The Fourth Gender

Ora Ruven

Let me mourn the loss of beauty… Men and women cease to be sexual beings. They are classified in the fourth gender — not man, not woman.

What is my gender? It depends on my age.

Age 30

Desired, courted, beautiful, sought-after, sexy, “hot,” restless, excited, flirting, teasing. (Not a mistake: a verb formed from the word “sex.” The absence of commas is not a mistake either — it is my preference for a fast, continuous reading of the chain of epithets.)

Age 60

Courted? Desired? Beautiful inside. Beautiful for her age. Wanted for babysitting. Sexy in the head. A “hot chick” of the past. Not restless, not excited. Flirting?

Beauty — whether culturally dictated or seared into our DNA — delights and pleases me. I mourn its loss. I look in the mirror and do not recognize myself. Who am I?

The aging women say: I earned my wrinkles honestly.
And I answer: What is the connection between honesty and wrinkles? And what is “earning”?

Let me mourn the loss of beauty. Tell me I must accept the “new” look because that is what there is. Tell me I must surrender to time, the victor. Tell the sad women who wear a shirt with a sleeve to hide the loose muscles of the upper arm that they should hide the wrinkles on their faces behind a veil as well.

Tell me to seek interest in doing, in leisure, in wise use of the present time that remains. The discrimination against old men and women stems from preferring the beautiful. Did you know? Young people who are not beautiful are discriminated against too!

The loss of beauty is the outward expression of a far greater loss. It marks the weakness of the body, mind, and soul. Because it is external, it may be perceived as the root of the problem, as the first cause of discrimination.

Is this preference for beauty embedded in our DNA? Is it cultural? It does not matter.

What matters is to separate beauty, and its loss, from justice. In the name of justice we must end discrimination against the old. It is important that this discrimination be seen as unjust — because the old can still be strong and capable!

This is a war of existence.

“You were already there” — a young woman who spoke with me about my future and hers told me so.

Indeed, before she was born I already was and did and experienced and fought and gave birth and raised and earned. Now she thinks I should step aside and give her my place.

But the old have always fought for their place in society. “Do not cast me off in the time of old age,” cried the psalmist. “Honor your father and your mother,” says the law. “Ask the elder of the tribe,” says tradition.

Yet tradition and religious law have lost their hold in Western society — and therefore a new infrastructure must be built in the struggle for the place of the old, based both on the universal value of equality and on the practical fact of life expectancy and quality of life that science has given us.

Today’s sixties and eighties were yesterday’s forties and sixties. I point to us as a new gender that must claim its place. An old story…

The new gender, the fourth, is age-dependent: there comes an age when the man gradually loses his masculine traits and the woman loses her feminine traits. Men and women cease to be sexual beings. They are classified in the fourth gender — not man, not woman.

Their sexuality is weakened; they are not courted, they do not court, they do not display sexuality — they even hide it and are ashamed of it. What is engraved in our DNA that makes us hide sexuality in maturity and old age even though it still exists? The end of the fertile age? The ancient “moral” link between fertility and sexual relations?

What does the world think of a seventy-five-year-old woman having sex?

King David plays for me

David Garrett is a star violinist, and also a strikingly handsome man. I watch him play and I know that for me all handsome men are already lost; all that remains is to paint (in simulated reality) a portrait of Garrett the musician and attach his playing to the animation — Albinoni’s Adagio. David Garrett the violinist who lifts my evil spirit reminds me of David who played for King Saul to drive away his evil spirit.

Photo album — Ora Ruven's Photo Album with Mr. Death

You do not have to go to a memorial at the cemetery; you can sit at ease in the sitting corner I designed, and look at my album with Mr. Death and the death masks on the shelf in the living room.