Aging male bodies, health and the reproduction of age relations

Journal of Aging Studies 27 (2013) 243–251

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Aging male bodies, health and the reproduction of age relations Ilkka Pietilä a, d,⁎, Hanna Ojala b, Neal King c, Toni Calasanti c a b c d

Gerontology Research Center, University of Tampere, FI-33014, Finland School of Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Tampere, FI-33014, Finland Department of Sociology, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061, USA School of Health Sciences, University of Tampere, FI-33014, Finland

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Article history: Received 28 November 2012 Received in revised form 24 March 2013 Accepted 15 April 2013 Keywords: Ageism Generational intelligence Men's aging Unmarked status

a b s t r a c t This article explores the ways in which a group of male factory workers uses bodies as bases for hierarchical categorization of men by age in their talk of mundane aspects of their lives. Analysis of interviews about health (4 focus groups and 5 personal interviews) with Finnish working-class men under 40 years old shows that they portray age groups to which they do not belong as careless, even irresponsible toward health and its maintenance. As they categorize youth and old people by age, they leave themselves unmarked by it, providing no vocabulary to describe their own group. Despite their tendency to distance themselves particularly from old people, they also distinguish among older men by familiarity, providing relatively nuanced accounts of their fathers' aging. We discuss the marking of age groups in terms of social inequality and talk of fathers in terms of intergenerational relations. Even family ties among men of diverse ages involve ageism, which familiarity serves both to mitigate and to make less visible. This article documents the maintenance of age inequality in everyday, mundane behavior. © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Introduction Despite their subject matter, gerontologists have tended to assume rather than explore ageism and the processes by which groups maintain it. Recently, however, scholars have paid greater attention to documenting ageism (e.g., Bytheway, 1995; Roscigno, Mong, Byron & Tester, 2007) as well as exploring the age relations that undergird this form of discrimination (Calasanti, 2003; Pietilä & Ojala, 2011). Scholarship on age as a relation of inequality has done much to show how discourses, from those of anti-aging medicine to those of retirement policies, help to skew distributions of authority, status, and other resources along the continuum of age. Still, such analyses have tended to focus either on the outcomes of ageism for old people, and the ways in which they grapple with losses of privilege, medical challenges, and discrimination, or the processes by which elders themselves engage in ageism, ⁎ Corresponding author. Tel.: +358 401901638. E-mail addresses: ilkka.pietila@uta.fi (I. Pietilä), Hanna.L.Ojala@uta.fi (H. Ojala), [email protected] (N. King), [email protected] (T. Calasanti). 0890-4065/$ – see front matter © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jaging.2013.04.001

distancing themselves from those whom they deem to be “old” (Minichiello, Browne & Kendig, 2000). Less attention has been paid to what younger age groups do to reinforce age relations and uphold the age order, and less still on behaviors of those who are privileged. Such investigations are critical for understanding and changing ageism; scholars need to explore both privilege and disadvantage, as well as the processes by which these are maintained or challenged (Choo & Ferree, 2010). Some maintenance of inequality in everyday life takes the form of marking differences between groups and membership in them. The temporal nature of age relations distinguishes them from other hierarchical inequalities; over time, people necessarily change their positions within age relations, whereas they may not shift locations within such other inequities as gender, class, race, or sexuality (Calasanti, 2003). And in reference to these categories among which people move over the courses of their lives, adults can create and maintain inequality. The framing of an identity as unmarked by its category, together with the association of other (younger and older) locations with lowered ability to work, allows the unmarked to create a status for

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themselves above that of the others whom they mark (Brekhus, 1998; Frankenberg, 1993; Pruit, 2012). Family contexts can also play a role in making categorical status, an important element in sustaining inequality, more or less salient to speakers. Despite people's tendencies to distance themselves from old people, they often view aging members of their own family differently, describing them in more nuanced terms. However, the extent to which such closeness to a member of a disadvantaged group challenges ageism or not, and the processes by which this might occur, remain largely unexplored. In this paper, we use interviews conducted among Finnish male workers aged 24–39 to ask how they use categories to manage relations of age and sustain or challenge inequality, and how the social contexts of family, occupation and class affect that use. Our analysis of these interview data gives us an opportunity to explore the process of age status change among working-class men, as it occurs within a generational context. We examine the role of our interviewees' unmarked status and family relations in elaborating age as a social relation of inequality, a system of subordination and privilege which remains invisible to most people. Markers in relations of gender and age Groups tend to distinguish members by age, just as they do by gender and class. Age relations among adults position groups of different ages in hierarchical order in which old people suffer the greatest exclusion from sources of social resources and status, such as the paid labor market (Calasanti, 2003). Many scholars in the fields of gerontology and sociology of age have explored the ways in which groups sort unequal age categories in routine interactions (e.g. Nikander, 2009; Pietilä & Ojala, 2011). As Bytheway (1995: 14) puts it, “ageism legitimates the use of chronological age to mark out classes of people.” Members ‘do’, ‘act’, ‘accomplish’ and ‘perform’ age as mundane parts of everyday life (Calasanti, 2003; King, 2006; Laz, 2003). Their behaviors are accountable in the sense of being managed with an eye toward the judgments of others and the possibility of having to explain how they are appropriate to their age category. That is, even in failure to live up to ideals of group-specific behavior, people maintain senses of social competence by being seen as aware of and concerned for such ideals. By holding imputations of social competence hostage to members' overt orientations to age-specific ideals, groups inspire both attempts to conform to, and the naturalization of, many age-appropriate ideals of behavior. That is, they organize members to regard aspects of age relations as manifestations of their bodies and the effects of time upon them (Phoenix & Sparkes, 2009; Twigg, 2004). Thus naturalized, these aspects of age relations can become both socially invisible and resistant to change. The stakes in such categorizations can be high. Doing gender (West & Zimmerman, 1987), men associate their activities with skilled work deserving high praise and pay, but relate women's work with natural dispositions to provide care for low pay or for free. By doing this, groups maintain the segregation of many occupations (from governance to nurturance) and thus cornerstones of gender inequality (Collins, Chafetz, Blumberg, Coltrane & Turner, 1993; Connell, 2005). Masculinity, as what groups do to distinguish men from others, positions many men as receivers of women's care and high compensation for their work (for a

