The worst compliment to give a woman

People who say this to women might think they’re being nice, but they’re actually being incredibly insulting, writes Kylie Lang.

You know you’re winning when someone tells you that you look good for your age.

Women — and it’s typically women over 40 — on the receiving end of this compliment should feel flattered, should they not?

Not.

The more I hear it — including when friends and I are out enjoying a drink in a bar (and we stay out after 9pm!) — the more it grates.

I find it patronising, narrow-minded and, while I’m at it, sexist, since you rarely hear the same being said of a man.

Prepared as I am for a familiar barrage from blokes who claim feisty females have emasculated them and that they can’t put a foot right, I have to call out this peculiar remark.

Well-intentioned it might be, but it reinforces negative stereotypes around beauty and youth.

There is so much more to admire in a woman than her appearance. But I’m not holding my breath for someone to tell me my brain is working well … for my age. Or that I’m still kicking career goals … at my age.

Women spend way too much time and money worrying about how they look.

For we gals who, and here’s another clanger, haven’t “let themselves go” (to where, I ask), the tone of surprise when being complimented on how good we look is off-putting. It implies that, like a block of cheese, we have a use-by date and if we haven’t exceeded it then we’re fast approaching it and turning more than a little bit mouldy.

It’s not just “ordinary” females who are judged in this way. Scrutinising the appearance of women in the spotlight is also fair, make that unfair, game.

In the Amy Schumer’s skit “Last F**kable Day”, actors Amy Schumer, Tina Fey, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Patricia Arquette, playing themselves, parody the gendered ageism in Hollywood.

Louis-Dreyfus jokes that actors “reach the point where you’re not believably f**kable anymore”. Fey adds: “Tell me about it. If you shoot a sex scene the night before your birthday, everyone is like hurry up, hurry up, we gotta get it before midnight, ’cause they think your vagina is gonna turn into a hermit crab.”

Humour aside, the bias is real.

RELATED: Angela Bassett’s health regimen goes viral

In May last year actor Angela Bassett, then 59, posted on Instagram a photo of herself in a swimsuit.

Fishing for flattery? No doubt, but she wouldn’t be the first woman to bare her body on social media.

Check out the predictability of the comments from men: “You still have me as a fan wanting to exhale” and “still looking amazingly gorgeous after all these years”.

Romping into her sixth decade and desirable? Who’d have thought it possible?

But it was the comments from women, specifically younger women, that raised a different alarm: “I wanna look just like you when I grow up” and “I’m just gonna have to be Angela Basset when I’m 60, there is no other option”.

Well, there is another option and it’s being yourself, growing older your way. Not that we can expect the $650 billion beauty industry to support this one.

La Prairie, for example, has a new cellular cream that promises an “extraordinary, transformative experience … combating visible signs of ageing” and it’s $1615 for a small 50ml jar.

But when cosmetic surgeons and “anti-ageing” clinics report women as young as 18 coming in for “preventive” Botox — the idea being the earlier you start, the less likely wrinkles will crack your youthful armour — then the challenge becomes helping all women embrace their age, not only the ancient ones who are over 40.

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Growing older should not be something to be feared or surgically removed like a cyst. The alternative is to die young, and that’s not preferable.

Far better to accept that with wrinkles comes wisdom or, at the very least, life experience that can bring valuable awareness of who we are and where we fit in the world.

For with age, we are better at letting go of things that don’t work for us, including toxic people and negative drama.

We can learn to love ourselves and finally stop the futile comparisons to others, which never helped when we were kids and won’t help now.

Having a positive attitude to ageing can also add years to our lives, according to research by Yale University psychologists.

So please, instead of telling a woman she looks good for her age, how about just saying she looks good, if you must say anything at all.

Kylie Lang is a Courier-Mail associate editor.

@kylie_lang