Our author always got a lot of attention from men. That has changed since she turned 40. It nagged at her, but then she changed her mind.
As a young woman, I told myself that I didn’t care if I was attractive to the opposite sex or not. The fact that I liked to wear mini skirts and crop tops – whether at school or in the club – didn’t contradict that in any way for me. After all, I thought I knew whether men were only paying attention to me because of my sexual attractions or whether it was really about me as a person. I felt good in my body and I really enjoyed using it for the first pubertal courtship attempts.
Basically, I felt empowered when flirting, but – at least that’s what I thought – didn’t establish my own value. I found older women bemoaning the loss of their beauty and their attraction to men to be anti-feminist. I pitied them for being so dependent on the male gaze and patriarchal ideals of beauty. I vowed never to become like this and to “age gracefully”.
The loss of my youthful charms hurts
I recently celebrated my 44th birthday and would like to take this opportunity to apologize to all the women whom I looked at in disparagement in my youthful ignorance. I openly admit it: the loss of my youthful charms hurts. When I go to a bar today, I feel invisible, the matches on the relevant dating apps have become rarer, although I even cheated myself a few years younger on some. But the number 40 seems to be hovering over my profile like an expired expiration date.
Today I feel bullied by Instagram to conform to a smooth filtered image. I’ve been trying to counteract the passage of time with Botox since I was 35, and even as I write these lines I’m waiting for my freshly injected dose to take effect. And I openly admit that too: I don’t do it to please myself, but to preserve my sexual effect on men. anti-feminist? This may be. But my environment de facto gives young, thin and “fertile” women a higher status, despite all feminist efforts – both in harmless flirting in the bar, but also in the conference room.
The singer and activist Brandy Butler describes the phenomenon in the book by Priska Amstutz and Leonie Hof “The new 40 – Everything can, nothing has to: The honest guide for an exciting age” as follows: “The patriarchal system says that we are only valuable , when we look young and beautiful. If we can have children. Many women base their value on this. Old age then feels like a loss.”
132 years until equality
I can only agree with that, and the only conclusion one can draw from this is: we as women must emancipate ourselves from the male gaze, shift power relations that allow us to define our relevance beyond youth and childbearing. However, victory over the patriarchy is still a long way off. According to forecasts by the World Economic Forum, if we continue to develop at the same pace, it will be another 132 years before we have equal rights. Nevertheless, I am already being asked to simply leave collectively learned patterns behind me and to make myself independent of the generally prevailing beauty dictate.
“A woman should wear make-up as she ages to look presentable, but not too heavy. She should let the gray hair grow, as the current zeitgeist allows, but only if it’s a neat gray. Take care of your body, but don’t wear sleeveless clothes anymore… Above all, she should make the transition to old age,” says author Marlene Sørensen in her recently published book “And now? Questions about life at 40. Answers forever” the downright schizophrenic assessments that women over 40 are exposed to today.
Women over 40 are rare in the media landscape
In the media and literature, women who still cling to their youth even in old age are often ridiculed. Instead, we are asked to “age gracefully”. Today I know that in principle this is again just a tool of power and means nothing other than that from a certain age we should please step discreetly into the background and no longer attract attention.
The media and film landscape reflects this particularly vividly. Women over 40 find little representation beyond the supporting roles. A romantic heroine of advanced age? Almost unthinkable. This has a profound impact on how mature women see themselves. Of course, the industry is also changing here. For example, 63-year-old actress Emma Thompson recently made waves with the movie Good Luck to You, Leo Grande. The Brit slipped into the role of a widowed, retired religion teacher who has never had an orgasm in her life and who wants to finally experience the longed-for climax with the help of a handsome sex worker. At the age of almost 80, Jane Fonda was allowed to show in the Netflix production “Our Souls at Night” that it is never too late for love and sex. Despite this, the image of the sexually active, mature woman is still alien to most of our society.
The best proof of this is probably the spin-off of the TV series “Sex and the City”. In “And Just Like That” three of the protagonists meet again in their 50s. Too fluffy, too wrinkled, too dressed up, too old-fashioned, too homogeneous, too diverse, too little sex, too much sex – that was the criticism of the series, and it seems as if the ladies just can’t please anyone. In an interview with American Vogue, Sarah Jessica Parker revealed that even before the start of the series, she had to put up with misogynistic comments that were primarily aimed at the advanced age of the protagonists. “Many people took pleasure in suggesting that we should be ashamed of who we are. It doesn’t matter whether we decided to age naturally and didn’t look perfect or whether we helped ourselves to feel better and appear defiant.
Why am I not wearing sexy outfits anymore?
What consequences does this have for my own appearance? I recently sat next to a well-known radio presenter who is more than ten years older than me at a dinner for a major German fashion brand. I shared with her my frustration with the lack of male attention. She scrutinized my look of a wide power suit, men’s shirt and a severely reduced ponytail and advised me to prefer figure-hugging dresses and to wear my hair down. I was outraged and replied that I didn’t want to be reduced to such a disdainful physicality anymore.
In fact, that’s not why I don’t wear skimpy clothes anymore. I just feel like it’s no longer appropriate for my age.
Now I realized that with this attitude I had dutifully catapulted myself to the sidelines, as is expected of women my age. So I blow-dried my red hair, streaked with the first strands of grey, dramatically, threw my body, altered by aging and pregnancy, into a skin-tight, short tube dress and went into the evening to take on the complete patriarchy. I felt damn sexy!