Friday Q&A: Why Only Women in Your Photo Contest?

Joy Sassoon, Age 60
by Tanya Constantine

Q: Why aren't you including men in your photo contest?

A: The simple answer is that if you scan through the posts on our blog, you will see a preponderance of photos of a white man in his 50s (Baxter Bell). So, to start, I wanted to get a bit more diversity on the blog and I decided to start with women (of all colors and body types). 

Karen Moore by Melina Meza

Secondly, older women in the yoga world—and in society in general—tend to get overlooked, much more than older men. There are lots of photographs out there of older yoga male teachers, and not so many of the females. In general, older women often comment that they feel "invisible," and older men appear as much as 10 times more frequently than older women in media (see The Case of the Disappearing Women Over 40: Anti-Aging and Symbolic Annihilation). Because I'm in the position to do something about that (rather than just ranting about it), I decided it was time to do my bit. And guess what? I posted the photo above of Joy Sassoon on our Facebook page, and it is literally going viral. I think that speaks to the hunger out there for more representation of this group.

However, there have been some complaints about lack of equality in this contest, so because I've received an outpouring of photographs of older woman doing yoga, I've decided that after I'm able to sort through all those photos and have posted a significant number of them, I will open the contest to men. Stay tuned!

Vincent, Age 51
Copyright by Sara Bennett 2013

—Nina

P.S. I received the following comment on Tuesday's post: 

"Although I love the women models I do not like the listing of their ages. If you added a caption with the age of all your models, it would be more balanced. Noting only the ages of women, and only older women, is feeding the 'anti aging' paradigm we would like to avoid."

This comment confused me. I thought women proudly stating their age was a good thing, as we are often taught to lie about our ages or be ashamed of being older. What do you think? Should I include the ages or not? (Of course, if I continue including the women's ages, I would also include the ages of men whose photos I post after that contest begins. I won't be posting Baxter's age on every single photo of Baxter, however, because I considered the photos of people demonstrating our poses to be in a different category.)

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