Women over fifty are always laughed at, says Barbara van Erp (54). They are lumped together with people in their sixties, seventies and eighties. And so, according to her, the image of people over fifty is: creaky knees, painful joints, menopause, incontinence. “No one says: oh yes, nice, finally freedom again! The kids out of the house! Festivals, dancing! New loves, starting your own.”
She also received those reactions when she met in 2016 Sarah Magazine began. This was initially an online magazine for women over fifty, but soon appeared in a paper edition (circulation 22,500). Short, cynical laugh. “Hahaha, probably about menopause and stuff?” The weekly Saar podcast followed last spring, with an average of 25,000 listeners per episode. Subtitle: ’50+ but far from dead’.
We are sitting in the Morgan & Mees restaurant in Amsterdam, close to her office. She comes in on time but in a hurry. I already knew that her partner Femke Sterken is at home with a burnout, she had talked about this in the podcast. Barbara van Erp: “There are four of us running the company, and now an almost full-time employee has disappeared. Another colleague is also sick, flu. It’s just too much.” She canceled tomorrow’s recording. “I can’t bring myself to be funny.”
She made a mini podcast this morning to explain that to listeners. In it she says that she burst out crying that morning while exercising. Because she “just didn’t know anymore.” She also says: “I have to take care of myself for a while.”
This state of mind, I think, also determines our conversation. She was looking forward to it, she said earlier on the phone, but she also remains a bit businesslike.
She has ADHD and those complaints worsened when she entered menopause. “I have a very busy head, and it really became too busy. I became chaotic and sometimes a bit panicky.” She recently started applying an estrogen gel to her skin every day. “A cloud has left my mind.”
Major projects will continue. Like the presentation of the first one next week Saarbook, and an online course for women who want to start their own business. She created the course herself, together with an entrepreneurial coach, and will teach it herself, six weeks in a row. “I actually think that everyone over fifty should start their own business.” She orders ginger tea and looks briefly at the menu. “Oh great, they have a new menu. Roasted eggplant salad, I want that right away.”
There are certainly people with a very nice job, she says, but that game of dealing with managers and people below you and having to work your way up within an organization – “I find that all terrible.” She sees that friends her age are tired of it. “I have managed to remove terms such as ‘just put your heads together’ from my life. We just work.”
I say that I am now beginning to understand her work history. She worked through many bosses before starting her own business. She worked, among other things Free Netherlands, Volkskrant Magazine, Sentence, Linda, Marie Claire and Dragonfly. Usually for one or two years. There is someone sitting opposite me with strong opinions and a certain unrest. She says that she never functioned well within an organization and constantly clashed with the people above her. “And then I had to leave again. So I went from page to page to page.” At one point she realized, she says, that it might also be “a little” her fault.
Heavily pregnant with her second son, “after a lot of IVF”, she decided to become an entrepreneur at the age of 42. She taught herself everything. Building websites, devising an online strategy, marketing, attracting advertisers and investors. The blog first followed Me to We, with which she aimed at young parents. It quickly attracted 400,000 monthly visitors. This followed a few years later Saar. She went straight from diapers to the over-fifty woman. An idea she already had in mind well before she reached that age herself. It became a mission, but perhaps more so a brand. She stands up for these women, but at the same time is mercilessly critical of the woman over fifty who does not match the target group description of Saar: smooth, Randstad, in the middle of life. We’ll talk about that later.
The image of the woman over fifty is changing, she thinks. “But women over fifty still have to get away from TV very quickly and everything and everyone is busy rejuvenating while half of the Netherlands is over fifty. I find that an insult.”
You also participate in it, I say. In the podcast she explains what she does to keep looking younger. “Well, I want to keep looking good. Healthy, rested. I don’t have to…” she pushes the sides of her face back with her hands, “to have everything pulled tight. I want to feel young. I sometimes hear friends say that they no longer feel like working. Then I always think: wohoo, I’m going to go for a walk around the block. They’re all women with those jobs, in an office building.”
She corrects me when I ask if she was dreading growing older. “Whether I dread it, because of course it goes on and on and on.” And then: “I really know that I am older, I really know, I am not crazy. But I don’t feel that way.” Her youngest son has yet to turn twelve, he is in group 8. “Everyone on the schoolyard will be ten years younger than me, but I hardly register that.” She does think about the moment when her children leave home, she now sees that happening with friends. “Maybe I want a house outside, on higher ground. So that the children can flee there if the dikes break. If something goes wrong, like corona, or like the drinking water shortage that is now threatening, you would rather be in the countryside.”
