wOw: Your famous "This is what 40/50/60 looks like – we’ve been lying so long, who would know?" has served generations of women (and Oprah said of you last year, "This is what 74 can be!"). How does 75 look and feel to you?  

Steinem: The good news is I don’t feel much different from my younger self – actually, better than I did before my late 30s when the women’s movement came along to rescue me from trying to be somebody else. I’m working at what I love, I’m on the road as much as ever, I have as much energy and I have a chosen family of friends. Once in a while, when I’m doing something very ordinary, a feeling of well-being comes over me and I realize I’m happy.

The bad news is that all this makes me feel immortal – and causes me to plan poorly! I hear about something that happened 20 or 25 years ago, it seems like yesterday, and then I realize that even if I’m very lucky, this is all the time I have left. Even if I make it to 100 as I plan to do, it won’t be long before I’ll have to leave everything I love. I’m trying to use this to help me use time better. It’s not so much about aging now as about mortality.

The odd thing is that I knew this long ago. A stranger just sent me an e-mail with a quote of mine under her sign-off: “Life is time, and time is all there is.” I wrote that in my 30s, but then I went right on thinking I was immortal for the next 40 years. The distance between knowing and understanding, between head and heart, must be the longest distance on earth.

wOw: Are you as happy/healthy/strong/wise? What regimen do you keep — if any — for your spectacular beauty?

Steinem: I’m happy, healthy and strong, but I don’t know about wise. Every day I discover how little I know; it’s just that I also discover that other people don’t know as much as I thought.  I also have to tell you that words like “spectacular beauty” never entered my life until I was a feminist. I think I was just a surprise, as if people were saying, “If a woman could get a man, why would she want equal pay?”

Now, I look in the mirror, I see all kinds of age changes, and I think, “Well, I expected that, but not THAT!” Beginning at around 50, I started to realize that our bodies lose what they need to support someone else, and keep what they need to support us. How smart is that!? It’s interesting to watch my body do something that it knows how to do but I don’t.

I’m not health conscious by the standards of vegan joggers, but I’m more conscious than I used to be. I was the classic Midwesterner who grew up on cheeseburgers, malteds and candy bars. I didn’t do sports or know female people who did sports — except maybe Ladies’ Night Bowling — and I thought exercise was for athletes. The only thing I did was dance because I loved it and I thought it might get me out of Toledo and into show business. I’m still hooked on sugar and I still don’t do sports, but I’m a vegetarian because I had a brush with breast cancer more than 20 years ago and I learned the dangers of hormones and chemicals in animal fat.

Which reminds me: Why are there so many races for the cure and for testing, but not for prevention? It’s because there’s no profit in prevention. People who profit from creating carcinogens get angry when you point out the most obvious causes of cancer among people with no family history of it.

Anyway, I try to exercise two or three times a week when I’m not on the road, and I love walking in New York. I’m lucky to have low blood pressure, a lot of endurance, and an Olympic ability to sleep on planes.

When reporters started to ask at about 50 if I would have a facelift, I used to say maybe after 70. Well, here I am and I still wouldn’t. I’d like to say it’s because I can’t imagine Georgia O’Keeffe or Eleanor Roosevelt or Rosa Parks with a facelift, but the truth is I’m afraid I’d become like the guy with a bad toupee; when you’re talking to him, you can’t think of anything else.