general review, see Calasanti, Pietilä, Ojala & King, 2013). It positions women in industrialized regions largely as dependents upon breadwinning men, for whom they provide unpaid care, often in heterosexual relationships. Masculinity, though affected by the inequalities with which gender intersects, gains privilege. Likewise, doing age positions younger adults as workers in their prime and old people as too frail to contribute and too ugly to attract admiration. Cast aside, old women suffer high rates of poverty and dependence on transfers from states. Old men mostly remain buoyed by the privileges noted above, but lose much of the status enjoyed by skilled workers with healthy bodies, on which many of their privileges were based. Groups use bodies as principal means of naturalizing these inequalities of gender and age, by taking visible aspects of bodies (including appearance, dress and behaviors, Laz, 2003) to indicate or mark members' social locations. Research on male bodies shows how people use them as signs of proper social locations for younger and older men, distinguished by physical stamina and thus fitness to work or claim authority (Calasanti, 2004; Connell, 2005: 55; Hearn, 1995), and to distinguish between classes as assessed in terms of discipline and respectability and thus entitlement to occupy particular public spaces (Skeggs, 1997, 2009). As a focus of ageism, an aged body can likewise indicate a proper place in an unequal structure. For instance, in a recent study Pietilä and Ojala (2011) found that middle-aged working class men used such terms as ‘codgers’ to denote other men who were roughly of the same age as them but whose health and physical condition was worse. This illustrates that age categories can rest less on chronological age than on invidious distinctions among bodies and functional abilities. In everyday negotiations, people seldom call attention to such categorization and naturalization, focusing instead on the bodily signs that indicate category; and, by directing attention this way, they reify bodily signs and render systems of inequality less visible as social relations. Moreover, the greatest attention goes to deviants, or bodies that most groups find offensive or odd: bodies that are working class, dirty, unhealthy, old, female (Acker, 1990; Calasanti, 2003; Elias, 1994; Gullette, 2004; Skeggs, 2004; Twigg, 2004; Watson, 2000). Brekhus (1996: 499) argues that people engage in a “social marking” of such groups; they are able to impose these categories regardless of whether or not those so marked “politically identify with their labels.” Pruit (2012: 441) likewise argues that being unmarked gives power and an authoritative voice to those who define the marked. Members of privileged groups often occupy “unmarked” social locations, in which their claims to authority and deference go relatively unnoted (Frankenberg, 1993); the social construction of their normativity remains obscured (Pruit, 2012: 441). Relations of familiarity, such as kinship or friendship, between group members can also affect categorization, by inspiring familiars to identify each other as members of relatively exclusive groups instead of as members of larger groups (i.e., as my parents, instead of as old people). This is most likely to occur in relations that generate impressions that disconfirm stereotypes (i.e., old people are inactive, whereas my father works hard) (Rothbart & John, 1985). Such exemptions of friends and family from categorization into larger groups may facilitate relationships between members of unequal groups in those specific contexts. But this social closeness can also occur without altering the stereotypes associated with them. This means that ageism might persist

