My daughter graduated from college last week, so for fun we watched The Graduate, Mike Nichols’s 1967 classic about an alienated young man and his affair with an older woman.
I remember seeing it when I was in college and identifying with Benjamin, the main character played by Dustin Hoffman. Like every other rebellious kid, I resonated with Benjamin’s disdain for the bourgeois mentality of his parents’ generation – the absurdity of the man who urges Benjamin to go into “plastics”! But now, at 58, I realized that Benjamin was actually an entitled creep for wanting to date his lover’s daughter, and it was Mrs Robinson who deserved our sympathy – and how did I not notice how hot she was?
Anne Bancroft was only 35 when she played Mrs Robinson, who was supposed to be about 10 years older than that. No doubt someone in Hollywood didn’t think an actress in her 40s could be convincing as a woman alluring enough to attract a recently graduated college boy. The women turned down for the part reportedly included Rita Hayworth, then 49, Lana Turner, 46, Susan Hayward, 50, Patricia Neal, 41, and Doris Day, 45. I looked up pictures of these women at those ages. All bombshells. Which I probably wouldn’t have seen when I was 20.
Our sense of whether women continue to be sexually attractive as they age is so heavily influenced by the entertainment, beauty and fashion industries, not to mention social media, that I don’t know if we’re always in full possession of our own feelings about it. And, of course, this influences how women regard themselves. It comes down to representation. If women of a certain age are rarely seen in pop culture as love interests or beauty gurus or models, then that must be because they’re not appealing, right? At least, this is what we internalize.
But if older women aren’t hot, then why does having sex with one continue to be a leading fantasy, as the popularity of Milf porn and adult film stars such as Lisa Ann, 51, attests? (I’m not advocating watching porn, here, just pointing out a disconnect.) And why, when I was on Tinder when I was 50, were the only guys who wanted to match with me half my age? Meanwhile, hundreds of women in their 40s, 50s and 60s I’ve heard from after the publication of a book I wrote about dating apps have told me they’ve experienced the same thing.
I thought about all this last week when Sports Illustrated was widely praised for putting 81-year-old Martha Stewart on the cover of its annual swimsuit issue, the oldest woman ever to get the spot. “Good for Sports Illustrated!” and “Good for Martha!” were the dominant reactions. Aside from a smattering of predictable haters, most people said they thought Stewart looked great, and wasn’t it terrific that she and Sports Illustrated had done something so inspiring? It became almost a progressive flex to talk about how hot Stewart looked, and how a woman can look hot at any age.
So why didn’t this feel like the feminist triumph it should have? Well, for one thing, being asked to be on the cover of Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issue isn’t exactly like being asked to address the UN general assembly. The issue has long been criticized for sexualizing women. In 1989, a former cover model turned feminist activist, Ann Simonton, called on the magazine to discontinue it, saying: “The swimsuit issue encourages violence and hatred toward women. It dehumanizes women.”
It’s interesting how the perennial debate about whether sexualization is empowering or harmful to women really comes into focus when you consider it in the context of older women. Because the problem with sexualization, some say, is that it makes a woman’s attractiveness her central value beyond any of her other qualities. And if a woman’s central value is her hotness, then it actually makes it harder for her to be seen as having much value as she gets older. It’s harder for older women to look hot in the narrow definition demanded by current standards – which insist that women above all look youthful, preferably thin with long legs, perfect skin, lustrous hair. Like Martha Stewart on the cover of Sports Illustrated.
Most older women don’t have the lucky combination of money and genes that helped the 81-year-old Stewart look so good. We have jowls. We have wrinkles. We have stretch marks on our stomachs from having children. We’ve put on some weight. We have crinkly necks.
But we know stuff, more than we ever did, which gives us confidence. And that makes us hot to the people who find us attractive. We’re hot for other reasons than looking good in a swimsuit. We’re hot because we’ve lived some life, and it shows on our faces. And it wasn’t until we got to be old, when that other kind of hotness went away, that we finally got to see that we’re hot for who we are, not how we look.
Nancy Jo Sales is the author, most recently, of Nothing Personal: My Secret Life in the Dating App Inferno
