'A 73-year-old woman is on the cover of a fashion magazine. But she had to take her pants off to be there.'

Yay diversity! A 73-year-old woman is on the cover of a fashion magazine!

Boo sexism! She had to take her pants off to do it.

So which is it? A good thing or a bad thing that Barbra Streisand is on the cover of W magazine this month?

Does it even matter? Well, not in the context of, say, Syria and Trump and cancer but sure, pop culture matters. Piece by piece, image by image, it's how we establish lots of things about our society. What's desirable or not. Attractive or not. Acceptable or not.

That's why right now I'm having one of those moments where two sides of me are battling it out to determine how I feel (and before you roll your eyes, YES, I have feelings about most things in the world and, yes, sometimes it's exhausting to feel all the things, but there's no harm in airing them).

As someone who cheers every time we widen the spectrum of what the fashion industry considers to be an 'attractive' woman deemed worthy of being portrayed in ad campaigns or magazine shoots, this image is positive. I want to see it as positive because I am trying to see everything as positive at the moment. The benefit of the doubt is really underrated.

Barbra is 73 and there she is, propped against a stool looking super sexy. This is envelope pushing, isn't it? How often are 73-year-old women who, I assume, are still having sex and feeling sexual, portrayed that way? How often are they encouraged to celebrate that sexy side of themselves?

Mostly, we depict women over the age of 60 like this:

You need to see what you want to be.

One of the quotes that has stayed with me in the aftermath of the US election was from comedian, commentator and Hillary Clinton supporter Laurie Kilmartin, who was interviewed about how she was feeling.

She said, "One of the things I'm most bummed about is that I was so looking forward to seeing an old woman getting shit done. Meeting with Putin, giving the State of the Union, battling with congress. Because as a woman in my 40s, I'm looking for strong role models to emulate and everything in society tells us that when you reach about my age or older, you just get replaced with a 30-year-old."

Case in point: Donald Trump's wives. He has literally done that. Every time his wife gets past 40 or so, she's replaced with a younger model. An actual Younger Model.

But I digress.

Back to Barbra getting her pants off... part of me is like, awesome. Let's subvert the age at which a woman must stop being seen as sexy. Let's shatter the myth that you can only be sexy if you're 22.

The other part is, FFS, is there ever an age at which women DO NOT have to be sexy? Is that really the only way we can stay relevant in the world? By taking our clothes off? Is there no other way to be seen as attractive when you're older than 30 but to... look like you're 30?

Would Barbra have got that magazine cover if she'd insisted on wearing a turtleneck jumper or a beautiful dress?

There's every chance that the outfit was her idea. In fact, if she wasn't comfortable in that outfit, she wouldn't have agreed to the photo. We know that because La Streisand is very very very very very particular about how she is portrayed. She has always been famous for this - for her control and her artistic use of lighting and fuzzy lenses and now Photoshop to manufacture a perfect image. Consider this spontaneous Instagram shot:

Consider this spontaneous Instagram shot:

Or the lighting in this interview:

Anyway. Many will say that taking her pants off was Barbra's choice and it was. Just like women choose to have plastic surgery and alter their own images before posting them on social media.

But our choices to do those things are not made in a vacuum. They're not choices made from a position of strength or power, not really.

They're choices made from a position of fear. Fear of looking old and thus becoming irrelevant. Fear of not being considered sexually attractive and thus losing our power.

Fear of being discarded for someone younger, slimmer, with fewer wrinkles than us.

Is it great that there's a 73-year-old woman on the cover of a magazine?

I just wish she hadn't had to take her pants off and look like a 25-year-old to do it.