Follow Up Part 2 – Reactions by Other Writers to Sexist, Condescending 50 Something Men Who Think They Are Final Arbiters of If Women Are Attractive Past Age of 40 (Re: Esquire Editorial by Junod)
Original Post:
Follow Up 1:
More backlash:
Note: as to this link below, at the LA Times, the section on the page entitled “It misleads women into thinking they have time” was actually quite sexist. I have chosen to not paste that part of the page in.
That part was written by a Charlotte Allen who argues that all men will always favor 22 year old women over 42 year old women, mostly because most men want to have babies.
I don’t know what rock that woman writer is living under, but women in their 40s still get their periods every month and conceive ((Link): read this page for starters – that is one but several pages I have on this blog noting that lots and lots more women are getting pregnant, some for the first time, over age 40).
I personally never really cared if I had a baby or not, but I think it’s sexist to say that women over 40 are basically unvaluable (to men) because, in the writer’s opinion, they’re all barren (they are not, by the way. A lot of “oops” pregnancies happen to women over 40, because they go off birth control under the mistaken notion “I can no longer get pregnant, or not easily.”)
(Link): What’s so offensive about Esquire’s praise of 42-year-old women?
Excerpts:
By ALEXANDRA LE TELLIER
Women don’t need a writer dressed in feminist clothing to define her worth by his own narrow definitions
Tom Junod set the social web aflame with his article praising 42-year-old women. Never did one think that Esquire, a men’s magazine that’s stayed above the lad mag fray, could enrage so many people. But that it did, with people accusing Junod of sexism.
“Let’s face it: There used to be something tragic about even the most beautiful forty-two-year-old woman,” Junod begins. Now, he writes, “it may be said that the best thing that forty-two-year-old American men have going for them is forty-two-year-old American women.”
It might sound like a compliment, but women aren’t buying it.
… I asked some of our female writers for their thoughts, and here’s what they had to say.
Where has Junod been?
… And, men, you now have Esquire’s permission to objectify women in their 40s without being creepy to other men. (But, again, only if the women do Pilates and yoga.) This expands your potential ogling to hundreds, even thousands more women each year.
Kidding aside, I find the whole premise of the piece to be completely outdated, if it was ever true to begin with. It’s as though Esquire and Junod have been cryogenically frozen for the last 20 to 30 years and woke up to discover this new creature in mass media called the Modern Woman. She’s independent! She’s empowered! She’s still sexy at 40!
But my biggest complaint is that Junod and Esquire reinforce the sexualization of women in general — the idea that the value of a woman is how much she arouses a man.
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