“When I am an old woman I shall wear purple,” wrote Jenny Joseph in her poem, “Warning”. “With a red hat that doesn’t go and doesn’t suit me”.
She describes a dream of growing old disgracefully, as a reward for being well-behaved. For now, we must “pay our rent and not swear in the street / And set a good example for the children”. When the proper age for being respectable is over, though, the poet vows to “go out in my slippers in the rain / And pick flowers in other people’s gardens”.
Though “Warning”, written in 1961, was voted Britain’s most popular postwar poem in one poll, it didn’t drive a surge in merrily misbehaving old matrons — at least not in the style she envisaged. Instead, at least judging by the press, older women get more invisible by the day. The lack of substantial acting roles for older women is so marked that a campaign to change it received Equity backing last year. And many women over 50 complain about feeling pushed aside and pushed out of the workplace.
A widely-trailed movie, out this week, seeks to challenge this narrative. Good Luck To You, Leo Grande is a two-hander in which Emma Thompson plays Nancy, a widowed schoolteacher in her early sixties, who hires handsome young rentboy Leo Grande (Daryl McCormack). The film documents their interactions over a number of meetings, as Nancy sets out to tick off a list of sexual experiences she never enjoyed with her late husband.
In this, it takes aim at a common experience described by older women: that as far as wider social perception is concerned, as women age we’re no longer seen as valuable. There’s some truth in this, at least at the superficial level of who gets ogled on the beach. According to the founder of dating website OKCupid, while women’s view of what’s attractive changes as we age, men of every age tend to rate women in their early twenties as looking the best.
Exceptionally beautiful women must feel this keenly. Paulina Porizkova, once the world’s most highly-paid model, clearly does: she told The Times earlier this year how she just doesn’t seem able to pull any more. “I am now completely invisible,” she says. “I walk into a party, I try to flirt with guys and they will just walk away from me mid-sentence to pursue someone 20 years younger. I’m very single, I’m dressed up, I’ve made an effort — nothing.”
There is, in other words, something robustly consistent about what induces men to stop what they’re doing and stare at a woman. The fact that the age of maximum perceived female hotness coincides with the age of peak fertility strongly implies that it has a material basis, something recognised by writer Ayelet Waldman: “I remember reading some study that men can sense a woman who’s fertile, and they focus their laser beam eyes on a fertile woman,” she said. “Well, as soon as you’re not fertile anymore, it’s like they just skip over you.”
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