We’re ageing, but who cares, writes Susie O’Brien
THE Logies is a showcase for brilliant middle-aged women, proving a middle-aged moment is something to cherish, writes Susie O’Brien.
Susie O'Brien
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IF THE Gold Logies line-up is anything to go by, middle-aged women are having a moment.
And I don’t mean a senior’s moment, where they still haven’t turned off the indicator 15km down the freeway.
Tracy Grimshaw, 58, and Amanda Keller, 56, are real contenders to win the little gold man with no pants.
Their success comes as TV journalists Jo Hall, 60, Jennifer Keyte, 58, and Lisa Wilkinson, 58, are recognised for their longevity in a cutthroat industry.
My colleague Wendy Tuohy wrote this week: “Just maybe there has been a belated realisation that older women are just as trusted and appealing to viewers as older men.”
Yeah, nah, as my kids would say.
Maybe women of a certain age are ruling the free-to-air roost because other middle-aged women are the only ones who haven’t worked out how to stream Netflix on to the TV.
These days, young people wouldn’t dream of doing anything so daggy as watching a TV show broadcast at a time chosen by someone else. Unless they can binge-stream three seasons of a TV show on their laptop, they’re not interested.
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Finally, the young people have left the free-to-air party, giving us oldies a chance to put our own music on.
Of course, it helps that these TV grand dames all look much younger than their actual ages. In TV-land, Botox and studio lighting wipe off at least 15 years. Other women their age, who live and work in daylight, are assumed to be sick when they venture out in public without wearing makeup.
That’s if anyone notices them at all. At 47, I’m getting on a bit. I’ve got blackheads older than some of the kids serving me at the Macca’s drive-through.
My Facebook feed is full of ads for orthotics and loose clothes for women who lost interest in their bodies years ago. And when I go to the chemist, I’m gently steered away from the youth dew range and towards the age-minimising creams.
These days, my friends and I sit around and talk about anti-ageing techniques, lament the dire state of our parents’ health and say: “Is it just me or is it really hot in here?”
We’re amazed that people two decades younger than us are senators, CEOs and teaching our kids maths at school. Our saving grace is that we refuse to act our age.
I applaud Tracy Grimshaw for refusing to walk the red carpet at the Logies for the past 10 years after once being labelled the “worst dressed”.
I think it’s great Channel 9 helped Jo Hall celebrate turning 60 with a huge party and I love the way Jennifer Keyte and Lisa Wilkinson recently changed networks after many decades. Go girls!
My friends are in their late 40s and early 50s, but they are also determined to age disgracefully.
They dispatch Ubers to pick up kids from parties so they can have a quiet chardy (or three) on a Saturday night. They text at the traffic lights. They buy things online and then return them just because they’ve changed their mind. And they sunbake topless — hoping the buzzing sound is bees and not a real estate drone from next door.
“Forty is for amateurs” my friends tell each other at dinner, sharing one pair of reading glasses because they’re all too vain to get their eyes tested.
Meanwhile, young people are so damn serious, throwing waste-free weddings and going to Guatemala on working holidays. They’re getting older as we’re getting younger.
Pamela Druckerman, the author of French Children Don’t Throw Food, writes about this in her new book There are No Grown-Ups.
“There are no grown-ups. Everyone is winging it,” she says. Lamenting the advent of middle-age, she says men only appraise her if she’s in full hair and makeup.
“Even then I detect a distinctly new message in their gazes: I would sleep with her but only if doing so required no effort whatsoever,” she writes.
In Australia we call that the pity root.
Druckerman wants us to become Femme Libre — Free Women.
“Homme Libre doesn’t have the same cultural resonance — it’s mostly used for men who have just left prison,” she notes.
I love this idea, and not just because it sounds like a new-generation panty shield.
A Femme Libre does what suits her. She doesn’t take herself too seriously and is free in her own body and mind. If that means updating Facebook while sitting on the loo without worrying about germs, then so be it.
Perhaps it means giving kids canteen money rather than making one more bloody school lunch. Or paying people to do jobs you hate like washing the inside of the car, ironing and watching the Logies.
For me it’s refusing to go anywhere near a camp site on holidays, saying “no” more often and dancing like no one is watching. (Actually, no one ever watches me dance. They hurriedly leave the room when I bust a move.)
I’ve even stopped trying to be cool.
Yes, I’m having a moment. A middle-aged moment. Gee, it feels good.
Susie O’Brien is a Herald Sun columnist
Originally published as We’re ageing, but who cares, writes Susie O’Brien
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