Nice

Why, in the 21st century, is the sexually
active older woman still depicted as a
figure of fun?
Author Helen Walsh is urging middle-aged
women to challenge casual sexism and ageism.
Judging by the slew of letters bulking up
my inbox, the sexual content of my latest
novel, The Lemon Grove, is dividing
opinion. It's not so much the idea of a
stepmother sleeping with her daughter's
boyfriend that's ruffling feathers; rather
the idea that a teenage boy might desire
a woman in her mid-40s at all.
"Preposterous!" one outraged woman
exclaims; another reader, male, asks: "Is
this just not wish fulfilment on your
part?"
Perhaps it is. Ever since I devoured Lolita
in my late teens, I've been aware of an
imbalanced and highly gendered
depiction of intergenerational
relationships in fiction. Some of my
favourite novels – Coetzee's Disgrace ,
Philip Roth's The Humbling and Gabriel
García Márquez's My Melancholy Whores
– feature older men smitten by much
younger girls. Yet one struggles to name
more than a handful of texts written by
women that depict older women lusting
after teenage boys.
The norm in those few works that do
buck the trend – Zoe Heller's brilliant
Notes on a Scandal , for example – is for
the errant woman to be apprehended
and punished, emphatically, for
succumbing to their obsessions. Needless
to say, no such draconian fate awaits
Coetzee's or Roth's priapic protagonists.
Their randy old men are punished not by
a jail sentence, but by a tragic and deeply
profound reminder of the iniquities of
old age.
With women in fiction, it really does
seem to be a case of art imitating life –
it's all a bit unseemly, a little bit
ridiculous: once you reach a certain age
you should keep your sexuality – and
your body, for that matter – under
wraps. The sexually active middle-aged
woman has long been portrayed as a
slightly desperate figure of fun. Whether
it's Mrs Robinson in The Graduate or a
quintessential Milf on heat such as
Stifler's mom (does Mrs Stifler even have
a name?) in American Pie, their stories
are invariably told from the perspective
of the lusting teen stud. Where are the
stories that shine a light on the
psychological complexities of the mums
they'd like to bed?
If Milf weren't already a sufficiently
hateful term, there's an expression, too,
for women who date younger men –
cougars. The Urban Dictionary defines
these ladies thus: "Anyone from a
surgically altered wind tunnel victim, to
an absolute sad and bloated old
hornmeister, to a real hottie or milf."
Cougar-reverence virtually oozes from
the page: "Particularly the true hotties, as
young men find not only a sexual high,
but many times a chick with her shit
together." Glad to see the themes of my
novel have hit the thinking man's
zeitgeist. Seriously though, cougar? I'm
racking my brains to think of an
equivalent handle for a man in his mid-
40s who dates a 17-year-old girl, but I'm
damned sure there's no pejorative.
It says a lot about our views on gender
and age that director Sam Taylor-Wood is
perhaps better known for her
relationship with Aaron Johnson, an actor
some 20 years her junior, than she is for
her Bafta-nominated directorial debut,
Nowhere Boy . Yet here we are, living in
an age where more and more women
hold influential roles as cultural
gatekeepers. From columnists to
commissioning editors to heads of
drama, women have significant powers
of veto as well as the green light. How
can it be, then, that this misogynist strain
of ageism is allowed to flourish
unchecked in popular culture?
In stark contrast to the stereotypical
Desperate Housewife, the equivalent
senior male is described as distinguished.
Tony Soprano was once voted one of the
sexiest men on TV – and, OK, given a
choice, I'd have taken James Gandolfini
over Aaron Johnson any day. But can you
imagine a perspiring size 20 woman with
thinning hair and collapsed buttocks
scooping a similar accolade?
It is no coincidence that our society
construes and vilifies the ageing female
body with the same reckless generality
that it celebrates and objectifies its
pubescent incarnation. We're quick to
express rage at Jimmy Savile's reign of
abuse or the taxi drivers who targeted
vulnerable girls from care homes in
Rochdale, yet our culture is still casually
at ease with its sexualising of young
female bodies. Our lionisation of size
zero, our aversion to pubic hair, even an
increasing trend towards vaginaplasties
are all symptomatic of a desire to take
the female body back to its pre-
pubescent state.
The full Brazilian is a look that is
borrowed from pornography – can there
be a more damning style endorsement?
At least pornography has a disclaimer:
hair gets in the way of the money shot.
Nice try, but perhaps our fear of hair is
less to do with practicality and more an
attempt to postpone womanhood. 2014,
however, is supposed to be the year of
the bush . Cameron Diaz and Gwynnie
have already signed up. The optimist in
me hopes that this trend is dictated less
by the vagaries of fashion and more by a
gradual awakening to the fact that there
is something seriously creepy about a
grown woman with the buffed pudenda
of an eight-year-old.
But it will take much more than a stance
on waxing to challenge the negative
perception of the ageing female. Sexism
and ageism will continue to thrive unless
women begin to challenge and reverse a
cultural diktat that desirability and
beauty are synonymous with youth.
Resisting the convention could start with
an understanding that trying to craft
youthfulness on to an ageing body is
pretty pointless: youth's core ingredients
of exuberance, abandon and curiosity
cannot be concentrated into a serum or a
syringe.
The allure of women such as Kristin Scott
Thomas, Tilda Swinton and Michelle
Obama lies to a large extent in their
repudiation of youth itself. These are
women who clearly have their shit
together. Theirs is an easygoing kind of
beauty that is not fixated on turning back
time, but exists firmly in each shifting
inflection of womanhood. All of these
women possess a sexiness that is neither
insincere nor apologetic, but shot
through with the wisdom, confidence
and, ultimately, self-knowledge that
maturity brings.