Please know that I'm truly not trying to brag when I say this, but I'll be turning 40 early next year, and I still think I look good. I protect my skin from the sun, I get plenty of sleep, exercise, eat the right foods, and the last guy who asked me out - just last week - was 24 years old. So I think it's OK to say that I must be doing something right.
The reason I'm bringing this up is because it wasn't so long ago that a woman turning 40 was pretty much all but turned out to pasture - and if she were still single at that ripe old age than she was truly an old maid and her chances of ever getting married were next to nil. Women over this age were also, it seems, considered unsexy. Once you turned the big 4-0, you might as well stock up on granny underpants because you sure weren't a demographic that Frederick's of Hollywood wanted to reach.
Case in point: the three ads I've dug up to show here. Maybe these are really isolated examples, but they're a little scary. The Geritol ad above, which came from a 1971 issue of Family Circle, is telling me that all of the women in the photo are 46 years old. Yikes. Some of them look about as youthful as Edith Bunker, correct? And at least 10 years older than that. I'd have to say the lady with the yellow turtleneck looks the best (I'm guessing she's one of the Geritol fans) but the hairdos on all of them aren't helping the situation.
This second ad on the left was posted a couple of years ago by a favorite blog of mine, Kitchen Retro. Not only does it assume that women over 40 like to dress like the Queen of England, but that they're also "fuller figured." That hat really is the icing on the cake. Maybe they're assuming it will distract people from wrinkles and the ghastly looking jumper?
The last ad is the most curious because it's calling for women over 40 to apply to be florists. I guess arranging flower displays just wasn't considered a young and hip profession back in the day, right?
Of course, there were exceptions to the stigma of being an over-40 woman forty years ago: one notable example that comes to mind was the casting of the beautiful Anne Bancroft as that original cougar, Mrs. Robinson, in The Graduate.
Of course, there were exceptions to the stigma of being an over-40 woman forty years ago: one notable example that comes to mind was the casting of the beautiful Anne Bancroft as that original cougar, Mrs. Robinson, in The Graduate.
However, as much as I love looking back on retro life, I thank my lucky stars that I'll be turning 40 in the year 2012. There's arguments out there that older women are trying too hard to look like their younger counterparts and have bought into the media's notion that young and beautiful is better, but I don't think so. I think women are just wiser today about how to take care of themselves and dress. Think of how many hot actresses over 40 there are today: Demi Moore, Nicole Kidman, Julieanne Moore, Vanessa Williams, Michelle Pfeiffer...the list goes on and on and on. OK, some of these celebs may or may not have had plastic surgery to keep things in place, but still, they give 20-something girls a run for their money. And then I found this quote on some random chat board: "Perhaps it's because I'm getting older, but I really don't remember there being a lot of hot over 40 women twenty years ago, at least not like there is today. Keeping in mind that I was a lot more socially active back then and had a much larger circle of people that I interacted with, it just seems that "hot older chicks" were few and far between. These days, I couldn't toss a bran cookie in a coffee shop without hitting a couple, or so it seems. All in all, I'm hoping this trend continues. :)"
Yep. I look forward to continuing the trend next year and beyond.
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