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:
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Another thing, before we turn our noses up at the older lady knitting away, there is nothing to say that that generation was not happier with their lot in life than we are today.
They didn't worry about body image, they knew who they were and they were happy to grow old gracefully.
I saw this happen with my two grandmothers and a couple of older aunts.
I often look and what I'm doing - at the hairdresser to say to my grey hair, begone, daily jaunts on the exercise bike, monthly facials, watching my weight... and I often say to myself 'Nanny never did any of this'.
Seriously a first world problem.