Pop Quiz: Name This Granny (answer at the end of this post). Bonus point for guessing her current age, and no cheating with Internets.
Never one to shy away from the tough topics, La Paltrow has weighed in on what happens when a woman ages and loses her desirability (or, as she so charmingly puts it, “fuckability”).
‘To get wrinkles and, like, get closer to menopause, and all these things… what happens to your identity as a woman if you’re not f**kable and beautiful?’
Gwyneth firmly believes self-acceptance is key and that as you get older, your inner beauty radiates outwards.
‘Luckily, what’s happening at the same time in parallel… is you just start to like yourself’, she continued.
‘I think you get to a point where it’s almost like your sort of pulchritude is waning in a way and your inner beauty is, like, really coming out, and so it’s this funny shift that’s happening.’
This is what happens when you work in an industry that a.) has no problem with (literally) fucking children and b.) enforces impossible standards of beauty upon its workers: of course you begin to think that only the young can be desirable and that women lose their desirability when they age.
As with so much of what Paltrow spouts, it’s mostly bullshit. I can think of several older women who have aged and become wrinkled, and who could get practically any heterosexual man to bed them. And I’m not just talking about actresses, either.
Where Paltrow, as always, misses the point is that she confuses “desirability” with universal desirability. I’m not au fait with the current crop of young women who are deemed “hot” by the poplar culture, but let’s just take Scarlett Johansson as someone I know was once (and may still be) considered the ultimate in female desirability.
She’s heading for her 35th birthday as we speak, and I think it’s safe to say that in twenty-five years’ time, she will still be quite desirable, just not universally so.
Here’s one-time paragon of beauty Sharon Stone, at age 60:
…and still-gorgeous Jane Seymour (at age 65):
But let’s ignore for the moment the fact that among actresses, skillful surgery can play a part in prolonging youth (or at least hiding the effects of age) — I have no idea whether any of the above has resorted to same, but we can play the odds — and acknowledge that while stupid men and callow youths (some overlap) are forever in thrall to the “perfect body” (as defined by, say, Playboy magazine), many men (myself included) find that women get more interesting as they get older.
And in my case, anyway, that’s not just a function of my getting older; at age 30, for example, I thought that Sophia Loren (then aged 50) was the sexiest woman alive:
…and I’m pretty sure I wasn’t alone in that thought, either. Now she’s nearer 85, and I’ll bet that for her age she’s still as sexy as hell, unless of course all the wheels have fallen off, so to speak.
And even then, some randy old goat would… let me not go there.
I said it earlier, but it bears paraphrasing: for a woman to be desirable to all men regardless of her age is never going to happen. What we do know is that very few older women (with some notable exceptions) are going to be undesirable to all men.
If Paltrow and her aging ilk are going to go all “Boo-hoo-hoo nobody wants to fuck me”, I would suggest they relocate from Hollywood (and from Southern Cal in general) and try living in a retirement community. They’ll get more pricks than a pincushion, from all accounts.
Frankly, if Paltrow really is having a problem (and it’s not just some new PR ploy to sell more vaginal marble eggs), it’s probably because as she’s got older, she’s become increasingly more batshit crazy. I would suggest that that, and not her wrinkled body, is the passion strangler. Read more
