Life & Wisdom Quote by Gail Sheehy

Sheehy’s line lands with the neat snap of a taboo being named out loud. “Oxymoron” is doing triple duty: it’s a linguistic joke, a cultural diagnosis, and an indictment. The phrase doesn’t just claim older women were desexualized; it exposes how that desexualization was treated as common sense, baked into the very logic of public conversation. “Rarely mentioned in the same breath” slyly points to the way speech itself polices desire: what can’t be comfortably said becomes what can’t be comfortably imagined.

The intent is less to shock than to mark a before-and-after. Sheehy wrote across decades when feminism was forcing private life into public language, and when mass media sold youth as both commodity and moral alibi. In that climate, “older women” weren’t merely sidelined; they were recast as caretakers, punchlines, or cautionary tales. Sex belonged to them only as a memory or a threat. Calling that pairing an “oxymoron” underscores how the culture framed the older female body as incompatible with appetite, as if desire has an expiration date that conveniently aligns with male comfort.

The subtext is a provocation: if the category feels absurd, ask who benefits from the absurdity. It’s a reminder that ageism and sexism collaborate with special efficiency. Men get to age into “distinguished”; women age into “invisible.” Sheehy’s wit is strategic - not decorative - because it punctures the rule that kept older women quiet and, crucially, kept everyone else from having to adjust their assumptions.