News of Patti Davis posing nude for More magazine at age 58 suggests the US might soon try catching up with the Netherlands in celebrity gossip about sexy “older” women. Pop culture in the Netherlands was treated not long ago to a number of images of famous midlife women making their faces and bodies plenty visible.
One, Patricia Paay, was Playboy Holland 's featured Christmas-issue centrefold in 2009. Patricia, a socialite and singer, was 60. With a pretty face shot on the cover, she is shown inside in typical soft-porn postures. In the controversy that followed, a comedian said only “necrophiles” would be attracted. But that didn't seem to be the popular view. The issue was Playboy 's biggest commercial success of the decade.
A more decorous novelty concerned Linda de Mol, a 40-plus TV show host, producer and actress who has her own magazine,
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With most such radical departures unavailable, Americans find themselves in a middle space, moving ahead but still trammelled by traditional sexist ageism. In the bad old days, few first-rate actresses could continue working without playing hags. Gloria Swanson played a has-been at 51 in Sunset Boulevard . Greta Garbo got out of the game forever at 36.
Tina Fey hit a nerve when she wrote in the New Yorker : “I know older men in comedy who can barely feed and clean themselves, and they still work. The women, though, they're all ‘crazy'.” Her suspicion is that the definition of “crazy” in show business is a woman who “keeps talking” even after no man wants to sleep with her.
But things have been changing, somewhat. The average age of a woman appearing on television in the US today is 40, compared with 33 in 1950. Meryl Streep, at 60, played a romantic lead with long blond hair and a tub scene in It's Complicated . Of her sexy role, she said, “Bette Davis is rolling over in her grave!”
Diane Keaton was naked and appealing at 57 in a shy long-shot in Something's Gotta Give . Kathy Bates was plumply naked from the waist up in a hot tub in About Schmidt . Helen Mirren played the lead in Jean Racine's play Phedre as a realistically passionate and dignified older woman.
The historical trend owes much to feminism — to female directors, or male directors who want female stars, and female audiences who gravitate toward actors alongside whom they have been ageing. It's a beginning that also coincides with the new longevity.
But what would happen if the envelope got pushed to the point where a woman at this life stage posed in Playboy ? Would it lead to harassment and stalking of older women? I don't think so.
The Dutch are moving the age of “still” being sexual objects and pretty women from 40 to 50 and to past 60. I suspect the trend, if it continues, might reduce ageism without increasing sexism.
It manages this by making apparent a few cheerful facts that should be better known. Bodies don't change over time as much as youth fashion, ads, menopause innuendos and jokes falsely suggest.
Insofar as wanting to have sex depends on visual stimuli, these help the not-young find lovers. For every woman who is happy that construction workers no longer whistle at her, there are others who want simply to be visible to someone.
Many 60-year-old women would be horrified at the idea of being airbrushed for Playboy . They don't want extra pressures to be slim, toned and “perfect” as they grow older. But others want to be admired in real life. Sexing later life opens up choices.
One friend of mine hides her neck, while another shows cleavage and a third bares her shoulders below white hair. Being a young woman always involves anticipating growing older, and if younger women can believe they will remain desirable as they age, it's an incalculable life-course benefit, reducing their own internalisation of sexist ageism.
We'll suspect that the double standard of ageing is weakening when people put gorgeous nearly-naked 60-year-olds — male and female both — on Youtube!
(Margaret Morganroth Gullette is the prize-winning author of ‘Aged by Culture'. Aagje Swinnen is an assistant professor at the Centre for Gender and Diversity of Maastricht University, the Netherlands.)
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