The Age of Denial : Memo to All Boomers: How Is It That You’ve Transformed the Rite of Turning 50 Into a Celebration of Your So-Called Youth?

So you’re turning 50.

Hahaha.

Er, take that back. Maybe the joke’s on us.

You would think all those yuppie-haters out there would be laughing at the prospect of Dockers-wearing baby boomers going Grecian, power walking instead of jogging, taking Depends breaks in between puffs of their Arturo Fuentes.

But oh, no. Just the opposite.

Just as in the past, you have managed to turn a traditional passage of doom into a celebration of your youth and culture--yet another opportunity to party in the pages of the media that you so clamorously control. Oldstock?

The Beatles are No. 1 (again--yawn). Everybody wants to sell you a miracle drug. Hollywood chronicles your every breath (from “The Graduate” to “Forrest Gump”).

And one thing’s for sure: As the 76 million of you begin to hit 50 at the rate of one every 7 1/2 seconds this year, you will change the concept of aging as much as aging will change you. You are, after all, so vain.

What used to be old will be young--a feat only you boomers could accomplish. From a new vocabulary (can you imagine calling Cher a senior?) to age-sensitive marketing (Act Young. Drink Pepsi!) to new products (girdles for a new generation), the world will bend over backward to make you feel like lads and lassies (though you will go through more life changes than an Oliver Stone plot).

“Fifty is still an age where you can still have one foot in youth,” insists 43-year-old Michael Lafavore, editor of Men’s Health magazine.

That’s half true. America’s life expectancy has reached new heights, 75.6 years, and is climbing. But the other half involves spin control. Even at 50, you don’t want to be called middle-aged, Mr. or elder (not to mention politically correct terms like “gravity challenged”). That would be rude. You would much rather be called dude.

“When I teach,” USC marketing professor Michael Kamins, 42, reveals, “I hate it when they call me Dr. Kamins. I prefer they call me Mike.”

Keen-eyed marketers have learned your lesson, Mike. Not only are they expanding their traditional target audience (18 to 49) to include the 50-plus crowd, they’ve even invented a new name for middle age. They call it “mid-youth,” Mister.

“No one here talks about middle-aged people,” says Alison Kaar, spokeswoman for LensCrafters. “We call them emerging presbyopes.” “Presbyopes” refers to the farsighted, as far as we can see.

“The story in marketing is not selling to how old people are,” Kamins says, “but the age people think they are.”

And boomers measure themselves as much as 15 years younger than their chronological age, experts say. Or as Gail Sheehy put it in “The New Passages,” (Random House, 1995) her paean to incessant self-improvement, “Fifty is now what 40 used to be.”

Mercedes-Benz is hip to that. In a twist of advertising irony, the German car company is invoking a famous line from ‘60s singer Janis Joplin: “Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes-Benz.” Redkin hair, skin and body products have a new motto: “To Preserve and Protect.” And Revlon is using a beautiful Melanie Griffith, 37, to promote “Age Defying Makeup.”

Then there’s the Circuit City commercial that portrays a suited yuppie out-blasting a grunge rocker in a park-bench boom-box battle. (As if.) Or the Caffeine Free Diet Coke commercial that has an older woman boxing a younger man and winning. A Coca-Cola marketing spokesman is proud to say, “It’s the first ad campaign in the soft-drink industry dedicated to the 40-plus market. No caffeine. No sugar. No limits.”

Will you ever age?

“What we can look forward to is people who not too long ago were staring at lava lamps, smoking dope and listening to Iron Butterfly--they’re basically going to be in diapers,” says Bob Garfield, editor at large for Advertising Age magazine.

“How are advertisers going to reach those people? I don’t think its going to be pretty. I can actually envision Jimi Hendrix being invoked to sell Arthritis Pain Formula. It’s going to be a laugh riot.”

Even girdles and butt-pads, the untouchable domain of grannies, are being marketed as Slenderizing Manshape Undergarments, Super Shaper Briefs and Bottoms Up Corsets.

(If these don’t work, sagging body parts will no doubt be the next big thing. You’ll call it skin relaxation--and twentysomethings will be stretching their chins and cheeks just so they can fit in.)

