally seeing the world – and yourself – through your own lens.

And the power of finally being free.

— Madonna Demir, author of Systems & Soul