While Saar focuses on Randstad women. Why actually?
“It’s me, I can’t focus on a farmer’s wife from Drenthe. I don’t know what that’s like.”
There are also women over fifty living in Drenthe who are not farmers.
“And they might also listen to the podcast. It’s also a bit of aspiration. We focus on nice, hip women, often wise women. Yes, if we only put short and spicy from Assen in the magazine…”
Do you associate women from outside the Randstad with short hair?
She sighs. “Yes, a little bit. That’s really bad. I do have a cliché image. That’s not right.”
You stand up for women over 50, while also attacking them in the podcast, the magazine and now the book.
“Yes, don’t let yourself go like that.”
An article in the book begins with the sentence ‘the older the woman, the more sour’.
“I encounter a lot of sourness, worry and burnout among women. And all those digital people! We tried for a long time not to have twenty or thirty year old girls working for us, everyone had to be fifty, but the pace of those people! Impossible! I think that women over fifty have to do something man-uppingdon’t say all the time: I can’t do that.”
Do you also see that as Saar’s task?
“Yes, keep renewing yourself. You don’t have to stop developing yourself. Even though I do stupid things myself, I recently told my son that my phone had been out of service for two days. He swiped his finger across my screen once and then it did it again. There is no stopping it of course.”
Don’t you think you should be a little more lenient?
“If you have enough money and you don’t have to keep up with all those digital developments, I’ll let you take up gardening. But if you still have to work for fifteen years and you complain that you don’t understand it all anymore, then make sure you do understand it.”
And if you like a short haircut?
“Then you get a short haircut. But make sure you comb it a bit so that you don’t have a bald spot at the back. And that you put on a nice lipstick. Well, that’s up to you. Maybe women who just let things hang are much happier. I exercise all the time because I think my stomach needs to be flat.”
How do you find balance in that?
“Balance and I are not really a match.”
She started the Saarpodcast with her partner Femke and editor-in-chief Els Rozenbroek. Almost immediately it became apparent that Els was terminally ill. Els did not want to talk about her illness in the podcast, but then it would become such an elephant in the room. That is why a ‘cancer minute’ was included in each podcast. “That cancer minute of course lasted longer and longer.” At the end of Els’ life, they took the recording equipment to the hospice. Els did not want the addition ’50+ and far from dead’ to be left out. “We received angry letters from people who thought it was not possible, but they said: leave it alone. I immediately respected that. It remains our mission: we are far from dead and you should not live like that.”
After Els’s death, a friend of Barbara said that in order to keep the listeners of the podcast, they now had to become completely honest. “We hid behind Els’s openness. That was no longer possible.”
She “of course keeps a lid on some things.” She also finds it difficult to talk about her relationship. “That’s not fun for him.” Him, that’s comedian Thomas van Luyn. “Femke finds it funny to swear very loudly about her husband. Sometimes she says: shit, I hope he doesn’t listen. We do look for the edges. I actually think with every podcast: I hope no one is listening.”
You push the edges less than Femke.
“Yes that is true. Femke is much more candid. I also have a son who is almost eighteen and I don’t want anything to go wrong. That someone at school listens to the podcast and picks up something. But people quickly find you open-hearted. And why shouldn’t they know that you were grumpy when you were going through menopause? The need for real is what our entire company is built on, that is our DNA. The most common and nicest compliment I receive is that listening to our podcast is like sitting on a terrace and eavesdropping on canal belt-looking women who talk a little too loudly to each other with some bubbles of white wine in front of them on the table.”
Do you like that?
“I like that!”
You don’t mind being pushed into the canal belt corner?
“I do not care. I know who I am. I would love nothing more than to eavesdrop on a group of women like that. We’ve always had a lot of shit thrown at us. From people who complain about Femke’s loud laugh or why we portray nice, older KLM stewardesses while I go and brag on the A12 with Extinction Rebellion. Or that we are in the canal belt, or where the province’s perspective is. And then I think: start making your own podcast with the province’s perspective. This is who we are and what we can do.”