Noli Irritare Leones

First, a song lyric, dedicated to John Derbyshire of the National Review:

Who’s that racy, middle-aged lady,
Standing underneath that tree.
Why don’t you know?
That’s Flamin’ Agnes!

I figure, as long as he’s going to revive “It’s a Well-Known Fact,” someone should supply the countering Broadway song.

A large chunk of the blogs I’m reading – but I’ll link Lauren, because I got it from her first – are nonplussed by Derb’s announcement that women reach their peak of attractiveness between the ages of 15 and 20, and decline from there, until they become old hags like Jennifer Aniston, well past her expiration date at 36, and now attractive to no one.

First thought, pretty much the same as everyone else’s first thought: EW!

Second thought, isn’t this the same guy who said no one could convince him that pederasty isn’t related to homosexuality? If normal heterosexuality means lusting after 15-year-olds, one wonders what’s left to tie homosexuality to pederasty.

Third thought, well, after all, if you are an ephebophile, women really do reach their expiration date rather earlier than men. There are men who look green enough that you can scarcely believe they’re old enough to sport beards, even into their twenties; women rarely manage to go quite that long without looking like actual adults. Reaching puberty a little earlier kind of takes care of that.

Still, beyond the extreme youth of Derb’s supposed time of optimal beauty – all the way from jailbait to barely legal – his views aren’t that terribly unusual. Like any other woman of a certain age, I’ve met men of about my same age who aspire only to women much younger. I take for granted that I am, in fact, in my mid-forties, well past some guys’ notion of what could possibly be attractive. And I’m not super offended by that fact; after all, most of those same guys are well outside my notion of what could possibly be attractive. And their views are apparently not universal.

What’s weird, though, is that whenever a guy does pontificate on the early expiration date of women, it’s as if youthful beauty, and a rapid decline with age, were something intrinsic to women’s bodies, rather than something which might come as much from the one looking as well as the one looked at. It would seem that, even if evolution bred us such that women are unattractive after the age of twenty (rather wasteful on the part of evolution, I would think, given that at twenty you still are a good thirty years from menopause, many of them actually pretty fertile ones), it might have done so just as much by shaping men to be especially attentive to youth as by, well, come to think of it, women gain no evolutionary advantage from losing their attractiveness to men so quickly, so it would have to be men’s genes being shaped here. And, indeed, I’ve never noticed that lesbians hit their expiration date any earlier than gay men. And, of course, to the extent that culture, or psychological factors like the desire for a less powerful or more vulnerable partner are at work, they have everything to do with the one looking, as well as the one looked at.

What makes a woman subjectively attractive to John Derbyshire, though, is only loosely connected to what makes her subjectively attractive to herself. I’ll freely admit that, at forty-something, I don’t think my naked body is a thing of exceptional beauty. But then, I didn’t think that at seventeen. I have never in my life suspected myself of being in the Jennifer Aniston league of physical attractiveness.

There’s a certain kind of attention that I do remember getting more of, when I was in the not quite legal to barely legal range, than I do now. But it wasn’t a flattering kind of attention, and it didn’t make me feel pretty. At worst, it was street harrassment, and felt a lot more like aggression than like flattery. And even at best, sure, there were a fair number of young men who seemed willing to sleep with me, but those same young men seemed equally willing to sleep with a whole bunch of other women, so I didn’t take the interest particularly personally.

Attractive only comes when someone has singled me out from everyone else, in just the right way, with just the right sort of approach. I think that what makes me, subjectively, feel attractive is something that’s almost inherently rare. Probably other women have different things that make them feel subjectively attractive, and some extroverts thrive more on attention from the world at large than I do (though I’ve yet to meet a woman who thrives on street harrassment). Probably none of us feel we’ve lost it at twenty; any woman who ever had any confidence in her attractiveness at all will retain it well past that age. But some women are more confident at fifty than others are at thirty, and manage to carry it off, for those men they actually want to win. I’ve met such women.

At any rate, this is me at about twenty:

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And this is me more recently:

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I’m actually not quite as flat-chested as either picture makes me look, but they’ll do. The button on my shirt in the college-aged picture reads “Question Authority”; not that you can see it. I think in this case the college photo looks better, but not, you know, overwhelmingly so. At least nothing that the right lighting and hairstyle in a current photo couldn’t take care of. The figure’s actually about the same; I’ve saved a few of my clothes from that time, and I still fit them. And one of the advantages of not being Jennifer Aniston to begin with is that people don’t get catty about looking for your every slightest sign of supposed decline. Well, maybe that’s the only advantage of not being Jennifer Aniston to begin with.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 4th, 2005 at 6:23 pm and is filed under Sexuality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.