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even if younger family members exempted their elders from age stereotypes. Under some conditions, groups may focus more on the inequalities themselves, and by doing so attain a self-awareness of social location and a more political–economic understanding of relations between groups. Biggs, Haapala, and Lowenstein (2011) term such critical views of relations between generations “generational intelligence”. It is constructed by the combination of familial intimacy, with the empathy that it can inspire, and increasing age, which can make people increasingly aware of being decentered from unmarked social locations (ibid: 1111). To the extent that unmarked status gives way to critical distance from mundane categorization and naturalization of inequality, people may become more generationally “intelligent.” Taking these sociological approaches to the roles of everyday interactions, understandings of bodies in the negotiation of naturalized inequality, familiarity, and differential marking of social locations, we ask, how do respondents' references to bodies suggest the structure of age relations between older and younger groups? In addition, we also explore the extent to which generational intelligence might influence this process of age categorization and inequality. In our analysis we take into account that the unmarked status and the factors producing inequalities do not take similar shapes across groups of men. Therefore we approach the unmarked status – and the role of bodies as constituent of this – as being structured by working class ideals and practices. Materials and methods This study explores age relations through interpretations of age, body and health on the basis of 5 thematic personal interviews and 4 focus group interviews conducted among Finnish male industrial workers under 40 years old. The interviews were conducted in three paper mills in central Finland in 2003–2004. The data analyzed in this article were extracted from the larger study of men aged 24–55 which explored how men of different ages interpret the relationship between health and age. In this article, we leave out the middle-aged interviewees (analysis of these data can be found in Pietilä & Ojala, 2011) and focus only on the younger men's conceptions of the body, health, and age. The individuals interviewed were all blue-collar workers, whereas the focus group participants included some whitecollar workers as well. The respondents were recruited with the help of personnel administration unit in one of the companies and the occupational health care unit in two others. The interviewees had different tasks in the paper production process ranging from monitoring the paper machine to dealing with chemicals used in the process and to packing products. Regardless of tasks, interviewees represent shop floor workers, and are considered skilled manual workers according to Finnish official classification of occupations (Ammattiluokitus, 2010), which is based on International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO-08). The paper mill workers were chosen to represent a male-dominated field of production and a relatively homogeneous occupational group in terms of education, income and status. As suppliers of manual labor, the sample was also chosen to enhance our understanding of aging as an embodied process and to explore how bodies act as means of age distinctions within Western working-class cultures.

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Both personal interviews and focus groups were based on discussing themes prepared by the interviewer, who was of a similar age as the participants; and the discussion topics were largely the same in both data sets. These included beliefs about causes of health and illness, ideas about the causes of the gender gap in health, the importance of information as a factor influencing health-related choices and behaviors as well as aging and its health effects. In the personal interviews, the interviewees' health status and health-related lifestyles were also discussed. After obtaining the participants' informed consent, the first author conducted all the interviews, which were then transcribed verbatim (For more details about data collection see Pietilä, 2008; Pietilä & Ojala, 2011). Here, we focus on the data drawn from a total of 20 healthy men aged 24–39 (average age is 30.8 years). The men had suffered neither chronic disease nor serious ailments or injuries that would restrict daily activities and work, which was a criterion for including them in the sample. Two additional men, one aged 42 and one aged 45, were present in one of each of two focus groups. Given the much younger ages of the men in these groups, we do not believe that their presence presents a bias. We focus on this age group because, in speaking of themselves and of others, we found that they talked about their bodies in ways that indicated that they no longer took their functional abilities for granted, but significant limits had not yet set in. Thus, they have become aware of the age-based changes in their bodies but are still to some extent uncertain of whether they should be more active in maintaining their health. This opens a particular perspective on age-related norms of bodily function and their role in (re)producing age relations. Our analysis focuses on how these respondents distinguish age groups and age-appropriate behaviors in their talk about aging bodies, physical changes, health, functional capacities, health behaviors, and the like. We thus explore how the interviewees construct age-based categories paying special attention to how bodies are used as a means of distinction. The analysis thus draws on membership category analysis (MCA). The analysis of categories focuses on activities associated with and attributions made to the categories, as well as their moral implications and contextual variation, which aims at showing how “identities, social relationships and even institutions are produced” (Baker, 1997:132). As Nikander (2009: 864) notes, age and lifespan categories enable us to “position each other or describe and account for our own and others' actions in various everyday settings.” This positioning is based on distinctionmaking between group memberships that, in turn, reproduce age-based cultural hierarchies. Our analysis is also informed by a combination of critical discourse analysis and discursive psychology, which takes note of both the existence of broader macro discourses and their contextual negotiations that follow “local pragmatics of that particular conversational context” (Wetherell & Edley, 1999: 338, see also Edley & Wetherell, 1997). Interviews and focus groups represent different contexts of interaction, and may thus be taken to yield different kinds of knowledge (e.g. Barbour, 2007; Kitzinger, 1994). Interviews typically revolve around interviewees' personal views and are based on interaction between the interviewer and interviewee. In a focus group, “people are confronted with the need to make collective sense of their individual experiences and beliefs,” which necessitates comparing, contrasting and negotiating

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divergent ideas for justifying an individual speaker's views (Wilkinson, 1998: 338). This provides an opportunity for exploring how participants negotiate and agree upon the cultural discourses of aging and bodies. Therefore in the analysis we pay attention to variations between the two data sets in age-based distinctions, how people are socially located on the basis of these categorizations, and thus the contextual (re)production of the cultural discourses, categories and stereotypes regarding age and bodies. Our sample is fairly homogenous: white, Finnish, employed men who are a predominantly working class. We assume that the ways in which they do age are influenced by these intersecting statuses. Still, our goal is to illuminate ways in which those with age privilege reinforce their status within the relations of age. A more intersectional analysis remains beyond the scope of this study. In preliminary analysis of our data, we noticed a difference between the ways in which our interviewees talked about men's aging in general, and the way they discussed their fathers' (or other significant others') aging, in particular, as follows: “When men are sixty well… they start lolling on the sofa and… It's sloppy like.” [26 year-old man]

