The best laugh I have had in a very long time came recently when a friend told me she gets checked out all the time by men, but only from the back.
When they move their eyes away from her rear-view assets to look at her face, she reckons they run a mile.
The issue, she says, is that from behind she can pass for a 20-year-old because she has long blonde hair and a pretty good figure. Once menfolk see her face and realise she’s old enough to be their mum, they reel back in horror and run for the hills. She says she can see the shock in their faces.
Why did I find this so funny? Because she called it, it was hers to call, and even though I’m not convinced the story is as factually correct as she might have me believe, because to me she will always be the 13-year-old I met in high school, there is a universal truth to this story. Once you get to a certain age, women don’t count as much to men – and the best thing is most of us find this fact hysterical. Cheers to us.
It’s also good to have a laugh about ageing, because the whole world is so serious and fixed on it as a negative, something to be embarrassed about, to try to hide. Calling out your own lined face and wobbly armpits for what they are – signs of life lived well – should be a right and an absolute pleasure.
Chrissie Swan did it recently on I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here! (we watched only the first episode, I promise), when she bagged out the producers for not making concessions for an “overweight, middle-aged mother of three” – her words – because she had to walk up and down mountains in long pants and searing heat.
She did it with that great Swan smile (cementing her status as the most interesting and funny person on whatever reality television show she appears) and again I shrieked because it was just excellent, especially for all of us at home on the couch nursing well-rounded jelly bellies.
Delicious also because there were no similar self-deprecating musings from her male counterparts, no shout-outs from Merv Hughes about a sunburnt bald spot or Andrew Daddo about having to carry an extra layer or two up the mountain.
What happens to your body when you age is funny. You can’t not laugh at turkey necks or wrinkled knees or a rogue hair on the bottom of a chin. It just feels like, after years of being exercised into shape and plucked and preened, your body gets to a point (about 45-plus, I reckon) where it says, ‘Stuff you I’m tired now I’m going to do whatever I like, so give me some carbs and some wine and some Mint Slices already’.
How we as a society react to, narrate and measure the outward signs of ageing is the bizarre bit. Just this week I read this quote from Hollywood heavyweight Jennifer Lopez: “We’re all going to get to a point where it shows we’re ageing but I try to find my value in the person I am. That beauty shines much more.”
Need I say more. Hysterical, right?
