This, we are told, is a very bad time to be a woman. When young, we’re warned that we are sexual prey, privy to a misogynistic ordeal both on the streets and in the sheets, courtesy of the jungle of app-mediated romance. Despite being slaves to the gym and learning to pole dance, we still can’t win. We are locked in a never-ending hell spiral that sees droves of us as young as 18 racing to the plastic surgeon, desperate to fill our faces with Botox and hyaluronic acid in a bid to look sexier, younger, hotter, fitter, less tired and more like the stars of reality TV. Did I mention younger?
And now a new book, Hags: The Demonisation of Middle-Aged Women by Victoria Smith, has arrived. I am not alone in recognising instantly what Smith is cleverly grasping with the title: I, like the middle-aged female reviewers who have raced to praise the book, have felt the ease with which older women can elicit scorn and disgust, even horror. Some know it from being on the receiving end; others, a category in which I include my 40-year old self, know it – to our shame – from feeling it. Most of us are comfortable with the image of the older woman as a snappy, suited, powerful, smiling charisma machine. But the ageing hippy, the pushy mother insisting on piano lessons, the emotionally (or physically) incontinent woman, the woman who is just a bit too noisy, poor, badly put together – if, as Smith says, she cannot shunt these things into sex appeal, she’s loathed. And nobody is loathed more the ‘Karen’: the entitled white woman of a certain age who complains to the manager.
‘The middle-aged woman becomes a repository of sorts, a holding area for ugliness, female inferiority, bigotry, failure, obsolescence,’ writes Smith perceptively.
And yet. There is another way of looking at the ‘hag’ phenomenon. If Smith and others complain about the cudgel of sexiness, and the punishment for those who fail to bend to it, then it’s only fair to acknowledge what’s happened to sexiness itself – which is that it has got bigger, roomier than ever before. And we have porn – yes, horrible, nasty porn – to thank for this. Porn brought us every possible permutation of sexy older, or old, woman. Porn turns everything into a fetish or a kink, from vomit to extreme fat to physical deformity. Within this rather sickening range, middle-aged and still-older women have actually done quite well – so-called hags included.
In a world in which ordinary women of all ages are dead-lifting three times their weight at the gym, there is less tolerance for the paunchy middle-aged man who has let the pleasures and stresses of life get the upper hand
Women used to be told they were on the shelf if they weren’t married by 25. By 35 they were considered firmly middle-aged, and that was not a good thing. But in the harsher society that predated this one, marriage and reproduction was all but compulsory, and women who deviated from this norm were spinsters, lesbians, frigid or mocked for being ‘sterile’. Perceptions of female age were therefore even crueller, and this carried into sex appeal as well as the more general poor treatment of older women. Playboy and its ilk did not tend to carry grey-haired mavens, legs akimbo. Porn today is full of them.
This is not a cause for celebration in itself (nothing to do with porn is, really), nor should older women feel grateful they are a porn category. But in a world in which there is a lot of complaining about the skewing effects of porn on ideas of women and sex, we should acknowledge that porn has birthed the sexy hag. One friend in New York in her sixties met the love of her life on Tinder: he is 26. There are plenty of examples like this. Indeed, far from reviled, the middle-aged woman’s wingspan is at its widest. A 55-year old Australian-Italian man who hangs out in his Speedos every day on a rock in Sicily once lectured me on how he found women in their fifties intoxicatingly attractive because they are successful and confident. Another extremely handsome man I know, 39, wrote the other day in a text to me that women in their forties are the best: ‘mature, fun, and sexy as hell’.
Porn may have eroticised female age in cahoots with certain constricting archetypes: the sexy dominatrix or step-mother or friend’s mother, or simply the unexpected or somehow verboten sex object. But is porn to be blamed for the men I frequently hear insist that they are attracted to traits such as maturity, confidence and, in the case of one prominent academic I had dinner with recently, being ‘distinguished’? And is that so bad? Not to me – a woman pushing middle age with an eye for the less-fair sex.
But perhaps the biggest problem with the hag thesis is the present status of men. ‘I’m a male hag, I think,’ wrote one morose chum now living in America, 44 and weary with childcare. Indeed, the West has never seen so many male hags. It’s middle-aged men who are reviled, as much as (if not more so) than women. Disgraced former health secretary Matt Hancock, 44, surely provides the starkest possible figure of the young-middle-aged man we love to hate. Physically, in a world in which ordinary women of all ages are dead-lifting three times their weight at the gym, there is less tolerance for the paunchy middle-aged man who has let the pleasures and stresses of life get the upper hand. Nobody gives the podgy older man a pass now; middle-aged spread, a term of endearment when I was growing up, is sneered at. The silver fox has become a pig.
#MeToo marked an age of proliferation for loathed categories of men – the predator, the creep, the narcissist, the common-or-garden sexist. But no age group falls into more of these than the boomer man. The middle-aged man, if he doesn’t watch out, is seen, at least by women, as a balding blowhard, desperate to stay relevant and usually incapable of doing so. In an age of heightened race politics, the Karen gets a rough ride, but the White Male Boomer may be the most reviled of all. Andrew Tate, the pick-up artist and hustler whose subterranean popularity was blown open in December when he was arrested in Romania, proved once and for all that it’s men – young as well as old – that are the butt of society’s jokes.
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