Youth Wasted On The Old

The Age

Saturday February 9, 2008

Janice Breen Burns

Age shall not weary them, writes Janice Breen Burns, but my god the glossies will.

It was a picture of Elle "The body" Macpherson's gnarly old knee that crystallised in my mind the calamity of these modern times. Soft and knotty it was, with the crepe-like skin over its patella ruched and sagging at the edges like a lovely old gum tree. A headline slithered across the photo - Eeeeyeeeew! - or a word to that effect.

It was snapped, most likely, through one of those merciless telephoto lenses. Long as a baseball bat and just as subtle. Excellent tools, in fact, to isolate those old body parts deemed worthy these days - by a perky and youthful new breed of "lifestyle journalist" - of intimate, insulting inspection by the young women who regularly read and feed on the dross-'n'-goss glossies such as Famous and Who Weekly. Something to look forward to. Or studiously avoid. Eeeeyeeeew indeed. These cheap-shot mags put me in mind of a certain, earnest amateur feminist in the mid-70s who patiently explained to a group of teenage schoolgirls how, while they fussed and bickered about frocks and hairdos and who was the Prettiest One of All, they were criminally distracted from doing anything intelligent about the testosteronic mess the rest of the world was in. Which, in turn, put me in mind of the mind-boggling circulations these cheap-shot dross-'n'-goss glossies enjoy among girls, which put me in mind of a recent British survey in which an astonishing number of girls also ticked "exotic dancer" or "model" as their first career choice. Which, in turn, put me in mind . . . but I digress.

I slotted the image of Elle's old knee into my bulging mental filing system of Disturbing Old Body Parts. In it went with Madonna's ropey old hands, Melanie Griffith's old fish-lips and Botox-resistant wrinkles, Kirstie Alley's fat old bum, Courtney Love's rock-solid cellulite and a mental washing line pegged with a hundred aged celebrity breasts flattened by gravity and sagging in that very particular National Geographic way. As old tits do.

Notice the recurring theme here - old. Substitute eeeeyeeeew if you like. The words are interchangeable in these calamitous modern times in which the standard for all is peaches-and-cream-perfect teen tits/abs/bums/legs/hair/lips or as near as you can mimic them. Old body parts are the aesthetic antithesis of all that is normal now. They are unavoidable but absolutely unacceptable and - not to put too fine a point on it - scary.

When Britney Spears swanned off the deep end last week, for example (according to reports from some gleeful glossies, she'll be in padded accommodation for another week), who was surprised? If less-than-physical-perfection and a laundry list of tricky personal addictions can whip up this level of scrutiny and criticism now, what horrors loom if the poor young mum's syntho-tits drop, if her stubborn baby bloat hardens to cellulite, if her knees go gnarly or her hands ropey in the next 10-15 years? What a bloody miserable prospect. Botox, surgery, gym addiction and crash diets can only correct so much.

We are unaccustomed to imagery of anything less than physical perfection and old doesn't cut it. Women of a certain age, particularly, have been scraped off the popular agenda. They're gone from films, sit-coms, TV ads and magazines.

And yet, as far as I can recall and research, this is the first time in history that any generation of women (or men) aged well beyond beauty's ideal age bracket has refused the elegant dignities of "a certain age" and continued to dress and undress as if they were 20.

This is the first time, in other words, that saggy, knotty, gnarly, crepe-like, ropey things peculiar to over 35s have been closely photographed, widely circulated and open for global inspection. "Eeeeyeeeew?" It's the shock, poor loves.

Until not so long ago, the years between a woman's late 30s and 60s were considered her prime and most icky physical changes were modestly obscured by a wardrobe of elegant, pared-down classics. Middle-aged blokes weren't ashamed to be dad material, either, and, aside from the odd one who veered into a busty-blonde-and-toupee crisis, they, too, graduated automatically into a dignified archetypal wardrobe of neat slacks, crisp shirts, sports jackets and cardigans that deftly disguised man-boobs, pot bellies and chicken legs. Smashing.