‘As I get older, I am more and more comfortable in myself’: Gendered portraits of older adults in a popular 50+ magazine in Finland

Later life has become more visible in popular media culture during recent years, with increasing academic interest round this cultural change and the intersections of age and gender. This article provides a long-term overview of common-sense understandings of older age and gender in the Finnish 50 + magazine ET during a timespan from the 1970s to the 2010s. In this article, we ask how ET has constructed ideas about ageing and gender in its portrait interviews. In our thematic analysis of 292 interviews published in ET , the main observation is that unless women were not totally invisible in previous years, their visibility in this magazine increased remarkably during this time. We also identified three gendered themes discussed in the interviews: working life, retirement and social relations and care. Gender was generally discussed in a rather moderate way while emphasizing women’s individual strength and being in the process of becoming something new. In this millennium, this has also meant a transition towards more neoliberal discourses of choice, freedom and successful ageing, often women as the leading figures.