Women are conquering age. Hooray!
BY CELIA BRAYFIELD
The London Times
Older women are invisible, but now that Catherine Deneuve, 57, is fronting
a L'Oréal ad campaign, will female wrinkles become acceptable?
 All
I ever wanted was a role model. It’s all right for fortysomethings,
they’ve got Madonna, but what about us, the women for whom intimacy with
Pampers is no longer a political issue? Well, now we can have Catherine
Deneuve.
In case you’ve been trapped in a black hole for a week, let me give you
the good news. At the age of 57, Catherine Deneuve has been chosen to
front an advertising campaign for a L’Oréal shampoo. And she has declared
that her image appears un-airbrushed, au naturel, wrinkles and all. Both
her wrinkles, even.
The bad news is that she says she hasn’t had any plastic surgery either. A
French actress of any age who hasn’t had plastic surgery? A bear leaving
the woods to spritz itself at the scent table in the ladies’ loo at
Quaglino’s? Well, I suppose it could happen.
Let’s focus on the big issue. Deneuve is 57 and she’s there, on the
television, in the magazines, on the posters. A woman of 57 who is
actually visible. This is a giant step for womankind. Finally, we have
someone to look up to. We are the sisters who had to do it for ourselves.
When we were thirtysomething, the only women pictured in our media were
the Queen and Myra Hindley. No women in politics, no women in the
professions, no women to show us how it looked to be independent,
successful or self-determined.
Mistakes — we made a few, and thinking that things would change was
apparently one of them. At the back of my mind I kept thinking that by the
time I was ready for HRT it would all be different. We’d be fine about
seeing pictures of women with crow’s feet or grey hair.
I erroneously supposed that by the time I was really grown up, the media
would be perfectly comfortable with images of real women — wise women,
funny women, plump women, muscular women, wrinkled women, interesting
women, clever women, old women. Comfortable, relaxed, accepting, OK. Just
the way the media are OK with images of real men.
Women, we assumed, would command coverage on their achievements. The whole
aesthetic would change, integrity would be beautiful, success would be
sexy. Actresses such as Vanessa Redgrave and Diana Rigg, writers such as
Doris Lessing and E. Annie Proulx, politicians and corporate leaders,
Tessa Blackstone, Margaret Jay, Marjorie Scardino, would be up there, out
there, visible and admired. Well, how wrong can you be? The media world
now is like the news studio in Drop the Dead Donkey, a place where men are
old, wise and arrogant, while women are just young, neurotic and botoxed.
Rarely does a tabloid newspaper carry a front-page picture of a woman of
more than 35. In fact, unless somebody wants to rubbish Ann Widdecombe, a
picture of a woman older than 35 rarely appears anywhere in any newspaper.
Television is worse. EastEnders may field its token bags and bats, but
there are few parts for actresses unless they can do dappy, ditzy or
tough-guy-girls. Factual programming is even worse. Most of the male
television reporters I know are still working. Most of the women
television reporters I know have found second careers, one of them in a
plastic surgery consultancy.
What happened after the success of Helen Mirren in Prime Suspect, playing
a real grown-up woman with a real woman’s challenges in her life? Nothing.
It was a blip, a false dawn, just a token gesture to the audience
demographics which show that grown-up women watch a lot of television.
Last week I was lunched by a television producer who wanted to turn my
next work of lit-crit into a series, but wondered how I’d feel if Jeremy
Paxman presented it. The subject was one in which I have some mileage; the
power of popular fiction. Ten Books That Shook the World, examines the
bestseller’s role in the history of ideas.
Having written a few bestsellers myself, plus a creative handbook which,
though I say it myself, is the best in the genre, I might have seemed a
natural choice to present my own idea. Mmmm — the woman more than 35 who
knows her stuff or the man more than 35 who hasn’t a clue — not a hard
decision, it seemed. After all, there are no, repeat no, female television
presenters of my vintage on screen at all.
Maybe Catherine Deneuve can change all that. Her exclusive beauty secret,
as Sarah Vine observed in this newspaper a few days ago, is really that
she’s Catherine Deneuve. Which is to say that she was born gorgeous and
has devoted her life to staying that way.
She is the ultimate greybe (babe+grey, right?) and not much consolation to
women with neither her advantages nor her commitment. But she’s up there,
because L’Oréal wants our grey pounds. Where girl power failed, purchasing
power may finally get them to see it our way.
Source:
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,7-2001290062,00.html
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