At 34, I find myself in the early stages of a boxing match with middle age. I can duck and weave — exercising, and cutting down on alcohol, and googling mysterious terms like “finasteride” and “minoxidil”. But still it lands its blows. Bam! Receding hairline. Bam! All-day hangovers. Bam! A deeper interest in poems about death.
I’ll keep on fighting. But women must have it worse. The fairer sex are judged more by their looks — a fact evident in their being described as “the fairer sex”. That makes it even more contemptible when the click-mad idiots at The Daily Mail publish a headline like, “Frumpy Pamela Anderson looks far from Baywatch days at Met Gala.”
Pamela Anderson looks great, as it happens — elegant and dignified. But that isn’t quite the point. The point is that she’s 57. Of course she doesn’t look like she did when she was 25.
This sort of churnalism makes ageing sound like even more of a depressing prospect than it usually would
The Mail loves this shit. A recent article gasped over the “unrecognisable look” of noughties songstress KT Tunstall. Actually, Ms Tunstall looked a lot like the 29-year-old singer who burst to fame with “Black Horse and the Cherry Tree” in 2004 — just two decades older. But from the tone of the piece, you would have thought that she had gained two hundred pounds, shaved her head and tattooed “I LOVE SATAN” across her face.
Men aren’t safe. Eastenders and Heartbeat star Nick Berry “looked unrecognisable as he ran errands in Essex” in March — perhaps because his last major TV role was almost twenty years ago. “The TV star was dressed casually,” the Mail continued, and “cut a very low-key figure”. The audacity! Some of us run errands on horseback, dressed in purple capes.
You don’t have to tell me that the Mail is doing this for clicks. Of course it is. But an alligator doesn’t kill for the sake of killing — it kills for food. Unlike the noble gator, journalists have an element of choice here. They could look for readers in a more noble fashion. They choose not to.
This sort of churnalism makes ageing sound like even more of a depressing prospect than it usually would. It affirms the fear that it is nothing more than a process of decay — death, as experienced by the living.
The irony is that people who do all they can to resist the ageing process get it in the neck as well. “Why can’t Madonna wear her age and experience with pride?” The Mail’s Sarah Vine asked two years ago. I don’t disagree in the case of the sexagenarian exhibitionist — and I appreciate, as an opinion columnist, that an opinion columnist is not necessarily expressing the editorial line of their employers. But perhaps Ms Vine should have turned her gaze away from the “American Pie” singer and towards her own outlet. If 57-year-olds are objects of disdain for not being buxom pin-ups, how surprising is it that ageing celebrities will go too far in trying to look young?
There’s no pretending that it’s not the case that most of us look worse with age. (Actually, I think I look better at 34 than I did at 24 — but that is only because my sense of style has progressed to “lazy” from “downright shambolic”.) It is not just social pressure which means that twenty-somethings don’t look in the mirror and say “God, I wish I had wrinkles” or “I can’t wait to go bald”.
But the biggest idiots among us don’t think that it would make sense to track down football stars from the nineties to their local parks and mock their fading speed and agility. The lowest bullies would not seek out a gymnast from the 2004 Olympics and marvel at their waning skills on the uneven bars. We know that age has unforgiving consequences. But we know that there is dignity and grace in adaptation and resilience.
I can’t help thinking about the writers and editors at the Mail who are involved in publishing these articles. Are they 18-year-olds who have somehow convinced themselves that ageing celebrities are the weird ones, and that they, in twenty years time, will look no different? Of course not. I’m sure that they are fatter, balder and/or wrinklier than they were in the past.
But this is not the strikingly “unrecognisable” thing about them. I’m sure that they — or some of them — had ambitions to be real, meaningful writers and journalists. They thought they would create prose that was true, beautiful and funny. They thought they would write articles and books that would enlighten and entertain. Somewhere along the road, they became the sort of hacks who would describe a graceful 57-year-old woman as “frumpy”. The decline of their souls must be the most “unrecognisable” thing about them.