Plastic surgery is at an all-time high among boomer men, according to the American Society of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeons. Dr. Randal Haworth, a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon, estimates that one out of four of his patients is male--and most of those are boomers.

“What’s so ironic,” says the 34-year-old, “is that these are the same people who espoused protest and 30 years later are succumbing to modern pressure, the antithesis of what the ‘60s stood for.”

Punk.

But he’s right. Pectoral and penile implants are in. Breasts are back. And everybody wants a nip-and-tuck (though they don’t call them face lifts anymore, of course: “facial rejuvenation” is the proper term).

“We all hope in the back of our minds that technology is going to come up with a cure for this aging thing,” says Lafavore of Men’s Health.

Not yet. But there are always relaxed-fit jeans, anti-aging skin creams, fake fattening food (olestra) and home gyms. Your legs, in fact, are fueling an almost $1 billion treadmill market.

“Boomers are at a point where they realize that preventive maintenance is required,” says Larry Weindruch, spokesman for the National Sporting Goods Assn. (“Forty-seven, and I have my treadmill.”).

You see, everybody wants the boomer market, even as it begins to turn 50, though not everyone is enthusiastically watching this mad dash for dollars. “I think we over-inflate the importance of baby boomers turning 50,” says 27-year-old Eric Liu, editor of the Next Progressive magazine.

But hey, Eric, we’re talking about money here--and hundreds of billions a year in boomer spending strength talks.

Even Modern Maturity, the seniors’ mega-zine put out by the American Assn. of Retired Persons, is going through a mid-youth rejuvenation--just for you. The Lakewood-based glossy has added Leonard Maltin on film, plenty of investment advice and contributors plucked from the pages of such boomer-centric publications as Rolling Stone and the Village Voice.

“In the future,” says AARP spokeswoman Joyce Winslow, “we plan to divide the magazine into two versions--a working persons’ version and a retired version.”

AARP itself, anticipating a windfall as boomers age, lowered its minimum age for membership to 50 nearly a decade ago.

Even the television industry, long the domain of 18-to-49 demographics, is hoping you’ll spend more time as a sofa spud. Sitcom sultan Norman Lear is working with AARP to develop a cable operation for the 50-plus crowd. (Geezer Television? VH-50? Whatever it’s called, it will be hip, darn it.)

“Whatever stage the baby boom is going through becomes fashionable because there’s so many of us,” Lafavore says.

“Why is baldness all of a sudden fashionable?” he asks. “Because all these baby boom guys are losing their hair.”

True. But “mid-youth” crisis still looms large for you.

Research says the 50s are the most tumultuous decade in life, with several “life changes” or major events to come. Those often include death of a parent, first serious illness and marital problems. According to the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, half of those 50 to 54 have gone through some traumatic event in the last year, the highest percentage of any age bracket. And the percentage of Americans who admit to having affairs peaks with the 45-to-49 crowd (at nearly one out of four of you . . . rascals).

Finance is another dark cloud.

Faced with a future of credit card debt ($1 trillion--more than mortgages) and all-time-low savings, Americans are putting off their sunset years in favor of debt-paying years.

“It’s unclear how much they will have to live on,” says Diane Crispell, executive editor of American Demographics magazine. “With Social Security there’s a lot of insecurity. And they may never get rid of the kids.

“Boomers may have more money,” she says, “but they will have more need for it.”

Generational historian Bill Strauss agrees. “Nearly half of us are negative-equity boomers,” says the 48-year-old co-author of “Generations” (Quill, 1991). “If their creditors called, they wouldn’t have the money.”

But “boomers will accept diminishing rewards for increased moral and cultural authority,” says Strauss, who is also co-author of a forthcoming book of predictions for the millennium (“Forth Turning,” due next year from Bantam).

And, he says, you all will continue to be active in public life, even as your politics change. The main battle in your hearts, Strauss says, will be the ageless American struggle of community versus the individual. With the success of the Million Man March, the fatherhood movement and religious revivals, he believes the Me Generation will finally become the We Generation.

“Boomers will reinvent duty,” Strauss says, “and they will demand others have that sense too. Boomers don’t want to be shown as hip, they want to be shown as responsible. One thing that has always been true about boomers as they entered every phase of life is they have seized it for all it has.”

Carpe mid-youth.