“My dad started to engage in sports when he was about 45. Earlier he smoked and was overweight. He just turned 50 and he's now in better shape than me!” [24 year-old man] For this reason, we have divided the analysis into two parts, one dealing with our interviewees' ideas regarding ‘men’ as a generalized social category, and another that focuses on how they discuss aging within a context of intergenerational relations and other personal relationships. We thus explore how age-based and gendered production of marked and unmarked persons is affected by personal ties. Unmarked locations: between careless youth and frail old age The men in our sample face a dilemma in talking about their bodies, age and health. On the one hand, these seem to be abstract issues for relatively young, healthy men. They link aging to functional decline and bodily ailments in late middle and old age, which amount to a “distant unrealizability” (Featherstone & Wernick, 1995: 8). On the other hand, talk of body and health also led to the discussion of how age has altered their awareness of both. These men seemed content to dismiss age as a problem of older men but they were nonetheless aware of its growing importance to themselves. This tension led interviewees to engage in a negotiation between their pasts and futures, of being ‘younger’ versus ‘older’ men. Respondents often mentioned that they had become more interested recently in their health because they had started to realize certain changes in bodily functioning that owed to advancing age. The majority of respondents saw the age of 30–40 as a period when men begin to notice shifts in their

physical conditions and functional capacities. They negotiated this unwelcome change by contrasting their heightened interest in their bodies and health to the disinterest they imputed to younger age. They linked younger men and youth to less personal responsibility for health, thus shifting the nature of their claim to privilege, from fitness of body to sharpness of mind and responsibility for health. In the excerpt below, a 27-year-old man talks about a stage of life when a man begins to take his health more seriously. Excerpt 1. Maybe it's when you realize that your own body doesn't work the same way anymore. I guess then you start to think- well, I wouldn't say I'd been thinking about this too much so far, before this age, because everything has worked so well. And probably.. I cannot say if there's any exact age when it starts. I guess it comes at a certain stage when you notice you're having problems with your back or legs, or something else starts to bother you. That's the stage I think. (..) At this age you sort of already think about it more than.. like more than ten years ago. Well, you didn't… you sort of just let it go. And you didn't think about anything. Now you start to think a bit about food and stuff, and smoking, but earlier, you didn't think about anything. [Niko (27 years)] The speaker seems ambivalent, pushing himself both from thoughtless youth and from ailing old age, toward a position between that cannot last forever. He deems young men careless of health, using his youth for example. Before reaching the age when a man notices that his body does not work as before, the interviewee “just let it go” and “didn't think about anything”. But recent changes led him to think “a bit” about maintaining his health. He also distanced himself from the implicit category of older age: still young enough to be capable, he has not been thinking about this “too much so far”. His hesitation in speaking about his awareness of his health and age suggests the unmarked (and privileged) position within age hierarchies. He has little language to describe his social location other than invidious contrasts to other groups. We find a similar ambivalence, between the worries of older age and the carelessness of youth, in the next excerpt. These considerations revolve around the need to ‘start thinking’ more about one's own health. Excerpt 2. My opinion is that when you're younger you're more lithe and healthy and you've got more energy… So my opinion regarding myself is that you're sort of… more careless about your lifestyle. You can eat a bit like anything, you can manage suffering shorter sleeps.. and so on. But well, maybe you anyway start to get a little bit older, and you like notice that.. er.. yes, you get older, and you certainly, probably start to think more. Yes you have more and more thoughts about should you sort of pay a little more attention to what you eat and how you exercise and others. But still you.. like partly you still permit yourself a certain carelessness. But like it's becoming stronger all the time, yes all the time that you kind of feel that you should, should start to control and follow like more.. [Mikko (28 years)]

