Wow, "Tell him I'm only 67!" Haha! I can not imagine myself saying something like that to edge out a 71 year old for the attention of a fella!

Yes, "women need to build up other women, not knock them down." I'm lucky with most of people around me. We do seem to lift each other up , out of habit. It's just those few nuts who I can do without!

I am sorry to say that in my opinion, the fashion industry is basically misogynistic and very influential. Its values infiltrate all of society, with the basic intention of promoting insecurity, because insecurity sells things. Make people feel bad about themselves, give them false values that require unattainable levels of perfection, and people will buy the cure you pretend to offer. It is basically the same trick that religion attempts, tell people that they are tainted by sin, and they will buy forgiveness, is exactly the same as telling people that not being perfectly equal to a fake standard of beauty, is also a sin.

I hope you like that bit, because the next bit could be interpreted as sexist, and assumes genetic differences between the sexes, (Genetic determinism, which many do not accept. ) so some women may not like it.

The other problem, which plays into that, is the factor of aggression. All animals are aggressive, and in many ways equally so, its complex, but basically all animals face equal threats and must respond in equivalent ways. However as a society we have collectively adopted the idea that, females/women are somehow less aggressive than males/men. This however is wrong, it is simply that aggression takes different forms in males and females. In social species, males assert their status, in part, by showing that they are self reliant and independent of the social network, and may be openly aggressive towards others. While females on the other hand depend much more on networking, because that helps with child rearing, and females, like it or not, invest more in producing children, and it also help with protection against overly aggressive males, etc.. So that female aggression is much more likely to take the form of passive aggression, and especially social exclusion, taking away the support of the network. In order to do that it will naturally take the form of making the network exclusive, and setting up standards of social norms, which determine how far individuals are allowed into or excluded from the network. And this is the framework into which, fashion industry and ageism etc. play.

So next time you meet with a woman like that, perhaps you should think about a female chimps, trying to determine over who gets to sit nearest the alpha male when the food is being shared. Some of us may not have come very far from that state, but at least some of us are educated and rational enough to be able to rationalize about who and what we are.

Yikes...some greeter!