In an effort to appease my girlfriend for making her see Terminator Salvation, I agreed to watch the Sex And The City movie. In between my eye rolling, a realization hit me: Kim Cattrall, the ultimate “cougar,” this ideal of what older women should be striving to emulate, looks really amazing. At 52 years old, she looks hotter than she did 27 years ago when she played Honeywell in Porky’s. This isn’t because she tries to hide her age with excessive Botox, bobby socks or booty huggers. She has crow’s-feet and isn’t runway model thin. Cattrall, like many sophisticated older women before her (i.e., Sophia Loren and Anne Bancroft) wears her age classically. With elegant dresses and an intelligent vocabulary, Kim Cattrall embodies a woman, not a girl.
Give us a sophisticated older woman
Compare this with Cattrall’s costar Sarah Jessica Parker, regarding whom Peter Griffin once said: “looks like a foot.” Well, if that’s true, she now looks like a mannequin’s foot. She has had her face pulled tight in an effort to look like her younger self, but why? Her younger self was Rusty in Footloose: The girl not hot enough to date Kevin Bacon who had to settle for Chris Penn. She looked better in the ‘90s. Also, her cutesy outfits (pink tutu included) may have made her famous with college girls, but guys could care less. Give us a sophisticated older woman in a sleek black dress any day.
An unfortunate baby-mama history
This trend of baby mamas trying to look like babies instead of sophisticated older women took root in the ‘70s. The backlash of the love generation birthed Farrah Fawcett in little boy’s runner shorts and tight tank tops. It continued through the ‘80s, when Madonna looked like a little girl playing dress-up in her mother’s closet. It came to fruition in the ‘90s, when Pamela Anderson didn’t even try to hide her teen-esque style in the guise of a fashion statement: Tube tops, taut jeans and tans screamed, “Look at my tits.” Guys looked and so did women — ushering in the plastic generation: plastic faces and plastic personalities.
When females’ tube tops began to sag and their tans wrinkled, rather than evolve, they nipped and tucked. They continued dressing in Juicy Couture and dating through MySpace because their new faces fooled their owners into believing they were 10 years younger. Seeing Courtney Cox and Jennifer Aniston chirp one-liners on Friends convinced them that a personality could be developed through losing more weight. Unfortunately, they didn’t have Emmy-winning writers behind them and grew boring and were never able to enter the “sophisticated older woman” phase of their lives.
Bursting the botox bubble
As we approach 2010, the ‘90s dumb-girl look has reached critical mass. Cuties like Meg Ryan have become plastic surgery nightmares. We need to return to the days of Marilyn Monroe and Brigitte Bardot, when women wore their curves and did their best to grow old gracefully. The days where Betty Grable and Mae West didn’t need Stoli Blueberry and a frat boy to feel good. Guys, let’s stop rewarding women for acting like little girls because, as good as the immediate gratification is, the long-term consequences of synthetic mess-faces and artificial conversation won’t be worth it.
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