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The interviewee's contemplation of his aging and health is based on the contrast between youth, when a man need not think about his health, and the gradual changes that occur as he grows older. By aging, a man becomes increasingly aware of his body and health, and thus has to think more about it. To ‘think’, in this context, is to seek control, particularly over eating and exercise but also in a general monitoring of the body (“following” it). Despite this, the interviewee locates himself and his body between youth and responsible adulthood. At his age, “you still permit yourself a certain carelessness”, in a process of increasing body awareness. Independently of temporal releases from control (Crawford, 1984), the idea that he should seek control by monitoring his body is “becoming stronger all the time”. In this line of thinking increasing health-awareness was contrasted, as 31-yer-old Petri put it, to younger men's “short-sightedness”. Similar ideas appeared in several interviews, and several men concluded that, by aging “you just try to keep a tight rein for yourself” and “keep the right attitude” to prevent oneself from falling into an uncontrolled state of “lolling on the sofa”. This expression was often used to suggest an undignified lifestyle, that of an inactive older man who does not take responsibility for his body and health. Being in control was often thought to take place through keeping oneself physically active (cf. Calasanti et al., 2013). In interviews this led to moral judgments of people who do not act in accordance with this widely shared ideal. Respondents linked this description to the categorization of other age groups, as we detail below. Bearing in mind how the interviewees in the Excerpts 1 and 2 talked about their own aging and health in terms of gradual increase of health and body awareness, we note how these respondents describe other men, whom Vesa argues need a “more radical wake-up call” to draw their attention to respond to the changes in their bodies. Excerpt 3. I think it's just what Janne says that what's at the back of somebody's mind is that for men, it's that they see themselves that they are OK … like, well, “I'm fit as a fiddle” or … A man has to get a more radical wake-up call so that he's now seriously got to do something. [Vesa (28 years)]

Many have, they say that many men have still had since they were boys this sports- sporty background there and have done and played everything and have such an image of themselves that they can still manage it, manage such, a certain performance in sports so.. It might remain for quite a long time.. before he sees that he can't, what the reality really is. [Janne (25 years)] In this focus-group excerpt, men are generally characterized as maintaining unrealistic faith in their everlasting capabilities before a “more radical wake-up call” forces acknowledgment of the aging of their bodies. Performance in sports remains a generalized ideal for men (e.g., Whitson, 1990), through which men position their bodies in the continuum of age. One of the features involved in sports and other physical exercise is competitiveness. This becomes apparent later in the same focus

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group, as participants discuss the reasons why most men do not take part in exercise programs during the breaks at their work place, and the ‘thresholds’ for participating in them. Excerpt 4. In a certain way, there's the fear that that's when you notice it… When you go there [exercise program].. first you might see yourself or others notice what poor shape you're in that you can't stretch this way and that so.. everybody else can and.. half way through you yourself start to puff and blow that.. you can't do it. [Vesa (28 years)] This excerpt makes it clear that physical performance not only provides an occasion for noticing bodily changes, but also positions bodies as potential objects of public assessment, and people as potential objects of marking by age. Such evaluations of abilities to perform physical exercise in an expected way creates hierarchies in which male bodies are then located on the basis of comparisons between men and women, men of different ages, and bodies in different conditions. This also highlights the processual nature of bodily aging, its consequences for a man in his social environment and his changing position in relation to age-based hierarchies. When asked what they think they ought to do for their health in coming years, the interviewees consistently pointed to maintaining physical activity and having the “right attitude”. Because some had some problems with their backs or legs, they were no longer certain that they could maintain physical exercise at levels to which they had grown accustomed. As Olli (33 years) noted, “What I've been thinking is that if I'll leave out those hobbies, shall I then only be lolling on the sofa?” In this consideration, “lolling on the sofa” suggests a marginal, inactive lifestyle, a form of ‘unsuccessful’ aging. As the 26 year-old man quoted at the outset put it, “when men are sixty well.. they start lolling on the sofa and.. It's sloppy like”. Although in many accounts the younger men defined their age and health relationally with either explicit or implicit references to older men's weakened bodies, thereby privileging younger men, this was not the only point of distinction. Another discursive practice of differentiation was to refer to older men's irresponsibility, a theme which appears to be similar to younger men, but which has a far more negative meaning. The generalized “sloppy” depiction and imputations of careless and unhealthy lifestyle attach to older men. For example, respondents accused older men of not going to doctors on time, while describing their own more responsible attitudes toward self-care. As one of the interviewees said about older men's reluctance to seek help, “I just don't get it. If there's something wrong, why don't you go to a doctor?” In addition, several participants referred to older men's unhealthy habits, distinct from their own rational, responsible and health-aware lifestyles, e.g. healthy diet and regular exercise. In summary, we have found that the discussions of other men elicit more negative assessments of health, performance, and responsibility than do discussions of interviewees' own lives. The age-based ‘others’ to whom our interviewees referred, whether younger or older men, were typically described in negative terms referring to irresponsibility, irrationality or laziness. We can interpret this as a stigmatizing or marginalizing practice by which men make claims to age-based hierarchies

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and their own privileged position over other groups. However, the descriptions of older men were not consistent in their negative and ageist tone. An important exception within the generalized category of ‘older men’ occurred when the discussion turned to fathers, men with whom respondents had personal and close relationships. Cracks in the ageist discourses: fathers as particular older men In studies of men's ideas of health, researchers have noted that men's responses vary with the objects of their descriptions. When men talk about themselves, they speak differently than when they discuss other men, at which points they are more likely to include negative assessments of health awareness. Descriptions of their own lives more often includes terms of rational and responsible attitudes toward health and its maintenance (Pietilä, 2008). In Steve Robertson's (2006) terminology, men are more likely to suggest that other men ‘don't care’ about their health, while the characteristic feature of stories about ‘me’ – and men close to ‘me’ – is that men follow the imperative of ‘should care’. Indeed, our interviewees found it difficult to explicate their health and aging, remaining – consequently – unmarked by matters associated with old age. Many redirected talk toward bodies and aging of other, older men, most often their own fathers. The next excerpt from a focus group illustrates how consideration of their own health turns to deliberating health in the lives of their fathers. Excerpt 5. Int: Now when you consider your own lives, as you all are under thirty, so what do you think, when ten years or more go by, do you think you will be more interested in health information than now? Joni (26 years): Well yes, probably.. we will be, because at that stage you – anyway – already start to think about.. that you could somehow like.. prolong those good years of life. So it certainly starts to gain interest.. more in that sense. Int: Could you tell me an example, what might be that certain age when, after which you start to be more interest in it [health]? Joni (26 years): Well probably.. probably like.. around the age of forty.. you start.. Mika (28 years): I.. I myself have sort of noticed, noticed about my dad like.. after he turned fifty that.. at the age of fifty and after that you kind of start.. start to be sort of concerned with, in a certain way, and you start to talk like.. “he's having this [health condition]” and “he's having that” and “bugger, he's of the same age as I!” Like the way that.. at least, latest just before the age of fifty it comes to your mind that.. “bugger, men of the same age as me, just as young as I am” and.. [laughs and others start to laugh]. You start to notice that there are blokes in the newspapers [obituaries]. When the focus-group participants are asked about the certain life stage when they would take greater interest in health, the first speaker (Joni) gives a vague answer which again refers to gradually occurring ailments that give reason to “start to think” about health. The next speaker (Mika) resolves the problem by offering a more concrete story, of how a man

becomes aware of his aging and possible risks of deteriorating health. “Radical wake-up calls”, which in earlier interview episodes referred to personal perceptions of a man's own bodily decline, relate here to the perceptions of ill-health and even cases of death in his father's social circles. In the story, the father suddenly meets the age-based expectations regarding the body. Although he seemingly feels healthy, his chronological age makes him vulnerable. Bearing in mind that old(er) men were often described in terms of weakness and laziness, the excerpt above illustrates that talk of fathers differs from general descriptions of older men in many respects. Avoiding accusations of irresponsible attitudes to health, Mika's story is both compassionate and humorous. It highlights that when fathers are discussed the considerations inflect general age relations with particular intergenerational relations. Old age does not lose its less advantaged position; but a particular person, especially a family member, may be viewed more compassionately than “those other old people.” This was characteristic of talk about fathers throughout our interviews. Fathers were most often taken as examples of increasing motivation to lead a healthy lifestyle when a man grows older. In some cases the fathers' health-awareness was even held to have caused trouble for their sons. 36-year-old Mikko complains that, after his father began to attend to his health, he also kept “nagging” about his son's unhealthy habits. On the other hand, the fathers' unhealthy habits were not judged as strictly as those of other older men but instead rationalized as, among others, deeply rooted routines. After referring to his fathers' reluctance to eat vegetables, Jukka (27 years) justifies this by saying that at that age it “may not be that easy to change it (diet) anymore”, positioning this lifestyle choice in a broader context of life-course. This discursive practice has also been noticed by Gough (2009:537) who concludes that “accounts of the father's faults are quickly followed by repairs which locate the father's actions in wider contexts and so mitigate his particular failings”. According to Gough, the father's potentially negative features are mitigated either by normalizing and rationalizing them or counterbalancing them with positive features. Discussing one's own father broadens the social context in which men's aging takes place, thus diminishing blame that accrues to the older man. Instead of focusing only on individual choices made by an aging man, the family context shapes the speaker's perceptions of age and the choices regarding an aging man's lifestyle. This was particularly visible in focus groups, especially in one of them, quoted above, in which fathers' lives were discussed in length. After the previous episode, Joni also tells the other focus group participants about his father, who has started to pay more attention to dietary habits and exercise. However, his story casts his mother as the primary initiator: “In our family it's like.. the more my mother knew [about health] the more my father suffered (chuckles)”. The mother pressures the father to engage in physical exercise and eat healthfully. After a while the interviewer gets back to this by asking Joni about the role of his mother in the father's health promoting activities. Excerpt 6. Int: Well you said that your mother has been involved in it quite a bit (Joni: Aha-a) in this (Joni: Aye! [laughs]) business..

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Joni (26 years): Yes she's one of those.. (Mika, 28 years: coaches [laughs]) Oh yes, she's the last word as a tough trainer so that.. Dad comes home from work well.. she gives him.. some salad and.. a bit of chicken, then says “and when you've eaten we'll go out for your exercise” and.. Then there's no questions asked that.. Int: Well, what about when this or.. do you remember any time when this like would have started or, or has it just like always been.. your mother.. did that, but that at some point (Joni: It started..) your father just started accepting it? Joni (26 years): ..a couple of, couple of years back so that, our well.. in the family.. the husband in this family we knew, he must be surely.. five, six years younger than my father.. Well he had.. in a year he had three bad infarcts and.. that's when we in our family.. started to look a bit what we were doing and.. Int: Uh huh.. then your father has like, like.. in a way.. even if your mother has been there.. been like working on it [laughing] and moving it along, still in a way it has been absolutely (Joni: Yes) absolutely on his own initiative? Joni (26 years): Yes. The excerpt provides an example of the complication of accounts of aging by personal relations with those growing old. At the beginning of the excerpt, Joni ridicules his aging father as an object of his mother's health-promoting “coaching”, which locates the father in a subordinated position. But he then shifts tone from humorous to more serious once the interviewer asks when these changes began. Joni also provides another perspective on his mother's role. By telling fellow participants about the serious health problems of one male family friend, Joni describes the change in his father's health-related practices as a group response: “that's when we in our family.. started to look a bit what we were doing.” He describes the decision to follow a healthy lifestyle as a collective choice on the part of his family, not referring to this as ‘their’ decision but as something that “we” did. Based on this, it is easy for Joni to agree with the interviewer's prompting question about whether the decision to lead a healthier lifestyle was, after all, the father's own initiative. This oscillating perspective on the father's lifestyle choices suggests that the interviewee both distances himself from his father's aging but relates himself to his father by locating himself as a member of the family. He both associates men over fifty with weakness and death, and speaks of his father as a maker of decisions shaped by family ties. In our view the first part of the excerpt extends the ageist discourse of older men in general, which positions them as weak, whereas the personal relation to his father leads the interviewee to take particular life events and their social contexts into account and thus regard him as more of an agent. Indeed, interviewees generally did not treat their fathers as ‘old men’ but categorized them in less inclusive groups, as particular family members shielded from the stigma of old age. For instance, while older men were often described to be lazy in relation to their health (“lolling on a sofa”), the fathers' motives and choices were discussed in a far more detailed and varied ways (e.g. taking note of family relationships and their effects on lifestyle choices).

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Intergenerational empathy: smoothing status transitions In contrast to their talk of ‘men in general’, respondents' stories of their older fathers often included references to concrete practices, places and physical tasks. One recurrent locale in the interviewees' accounts was the summer cottage — in Finnish culture, a place of both freedom and joy, and a realm of strenuous work done with family members. Discussion of such work enables the assessments of bodies in terms of capability and persons in terms of authority. Mika discusses his father's aging in the context of physical work at their summer cottage: Excerpt 7. Int: How about.. well you told me that your father, around at the age of fifty, he started to pay more attention to these things. So how, in which things it has been noticeable, what he has like concretely done [differently]? Or left to do? Mika (28 years): Well, probably, I think it's like he.. dares to ask for help.. in something he's, what he's been doing there, toiling somewhere there in our summer place. Like he dares to ask someone to help him so that.. (..) like harvesting alone in the forest or doing other similar stuff alone.. (..) Earlier it was like.. he was so bloody stubborn, you know, and now he's starting little by little sort of.. ask for getting help every now and then so that.. You don't always, like always have to do it all on your own. (..) Joni (26 years): In our summer cottage it has gone to that.. well my dad has.. every now and then his back, his neck is like really awfully aching and you know his back aches- but sort of.. All heavier stuff what needs to be done, like in the forest and so, well we entirely do them with the brother-inlaw now. We just say like “now you go there.. to the beach”, and then we do the job although.. Sometimes it surely makes you feel pissed off (gives a short laugh) when he sits there alone on the beach, drinking beer (laughing) sort of.. And you feel you could be doing that yourself! Mika invokes a man's ideal of manual work performed without aid as he frames his father's aging in terms of loss of that independence, autonomy and strength. In telling this story, he takes a critical view of his father's “bloody stubborn” risk-taking strain, and notes that now he, little by little, “dares” to ask for help. Mika then suggests that his father should admit the bodily changes caused by aging and acknowledge his son as a source of aid in physical tasks: “you don't always … have to do it all on your own”. But, despite this, he leaves his father in the position of privilege to define the rules for asking and getting help. From the perspective of the intersection of inequalities, we see Mika's story as shaped by class, as well as familiarity, gender and age. “Toiling” at the summer cottage expresses a freedom unusual for a working-class man, where he, not an employer, can choose the work his body does. In such stories, aging gradually limits a man's freedom to make these choices; but the father, in his position as head of the family, retains the right to define the roles, rules and division of physical work. Joni follows Mika's story with a similar example from his own father's life, one which also defers to a parental authority even though age relations can sap the occupational status of older men. Due to his father's neck pains, Joni has taken the

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responsibility to do “all heavier stuff” with his brother-in-law. They have told his father to go to the beach to rest as the younger men take the positions of physically more capable men. Such a directive can look like simple exclusion of the aging father, but the description includes other aspects too. In telling his story Joni points out that, while he is “doing the job” with his brother-in-law, his father sits on the beach drinking beer, which makes Joni feel “pissed off”. But he accompanies the story with an affectionate laugh that softens the cruder words. His father cedes responsibility to the younger generation of men but still maintains some authority over them, apparently with their consent. Released from some of his former responsibilities, he can drink beer and watch how younger men do the physical work. Those younger men appear similarly ambivalent: although they occupy the positions of more capable men who take responsibility for tasks that had been their father's chores, they do not become entirely independent of him. They submit to his controlling eye. Discussion Our analysis shows that under-40-year-old interviewees portrayed age groups to which they do not belong as irresponsible, for different reasons, toward health and its maintenance. As they categorized younger adults and old people by age and drew invidious distinctions in terms of ability to maintain the activities associate with male privilege, they left themselves unmarked; providing no vocabulary to describe any age group of their own. We suggest that this framing of their unmarked status maintains age as a social relation of inequality at the same time as the marking of men in terms of ability address gender. It marks men of “fifty” or “sixty” as “lolling” and even dying, and leaves the claims of younger adults, to be fully productive and responsible for skilled work, unquestioned. Though respondents contrast their mindfulness to the carelessness of younger men, they do not question younger men's capability (e.g., their ability to work). Indeed, they are seen as careless because they enjoy good health. Ageism focuses instead on older men, with its imagery of decline and death. These accounts naturalize aging and can justify the exclusion of older men from some pursuits. Despite younger men's tendency to distance themselves from old people, they distinguished among older men by familiarity, categorizing their own fathers not only among those growing frail but also as family in more diverse and nuanced accounts. The interview talk of fathers is shaped by family structure and age relations. We trace the more nuanced tone in the descriptions of interviewees' fathers both to the feelings of closeness among kin and to the changes of status within families caused by aging. In this context, respondents categorize aging bodies in relation to shifts in the division of responsibility for carrying out physical work. Transition between statuses is a slow and gradual process, and our interviewees' talk reflects a negotiation of their fathers' position within age categories being ‘on the edge’ of middle-age and old age. Biggs et al. (2011) have conceptualized the ways in which generational relations (defined as the combination of cohort, life course, and family roles) are maintained and negotiated, in families and beyond, and isolated a self-aware, critical empathy as “generational intelligence”. This process builds on

the recognition of multiple and partly contradictory aspects of generational awareness and ability to understand generational conflict. Generational intelligence enables people to “act knowingly in an intergenerational space” (ibid: 1110) as they cope with tensions between solidarity and conflict. And, to the extent that self-awareness of family role results from advancing age and empathetic engagement with older people, such fine-grained negotiation may be seen to cultivate one aspect of generational intelligence, which enables the (re)definitions of men's intergenerational relationships in a way which does not threaten the solidarity between men of different ages. As Hagestad and Uhlenberg (2005: 352) point out, family ties provide “a basis for age integration that is missing in other social contexts”. Our analysis shows that the ways in which generational intelligence takes its form are tightly linked with class-based ideals and practices. In our interviews, which focused on health and bodies, the status transitions between generations related particularly to the abilities to carry out physical tasks and work. For our interviewees, generational intelligence amounts to an awareness of the ways in which social constructions of physical capability, bodily autonomy and control affect working-class “respectability” (Skeggs, 1997, 2004, 2009). Sons interviewed here observed their fathers gradually diminishing their leading roles in physical tasks, but not retracting all of their paternal authority. Thus, the status transitions do not challenge the fathers' respectability, either in terms of physical abilities or authority over intergenerational relations, which sons redefine rather than deny. This illustrates that status transition is a joint project in which both generations “act knowingly in an intergenerational space” (Biggs et al., 2011: 1110) for common purposes. Preserving respectability in terms of bodily autonomy and control not only requires but also enables performance of working-class masculinity (Collinson, 1992; Paap, 2006), independent of changing life course statuses. Research on cultural images of men's aging has shown that aging men often lose their power and status to retirement and to a loss of bodily performance, resulting in a marginalized position in comparison with younger men (Meadows & Davidson, 2006; Thompson, 2006; Venn, Davidson, & Arber, 2011). On the basis of our analysis, it seems that although family ties serve to mitigate ageism and make it less visible (Gough, 2009; Hagestad & Uhlenberg, 2005: 355), these family relations still involve ageism and (discursive) practices that treat older men as somewhat less masculine. We argue that talk of age follows the patterns typical of other relations of inequality, such that being in a position of privilege renders one “unmarked”, much as occurs when one is white, male, heterosexual or middle class. Closeness to a member of a disadvantaged group – such as with an older family member, like a father – can further reinforce privilege by making advantage all the more difficult to see, systemic inequality more difficult to understand. By fostering particular (exceptionalist) view of old in terms of fathers, respondents appear to maintain a popular dualism, of old men in general and dads/selves in particular. Rather than challenge the naturalization of ageist views, such familiarity can affirm the invisibility of age as a social relation of inequality. This report on the maintenance of age inequality through talk on bodies, health, work, and family ties is limited by the fact that the talk in question occurs not in mundane activity but in discussions occasioned by the authors. In our analysis of two

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